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Bush faces policy nightmare in Colombia

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BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) -- With the U.S. election finally behind him, President-elect George W. Bush may soon be slogging deep into a potential foreign policy nightmare in Colombia, just three hours flying time from Miami.

Bush, who moves into the White House in January, has expressed a reluctance to intervene in foreign conflicts.

But the son of the U.S. president who declared "all-out war" against Colombia's drug gangs -- and who invaded Panama to oust drug-dealing dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega in 1989 -- has voiced support along with powerful members of the Republican-led U.S. Congress for the $1.3 billion in mostly military aid the United States approved in July to bolster Colombia's anti-drug program.

And faced with deep political divisions Bush may find that foreign affairs and stepping up the fight against drug trafficking and Marxist guerrilla activities in Colombia is something he can rally Americans around.

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With the backing of Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, derided by Latin American intellectuals like Mexico's Carlos Fuentes as a cold warrior known for his "ultra-reactionary policies," Bush might even give the go-ahead for American troops to be drawn into a combat role in Colombia, where they have been limited to training missions and intelligence sharing.

Fighting drugs is politically popular, after all, and Cheney was the elder George Bush's defense secretary when U.S. troops invaded Panama.

"The common denominator in the United States seems to be no second Vietnams," said one senior Western diplomat, when asked about a possible U.S. expeditionary war in Colombia, already the third-largest recipient of U.S. security assistance after Israel and Egypt.

"But it could happen, it could happen," he said, adding that communist-led rebels who reputedly reap huge profits from the drug trade were one of "the clear and present dangers" in a region long considered the backyard of the United States.

The Vietnam analogy is a bit of a stretch, according to Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

More huge flows of U.S. aid for Colombia -- under the so-called Plan Colombia to thwart leftist insurgents and drug traffickers -- are unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon, especially if there are American casualties on the ground in the Andean nation, Roett said.

"Support for Plan Colombia is skin-thin in Congress, very broad but very, very shallow. It was just a bipartisan way to kick this thing forward until after the election," he said.

It could become more palatable if the weak and unpopular government of President Andres Pastrana fails to put stalled peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) back on track, however, or is unable to halt recent rebel advances and what many political analysts see as his country's steady slide toward chaos.

The FARC, Latin America's largest and oldest rebel army, maintains a dominant presence in about half of Colombia, a nation roughly the size of France and the Iberian peninsula combined. And U.S. officials led by outgoing White House drug policy coordinator Gen. Barry McCaffrey say the guerrilla group plays a dominant role in drug production in Colombia, which is the source of 90 percent of the world's cocaine and much of the high-grade heroin sold on U.S. streets.

"We have vital national security interests at stake in Colombia," said McCaffrey on a recent visit to Bogota, noting that he had personally briefed Bush and his policy advisers on the U.S.-backed military buildup in Colombia.

"We do not want Colombia to go under, nor the region, in a spillover factor to drug-related criminal organizations. We must stand with these people," McCaffrey said.

Critics of the militaristic U.S. anti-drug policy in Colombia say it puts Washington in league with an army with a horrible record of human rights abuse and with established links to the ultra-right paramilitary groups responsible for most of the peasant massacres and other atrocities committed in a conflict that has taken 35,000 lives since 1990.

They also said it will inflame Colombia's conflict further while spreading instability throughout the region.

"For Colombians it's very clear that what Colombia is experiencing is really a human rights emergency," said Carlos Salinas, director for the Americas of the London-based human rights group Amnesty International.

"If what's added to this is a larger quantity of arms, lethal training and helicopters you can't expect the situation to improve but that what we'll see is the emergency situation turning into a catastrophe," he said.

A U.S.-backed escalation in the repressive military tactics employed by Colombia to fight the drug trade could also play straight into the hands of the FARC, which has long bridled against "Yankee intervention" and sought to fuel anti-American sentiment to galvanize much-needed grass-roots support.

"It's only result will be to throw hundreds of thousands of peasant coca growers, deprived of their means of subsistence, into the arms of the guerrillas," Antonio Caballero, a leading Colombian political analyst, wrote in a recent book about Colombia and its long-running drug wars.

He was referring to poor farmers in rebel strongholds across much of southern Colombia who grow coca -- the raw material for cocaine -- to feed their families and have long received protection from the FARC in exchange for a "tax" levied against their illegal crops.

"This will convert the war into what guerrillas have always wanted it to be without being able to achieve it: a great patriotic war against imperialist foreign intervention."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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U.S. State Dept. Fact Sheet: Plan Colombia
United States Institute of Peace Library, Plan Colombia Information
Drug Enforcement Administration
  • Traffickers from Colombia
Presidencia de la Republica de Colombia (Spanish)
Center for International Policy Latin America Demilitarization Program
  • Report on United Self-Defense Groups of Columbia
Transnational Institute Drugs & Democracy Project
U.S. State Department: 1999 Human Rights Report for Colombia
Human Rights Watch Report on Columbia

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