Pubdate: Thu, 18 Jan 2001
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2001 San Jose Mercury News
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Author: George F. Will
Note: George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post.

FIGHT DRUGS AT HOME, NOT IN COLOMBIA

WITH the delicacy of someone seasoned by much experience near the summit of 
government, Donald Rumsfeld has indicated strong skepticism about a policy 
from which this country may reap a bumper crop of regrets. Asked about the 
$1.6 billion -- so far -- undertaking to help fight the drug war in 
Colombia, Rumsfeld said he had not formulated an opinion. However, he 
embroidered his agnosticism with thoughts antithetical to the program for 
which George W. Bush, during the campaign, indicated support.

In his confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld, the next secretary of defense, said 
combating illicit drugs is ``overwhelmingly a demand problem,'' and added: 
``If demand persists, it's going to get what it wants. And if it isn't from 
Colombia, it's going to be from someplace else.''

Indeed. In authorizing the aid for Colombia, Congress demanded, 
delusionally, the elimination of all of Colombia's coca and opium poppy 
cultivation by 2005. That would almost certainly mean a commensurate 
increase in cultivation in Colombia's neighbors. One reason Colombia is the 
source of nearly 90 percent of the world's cocaine and a growing portion of 
heroin is that U.S. pressure on coca and poppy production in countries 
contiguous to Colombia, especially Peru and Bolivia, drove production into 
Colombia, where coca production has increased 140 percent -- to 300,000 
acres -- in five years.

Now pressure on Colombia is pushing production into Colombia's neighbors. 
The New York Times reports that cocaine processing labs have recently been 
found in Ecuador's Amazon region. This is evidence that local peasants, who 
have crossed the border in recent years to work in the cocaine business, 
are ``returning with the drug expertise they have acquired in Colombia.''

Regarding the use of the U.S. military in policing this region, it is 
depressing to have to say something that should be obvious, but here goes: 
The military's task is to deter war and, should deterrence fail, to swiftly 
and successfully inflict lethal violence on enemies. It is difficult enough 
filling an all-volunteer military with motivated warriors without blurring 
the distinction between military service and police work.

The $1.6 billion for Colombia will mostly pay for helicopters that 
Colombia's military will use to attack drug factories and 17,000 Marxist 
guerrillas, who are the world's most affluent insurgents. They use drug 
trafficking, taxes on coca production, extortion and ransoms -- grossing 
perhaps as much as $900 million a year -- to wage a war now in its fourth 
decade. The guerrillas also are opposed by right-wing paramilitary forces 
- -- 8,000 strong and growing -- that are increasingly involved in drug 
trafficking.

Speaking of narcotics, Colombia has a ``peace process'' with a familiar 
asymmetry: Colombia's government wants to tame the guerrillas with a peace 
agreement; the guerrillas want to topple the government. Colombia's 
government is creating a second demilitarized zone in the country, this one 
for the second-largest guerrilla group to use as a haven during peace 
talks. But the Washington Post reports that since the first such haven was 
created two years ago for the largest guerrilla group, that group has used 
it ``to increase drug cultivation, stage military offensives, train new 
recruits and hold more than 450 soldiers and police officers captive in 
open-air pens.''

Kidnapping has become industrialized in Colombia, and assassins can be 
hired for ``a few pesos'' according to Brian Michael Jenkins. Writing in 
The National Interest quarterly, Jenkins, an analyst of political violence 
and international crime, says Colombia's 30,000 murders unrelated to war 
translate into 100 deaths per 100,000 Colombians, a rate which in the 
United States would mean 250,000 murders a year.

Colombia, Jenkins says, is a combination success story and tragedy. The 
unemployment rate is 20 percent, and will go higher if defoliants and other 
anti-drug efforts put small growers and processors out of business. But 
Colombia has Latin America's fourth-largest economy and one of its highest 
literacy rates. It has 40 flourishing universities and has never defaulted 
on its debts. Yet a Gallup poll reveals that 40 percent of Colombians have 
considered emigrating and 60 percent know someone who has emigrated in the 
last two years.

Colombia's drug-related agonies are largely traceable to U.S. cities. 
Although one-third of Colombia's cocaine goes to Europe, America's annual 
$50 billion demand is a powerful suction pulling in several hundred tons of 
cheaply made, easily transportable and staggeringly profitable substances. 
Here is the arithmetic of futility: About one-third of cocaine destined for 
the United States is interdicted, yet the street price has been halved in 
the last decade of fighting the drug war on the supply side.

George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post.
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