Colombia wins added support for faltering peace plan

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) -- International donors have pledged $280 million in fresh aid to promote peace in Colombia, but European nations balked at endorsing a U.S.-backed war on drugs and on the Marxist rebels accused of profiting from them.

The pledges of support came during a daylong meeting on Tuesday at the foreign ministry, where representatives from the United States, Japan, Canada and 22 European and Latin American countries met to discuss President Andres Pastrana's $7.5 billion Plan Colombia.

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The European Union pledged $90 million in aid to address what it called the deep-rooted social problems underlying the nearly four-decade-old conflict, which has taken 35,000 lives in the last 10 years alone.

The rest of the $280 million came in bilateral assistance from Canada, Finland, Italy, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland.

The EU aid fell far short of Pastrana's initial hopes that European states would contribute up to $1 billion in funds to strengthen Colombia's faltering peace efforts, foster economic development and judicial reform while cracking down on the Andean nation's booming drug trade.

But Foreign Minister Guillermo Fernandez de Soto, putting an upbeat spin on what some diplomats had predicted would prove an embarrassment for Bogota, told reporters Colombia got more than it expected.

European diplomats have long criticized Plan Colombia, branding it a U.S. military undertaking -- the largest the hemisphere has seen since the Cold War -- that would exacerbate Colombia's internal conflict and unleash a tide of refugees.

Renaud Vignal, the chief representative of the European Union at the meeting, said total contributions from its member countries were now expected to reach about $320 million by the time a follow-up donors meeting was held in Brussels next year.

That would include $100 million already offered by Spain and the $90 million EU commitment made Tuesday.

Distancing itself from the United States and its $1.3 billion in mostly military aid for Plan Colombia, the EU issued a statement at the meeting strongly criticizing Colombia's deteriorating human rights situation and saying its troubles go deeper than guerrilla warfare or its rogue status as the world's leading supplier of cocaine.

"For the European Union there are no alternatives to the peace process, nor is there is any military solution to achieve a lasting peace," it said.

"This country is met with endemic violence whose causes go beyond the conflict engendered by guerrillas and drug trafficking," it added, tacitly indicting Colombia's conservative power elites and weak central government.

Swipe at U.S.

Pastrana launched so-far fruitless peace talks in January 1999 with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's largest and oldest guerrilla force.

To push the negotiating process forward the EU, echoing long-standing demands by the FARC itself, called for deep-rooted structural reforms to reduce social inequalities, improve distribution of land and income, and provide much-needed infrastructure in the countryside.

The EU also took a thinly veiled swipe at Washington, which has long backed the aerial delivery of herbicides to kill Colombia's illicit drug crops. The EU said the herbicide programme threatened to hamper legal crop substitution and alternative development programmes for Colombia's overwhelming majority of poor peasants.

Coupled with $621 million in loans and donations to Colombia's peace process, pledged at a meeting in Madrid in July, Colombia now has roughly $900 million in non-U.S. support for its pacification efforts.

Colombia, which is barely recovering from its worst recession on record last year, has said it will provide up to $4 billion to fight drug trafficking and push the FARC toward a peace deal. But the government has not yet spelled out where the additional money will come from.

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