From: Mark Keesee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Wall Street Journal
September 24, 1999
Editorial
Review & Outlook
The Cokeheads' Country
If it weren't for the fact that so many Americans working for
Fortune 1000 companies think the most important thing in life is
sucking cocaine up their noses, nobody in the U.S. would much
care about Colombia. But the reality is that tens of thousands
of Colombians -- peasants, judges, mayors, journalists--have
died with bullets in their heads so that American office workers
could feel unusually good about themselves for a few hours.
Until George Soros spends enough money to make recreational
drugs legal at corporate lunches, it will be America's problem
that the sovereign nation of Colombia is on its way to becoming
the world's first drug republic.
Alas, Colombia is a case study in how U.S. policy makers fail at
what they get paid to do.
Colombia is a nation of 38 million people, where a homicidal
guerrilla movement's modus operandi is to invade a town, murder
the mayor, open the jails and start taxing the peasantry who
raise coca plants for the drug lords. The heavily armed
guerrillas then protect everybody in the production line from
the Colombian military and police. Because of the resulting
stalemate, Colombia's hapless president has effectively ceded
control of an area about the size of Switzerland to the
guerrillas and their drug-gangster partners. In short, rural
Colombia is close to what a country will look like, say Russia,
when the law finally loses for good and the criminals win.
[[Andres Pastrana]]
Colombia's President, Andres Pastrana, has been in the U.S. this
week to plead his case to the United Nations and to meet with
President Clinton and members of Congress. He wants $3.5 billion
in international aid. Colombia is the U.S.'s number one supplier
of cocaine. While coca cultivation is down in neighboring South
American countries, Colombia now reportedly looks like the coca
equivalent of a Nebraska cornfield.
So what have we done about all this?
In 1993, the Clinton administration shifted the emphasis of drug
control policy away from attacking drug traffickers along their
transit routes in favor of moving the anti-drug offensive into
the source countries. The weapon of choice is crop eradication.
Not surprisingly, Colombia since has grown increasingly violent.
Indeed, thanks to the healthy cocaine export market (that is,
American users) and a stepped-up effort to eradicate the plants,
guerrilla tax coffers are brimming. As a consequence of this
fiscal surplus, the gangsters are able to buy plenty of weapons.
In other words, with Colombia's guerrilla-gangster army armed to
the teeth, it is U.S. policy to fight them with herbicide. How
did U.S. policy arrive at such a dead-end?
Step one was to reach an American political consensus that
Colombia should be forbidden to use its army to fight back. The
Colombian army was portrayed in the U.S. and Europe as a "human
rights violator." The existing, largely incompetent army has
long been weakened by its own historic isolation from the
civilian government. But the U.S. Army program at Fort Benning,
Ga., which teaches Latin American officers how to behave like
professionals, has cut funding for students and is under
pressure to close.
Working out of this mindset, Congress says it is in favor of
sending military funds to Colombia to fight the drug lords, but
it can't be used to violate the human rights of the guerrillas.
So what's left? The U.S. exhorts Colombia to bomb the fields!
Without a modern, efficient army, Colombia can never establish
law and order outside the big cities. As a result of U.S.
policy, drug money from our value-free yuppies fuels a
law-of-the-jungle rural society in Colombia, where the winners
rob, kill, kidnap, maim, and extort the weak. This is the
manifesto of both the Marxist guerrillas and their enemies, the
vigilante paramilitary. Millions of peasants are caught in this
crossfire.
This thriving criminal underworld threatens to destabilize the
entire Andean region. Guerrillas are now popping up in Ecuador;
and they have long taken advantage of the wild, untamed
Venezuelan border area. The U.S. military withdrawal from the
Panama Canal also weakens the region.
With no upside in sight, President Pastrana wants to strike some
kind of a peace deal with the guerrillas, though they've
virtually made double-crossing his overtures an entertaining
national sport. Still, even the white-flag-waving president now
seems to recognize that reasonable negotiations require that the
state regain some control and that to do so Colombia is going to
need a strong, modern, professional army. We should help them
acquire it.
For now, though, it is de facto U.S. policy to deprive the
people of Colombia of any such ability to clean up their own
mess. So long as the Clinton administration and Congress are
willing to hold this position, they should stop whining all the
time about our drug problem with Colombia. America's cokehead
population may be irresponsibly narcissistic, but on this
subject, their political leadership is hardly less
self-indulgent.
Copyright © 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
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