Pubdate: Wed, 22 Mar 2000
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2000 Houston Chronicle
Contact:  Viewpoints Editor, P.O. Box 4260 Houston, Texas 77210-4260
Fax: (713) 220-3575
Website: http://www.chron.com/
Forum: http://www.chron.com/content/hcitalk/index.html
Author: William M. Leogrande And Kenneth Sharpe
Note: William M.  Leogrande Is a Professor of Government at American
University and the Author of "Our Own Backyard: the United States in Central
America, 1977-1992." Kenneth Sharpe Is a Professor of Political Science at
Swarthmore College and Coauthor of "Drug War Politics: the Price of Denial."

LET'S NOT TURN COLOMBIA INTO ANOTHER EL SALVADOR

ONE year ago this month, President Clinton publicly apologized to
Guatemalans for decades of U.S. policy in support of a murderous military
that "engaged in violent and widespread repression," costing the lives of
some 100,000 civilians.

That policy "was wrong," the president declared, "and the United States must
not repeat that mistake." One year later, Clinton is about to repeat it in
Colombia.

In the name of fighting drugs, the United States is preparing to join the
Colombian armed forces in a civil war that has been raging for more than 40
years, despite the fact they have they have the worst human-rights record in
the hemisphere. On Jan. 11, the president sent to Congress a request for $1
billion in security aid for Colombia, up from $65 million in 1996 and $300
million last year. Most of the money will finance a new counterinsurgency
campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the
largest of three armed leftist guerrilla movements.

The insurgents are a serious force.

Numbering about 20,000, they exercise significant influence in more than
half of Colombia's municipalities. Until now, the United States has had the
wisdom to stay out of the military's protracted war with the guerrillas. The
rationale for abandoning that restraint is what drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey
has called a "drug emergency": a dramatic increase in coca-leaf cultivation
in the southern provinces of Putumayo and Caqueta, strongholds of the FARC.
To "secure" these areas for drug eradication, Washington plans to outfit the
Colombian army to wage counterinsurgency war.

But even if coca eradication in southern Colombia succeeds, production will
simply move elsewhere.

As long as demand for drugs in the United States remains high, and enormous
profits can be made from the illicit trade, traffickers will adapt to
eradication and interdiction programs the way they always have: by shifting
from region to region and country to country. Decades of eradication
campaigns the world over tell us the war in southern Colombia will have no
significant effect on the supply of drugs entering the United States. The
idea that we can win the war on drugs by waging war on the Colombian
guerrillas is a dangerous fantasy.

The elements of Washington's counterinsurgency strategy for Colombia are
taken straight from the Pentagon's experience in El Salvador: U.S.-trained
and outfitted rapid-deployment battalions, advanced gunships, intensive
intelligence gathering and hundreds of U.S. military advisers who won't go
into combat (just as they weren't supposed to in El Salvador, although they
did, as the Pentagon acknowledged years later).

A billion dollars of aid turned the Salvadoran military into a large,
well-equipped, politically powerful force that murdered more than 70,000
civilians with impunity for more than a decade.

It did not win the war. The war ended when the United States finally
recognized that it was unwinnable and forced the army to accept a negotiated
peace or face a cutoff of U.S. aid.

The 40-year-old civil war in Colombia is unwinnable, too, as Colombian
President Andres Pastrana acknowledges. Elected in 1998 on a peace platform,
he has opened negotiations with the guerrillas, and rightly so. Despite
their serious human-rights abuses and involvement with coca growers, they
are a powerful force representing a constituency with real social and
political grievances. But the guerrillas are wary of negotiations. The last
time they signed a cease-fire and agreed to participate in elections, death
squads of the paramilitary right, often paid by large landowners and
assisted by the military, assassinated 3,000 activists of the left's
Patriotic Union Party, including elected officials, two senators and two
presidential candidates. Since then, the right has grown even stronger, now
numbering more than 5,000 combatants who terrorize whole regions of the
country.

Pastrana cannot guarantee the personal security of the guerrillas if they
lay down their arms, just as the Christian Democrats in El Salvador could
not guarantee the security of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front
guerrillas in the early 1980s, at the height of the death-squad violence
there. As long as the Colombian government is unwilling or unable to control
the violent right, the guerrillas dare not agree to peace.

No one doubts Pastrana's desire to halt paramilitary violence and to sever
the ties that have long existed between the paramilitary right and the armed
forces. But Pastrana, like Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte in the
1980s, has limited control over the military.

He has managed to reduce the army's human-rights abuses, but despite his
best efforts, he has not been able to dissolve the silent partnership
between midlevel, even senior, officers and the paramilitaries. A Human
Rights Watch report last month links half of Colombia's 18 brigade-level
army units to paramilitary violence, which is now responsible for 78 percent
of reported abuses, including several thousand political killings and
disappearances annually. Investigations by Amnesty International, the United
Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Colombian government
confirm the army's collusion in paramilitary violence.

In El Salvador, the army had no interest in reining in the death squads
because they were an essential weapon in its war against the left. The
Colombian situation is similar; by leaving the dirtiest work in this dirty
war to the paramilitaries, the regular army can claim a clean human-rights
record as it seeks more military aid from Washington.

In lobbying Congress for the Colombian aid package, McCaffrey echoes the
arguments made by Reagan administration officials who lobbied for military
assistance to El Salvador and Guatemala, insisting that the death squads
were independent of the armed forces.

The declassified history of those wars has revealed that such arguments were
disingenuous. In Colombia, the record of complicity is equally clear.

As in Central America, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the
Colombian armed forces will make them more powerful politically and less
answerable to civilian authority.

Senior officers are already hostile to Pastrana's peace overtures and his
efforts to discipline officers linked to the paramilitary right.

A massive infusion of U.S. aid will be seen by officers as Washington's
endorsement of their preferred strategy: escalating the war rather than
ending it through negotiation. That will make it harder to stop the
paramilitaries and harder to convince the guerrillas that the government's
desire for peace is genuine.

Friday marks the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar
Romero in El Salvador. Two months before he was killed by a rightist death
squad, he wrote a personal appeal to Jimmy Carter, asking the president to
abstain from increasing U.S. military aid that "will surely aggravate the
repression and injustice" inflicted on the populace by the armed forces. "If
you truly want to defend human rights," Romero wrote, "I ask that you ...
prohibit all military assistance." Instead, we allowed our obsession with
communism to justify arming and financing a murderous military, and a war
that could have ended with a peace accord in 1980 dragged on for another
decade, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

In Colombia, we are about to let our fear of drugs lead us into an equally
futile and bloody war. We failed to heed Romero's plea 20 years ago; we
ought not make the same mistake again.
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