Pubdate: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 Source: Washington Post (DC) Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company Contact: 1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071 Feedback: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Author: Bernard Aronson Note: The writer was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1989 to 1993. SAVING COLOMBIA The overwhelming, bipartisan vote in Congress last week to appropriate more then $1 billion in aid to Colombia, two-thirds of it military assistance, makes clear the United States will support that embattled nation in its war with leftist guerrilla forces heavily involved in drug trafficking. Now the president and secretary of state should send an equally strong message -- with the same strong bipartisan backing -- that the United States prefers and will aggressively support a negotiated peace settlement. Colombian President Andres Pastrana has staked his government's prestige on negotiations with the guerrillas. With two years left in his term and his popularity waning, Pastrana risks becoming a lame duck soon if there is not tangible progress at the bargaining table. Meanwhile, the largest and most formidable guerrilla army, the FARC, is recruiting new troops in anticipation of increased U.S. assistance and heightened combat over drug eradication. Over the next several months, the peace talks will either gain traction, or the war is likely to escalate. To sway the balance toward a negotiated settlement, the United States must become as actively engaged in the Colombian peace process as it has previously been in Central America, the Middle East and Northern Ireland, and it must press its allies in the hemisphere, Europe and the United Nations to do the same. The danger in an election year is that U.S. policy toward Colombia will be driven, like much of the debate over the aid package, by the argument over who is "soft" on narco-trafficking, and the administration might shrink from taking the steps and risks it must. For example, a group of European nations, which will convene in Madrid next month for a Colombian donors' conference, has proposed that the FARC embrace manual eradication of coca production and alternative development, with international verification, in exchange for temporary cessation of forced eradication by the government. Such a proposal, if implemented with real international verification, even on a pilot basis could begin to reduce drug production, jump-start serious peace negotiations and break the momentum of the war. But such a proposal will not be viable if the administration, under attack by partisan critics, shoots it down immediately as a "sellout" in the war on drugs. As we have learned in Central America, the Middle East and Northern Ireland, the United States, if it hopes to influence the peace process decisively, must find a way to talk directly with the guerrillas, as the Colombian government has urged us to do. In December 1998, State Department officials began a direct dialogue with FARC representatives, but broke it off under heavy fire from congressional critics after guerrilla cadres kidnaped and murdered three American human rights activists. When and how to talk and thereby lend legitimacy to a political-military organization that employs terror as a tactic is a recurring dilemma in foreign policy. In such debates, it is far easier to take the "tough" position and say "never" than to take the responsibility and political risk of opening up such a dialogue. But as successive administrations have done with the PLO, the FMLN (in El Salvador) and the IRA, the United States needs to find a formula to talk with the Colombian guerrillas, and a cease-fire in our domestic political wars would make that possible. Underlying much of the political debate that skews U.S. policy toward Colombia are two related misconceptions: first, that there is a military solution to the conflict and, second, that eliminating the guerrillas will eliminate the drug problem. The truth is that over time, U.S. military assistance and training for the Colombian armed forces, coupled with a strong emphasis on human rights, can begin to alter the balance of forces between government and guerrillas and, one hopes, create real incentives for serious negotiations. But the FARC has been waging war in Colombia for nearly four decades and is the de facto local power in a remote region five times the size of El Salvador. No serious observer believes a decisive military victory is in sight. The FARC, like the paramilitary forces on the right, finances itself significantly by protecting coca cultivation, production and transport. But the traffickers who manage the drug trade and reap the lion's share of profits are organized criminal enterprises, not guerrillas. A negotiated settlement of the war with the guerrillas -- far from being the "soft" position on drugs -- would strike a major blow against the narco-trafficking gangs, because the violence and instability that the war has brought to Colombia is the sea in which the drug cartels flourish. Those who denigrate negotiations in Colombia as naive argue that the guerrillas are so flush with protection money from drug trafficking that they have no serious incentive to negotiate. But Colombia's insurgencies, which long predate its emergence as a major producer of cocaine and heroin, are rooted in its political and social history. The FARC claims publicly that it will end ties to the drug trade and embrace alternative development in return for social and political reforms and safeguards for its security. As former minister of defense Rafael Pardo writes in Foreign Affairs, "The cost of the drug war has been staggering. In the last 15 years, 200 bombs (half of them as large as the one used in Oklahoma City) have blown up in Colombia's cities; an entire leftist political party was eliminated by rightwing paramilitaries, 4 presidential candidates, 200 judges and investigators, half the Supreme Court justices, 1,200 police officers, 151 journalists, and more then 300,000 ordinary Colombians have been murdered." If more violence must come to Colombia in the future, it should be because the guerrillas' claims have been exposed at the negotiating table before the international community as posturing for tactical advantage, not because election politics in the United States made it impossible for the negotiations or the guerrillas to be put to the test. The writer was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1989 to 1993. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D