Colombia Illusions

By George F. Will

Sunday , September 10, 2000; B07, Washington Post

President Clinton's assurances that the United States will not get involved
in the Colombian civil war that the United States already is involved in
(with military personnel, equipment, training, financing and intelligence)
make sense if you think of the helicopters as farm implements. The 60
transport and attack helicopters, and most of the other elements in the
recent $1.3 billion installment of U.S. aid, look warlike. However, the
administration says the aid is essentially agricultural. It is all about
controlling crops--particularly the coca fields that provide upward of 90
percent of the cocaine that reaches America.

The law governing U.S. intervention includes this language: "The president
shall ensure that if any helicopter procured with funds under this heading
is used to aid or abet the operations of an illegal self-defense group or
illegal security cooperative, then such helicopter shall be immediately
returned to the United States." Imagine how reliably this will be enforced.

Conceivably, important U.S. interests are involved in the Colombian
government's fight with the more than 17,000-strong forces of Marxist
insurgency in the civil war, now in its fourth decade, that has killed
35,000 people and displaced 2 million in the past 10 years. Political
violence has killed 280,000 since the middle of the 19th century. Do makers
of U.S. policy understand this long-simmering stew of class conflict,
ideological war and ethnic vendettas?

They advertise their policy as drug control through crop extermination. The
president, delivering the money that will buy military equipment, said: "We
have no military objective." And: "Our approach is both pro-peace and
anti-drug." As though the civil war and the anti-narcotics campaign can be
separated when the left-wing forces that control half the country are
getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by protecting and taxing
coca fields.

The U.S. policy--peace through herbicides--aims to neutralize the left-wing
forces by impoverishing them. But already those forces are diversifying.
The Wall Street Journal reports: "Armed with automatic rifles and personal
computers, guerrillas often stop traffic, check motorists' bank records,
then detain anyone whose family might be able to afford a lucrative
ransom." There are an average of seven kidnappings a day, and the newspaper
reports that every morning Colombia's largest radio network "links its 169
stations with its stations in Miami, New York, Panama and Paris. It opens
its lines to relatives of kidnap victims who broadcast messages they hope
will be heard by their missing loved ones."

Speaking of diversification, does anyone doubt that, in the very unlikely
event that Colombia is cleansed of the offensive crops, cultivation of them
will be promptly increased elsewhere? Despite Colombia's efforts, coca
cultivation increased 140 percent in the past five years, partly because
the United States financed the reduction of Bolivia's coca crop. However,
the pressure on Colombia's coca growers is "working": Some of them have
planted crops (and the seeds of future conflicts) across the border in
Peru. And guerrillas have made incursions into Panama and Ecuador for
refuge. And the price of cocaine in the United States has plummeted for two
decades.

Will the United States ever learn? As long as it has a $50 billion annual
demand for an easily smuggled substance made in poor nations, the demand
will be served. An anecdote is apposite.

A presidential adviser was fresh from persuading the French government to
smash the "French connection" by which heroin destined for America was
refined from Turkish opium in Marseilles. Boarding a helicopter to bring
his glad tidings to President Nixon, the adviser, Pat Moynihan, who then
still had Harvard's faith in government efficacy, found himself traveling
with Labor Secretary George Shultz, embodiment of University of Chicago
realism about powerful appetites creating markets despite governments'
objections. When Moynihan (who tells this story) told Shultz about his
achievement, this conversation ensued.

Shultz, dryly: "Good."

Moynihan: "No, really, this is a big event."

Shultz, drier still: "Good."

Moynihan: "I suppose you think that so long as there is a demand for drugs,
there will continue to be a supply."

Shultz: "You know, there's hope for you yet."

That is more than can be confidently said for U.S. policy in Colombia,
which seems barren of historical sense. "The enduring achievement of
historical study," said British historian Sir Lewis Namier, "is a
historical sense--and intuitive understanding--of how things do not work."
Such a sense should produce policy. Instead, the most that can be hoped is
that U.S. policy in Colombia may, painfully and tardily, produce such sense.

© 2000 The Washington Post Company

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