Colombia's Two-Front War

Rafael Pardo

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2000

Article preview: first 500 of 3,519 words total.

Summary:  Colombia is waging a war on two fronts: against guerrillas and against drugs. The former cannot be won on the battlefield alone. If the current peace talks fail, the country will plunge into all-out chaos. So the United States needs to take Colombia off the back burner and work with its government to help tamp down the violence, limit the drug lords' clout, lower the demand for drugs abroad, and prod the peace process along. Without these steps, even billions in U.S. aid will not be enough.

Rafael Pardo is President of the Milenio Foundation, based in Bogotá. He was a special adviser for peace negotiations to Colombian President Virgilio Barco from 1986 to 1990 and Colombia's first civilian Minister of Defense from 1991 to 1994.

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During the 1980s, Latin America was at the forefront of U.S. foreign and security policy. But as the Cold War ended and local conflicts subsided, the region slipped onto a strategic back burner. Washington's interest in it was sparked chiefly by financial opportunities or crises. Now Latin American battles are once again in the news as civil strife in Colombia becomes a serious security threat not only to the Andean region but to the broader hemisphere as well.

The Colombian conflict is deep-rooted and complex, involving two basic issues (drugs and control of the country) and three warring factions (the government, left-wing guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries). What is more, it is now boiling over: in addition to battling the government, the guerrillas kidnap neighboring Venezuelans and Ecuadorians; the paramilitaries smuggle weapons from bases along the Panamanian border; and hundreds of citizens from dozens of foreign countries are taken hostage annually. Despite years of antidrug efforts and the destruction of the powerful Medellín and Cali cartels, Colombia remains the world's largest producer and exporter of cocaine and the second-largest supplier of heroin to the United States.

These problems cannot be solved by Colombians alone. The country needs international help, particularly American engagement. But foreign involvement will make a difference only if it comes in the proper form.

The Clinton administration has recently proposed a $1.7 billion aid package, the largest in Colombian history. Of this, $1 billion would go toward improving the Colombian military's capacity to suppress coca planting -- buying helicopters, spare parts, training, and intelligence equipment to help the army destroy coca crops and retake guerrilla-held areas. The other $700 million would finance coca substitution programs, public works in sensitive regions, and improvements in Colombia's judicial system and human rights protections. The U.S. aid would be part of a broader three-year, $7 billion "Plan Colombia" that includes multilateral loans and contributions from Europe. The plan is designed to strengthen Colombian institutions, sponsor regional development of the coca areas, and help reduce drug production.

Plan Colombia is an important step in the right direction, and most ordinary citizens have welcomed it. We Colombians understand that the drug issue is critical, not least because the guerrillas and paramilitary forces rely on the financial backing of drug traffickers to keep fighting. But we also know that the conflict involves more than drugs and that, by itself, Plan Colombia will not answer all our problems.

Those problems are not to be taken lightly. The cost of the drug war has been staggering. In the last 15 years, 200 bombs (half of them as large as the one used in Oklahoma City) have blown up in Colombia's cities; an entire democratic leftist political party was eliminated by right-wing paramilitaries; 4 presidential candidates, 200 judges and investigators, half the Supreme Court's justices, 1,200 police officers, 151 journalists, and more than 300,000 ordinary Colombians have been murdered.

Despite this toll, the international community in general and the United States in ...

End of preview: first 500 of 3,519 words total.