Colombia Implodes

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 13, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

Latin America's oldest democracy is under siege from insurgency and a failing economy while drug production increases. Help from the U.S. risks getting ensnared in election politics.

In every presidential election an issue emerges that takes politicians and pundits alike by surprise. What will it be in the upcoming race for the White House? How about Colombia and the near-collapse of Latin America's oldest democracy, as well as the explosion of coca and heroin production there which has led to a flood of cheaper, purer narcotics on the streets of America?

Nowadays, of course, presidential elections are foreign-policy-free zones and, in the absence of major U.S. involvement in an ongoing war, no candidate in his or her right mind -- unless they want to imitate Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar's "dead man walking" campaign of 1996 -- would Loeleg battle: Colombian forces are engaged in two wars: drug and civil. even consider expending much of a hustings effort on anything to do with abroad. Domestic issues win and lose elections -- that's post-Berlin Wall conventional wisdom.

But Colombia -- the source country for 60 percent of the cocaine and 80 percent of the heroin flowing into the United States -- may nudge itself into becoming an election issue. Or so fear some administration aides who are beginning to wonder whether a campaigning Vice President Al Gore could be forced to defend the Clinton administration from Republican charges that while it dithered Colombia was lost to an unholy alliance of narcoguerrillas and the Cali drug cartel.

And that Democrat worry isn't misplaced. House Republicans smell a possible election issue in the making -- one they believe would allow them to combine an attack on the foreign-policy acumen of the Clinton-Gore team with its handling of the domestic war on drugs. "If Colombia isn't an election issue, it will only be because the Republicans are asleep," says a senior House GOP aide. "No American was under threat in Kosovo, but what has been happening in Colombia has contributed to American cities being turned into drug killing fields."

Colombia is moving up the political agenda fast. The air-crash deaths of five U.S. Army personnel in the southern Colombian High Andes on July 23 -- they were on an electronic eavesdropping mission and were the first U.S. troops killed in the history of Colombia's drug war -- have added to a sense of urgency in some Washington quarters about a narcotics-financed leftist insurgency that's pushing Colombia closer to implosion.

But it is another matter whether that newfound urgency will be translated into a coherent and effective U.S. strategy. The whole effort to "save Colombia" risks becoming entangled in election politics, as well as being ensnared in budgetary battles being waged between Capitol Hill and the White House and within the administration itself.

Serious Washington attention to Colombia has been a long time in coming. Nearly two years have passed since Insight published a lengthy special report on the raging leftist insurgency and ultraviolent paramilitary lawlessness in the Andean nation (see "Insight Goes to Colombia;' Nov. 24, 1997). Few administration officials or lawmakers subscribed then to the idea that the country could spin out of control, with untold consequences not only for neighboring Latin American states but for the United States as well. House International Relations Committee Chairman Ben Gilman of New York and Republican Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who have been badgering the Clinton administration for the last three years to do something, were among the few exceptions. In the intervening months much has happened in Colombia.

The 20,000-strong narco-linked Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, now control about half the countryside and have dealt staggering military blows to the Colombian army and even have managed to take their violent subversion right up to the outskirts of the capital, Bogota. The economy is reeling: Colombia is engulfed in its first recession in 25 years and is facing a 20 percent unemployment rate. The elite is seeking refuge overseas and a capital flight is underway. A demoralized army has seen its spirits sink even further in recent weeks with the resignation of a minister of defense and a dozen generals who oppose President Andreas Pastrana's negotiation-led approach to the insurgency -- a strategy that initially was encouraged by the State Department and the White House.

Testifying before a congressional panel in the second week of August, U.S. drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey acknowledged that Colombia's crisis has reached "emergency proportions" but disputed the claim by Gilman that the administration's response in the last few years has been one of "benign neglect at best and gross dereliction at worst."

McCaffrey's assessment of the dire security situation in Colombia was grim enough during the hearing, but he painted an even bleaker picture in a July 13 five-page discussion paper distributed to all Cabinet members. "Continued explosion of coca cultivation and increases in opium poppy cultivation in Colombia undermine the U.S. zone strategy and Colombian democratic institutions ... Colombian coca cultivation has doubled in three years from 50,000 hectares [123,500 acres] in 1995 to 100,000 [247,000] in 1998. CIA will report continued rapid expansion in Colombian coca potential production next January.... Virtually all of the new cultivation is occurring in areas controlled by guerrilla or paramilitary groups, contributing to the erosion of democratic institutions and ascendancy of extremism and violence."