It's official: The long "peace process" in Colombia has come to an end. After slightly more than two years of fruitless talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the larger of that country's two guerrilla movements, President Andrés Pastrana has redeployed his country's army into the zona de despeje—a region roughly twice the size of New Jersey that covers 40 percent of the nation's territory and had been temporarily ceded to the insurgents—and the war has formally resumed. The proximate cause of the breakdown of peace talks was more than a hundred guerrilla attacks in recent weeks, highlighted by the hijacking of an airliner and the kidnapping of a Colombian senator, but the real reason is that over many months the guerrillas have shown little or no interest in bringing Colombia's thirty-eight-year internal conflict to an end.

The wonder of it all is that the "peace process" lasted as long as it did. During their infrequent visits to the negotiating table—and far more frequent encounters with the foreign press—the guerrillas made it clear that their objective was not territory or political recognition, but a radical transformation of Colombian society along Marxist lines. By raising the bar to heights that no elected government could possibly surmount, the FARC condemned the talks to failure from the very beginning. Of course, it is by no means clear that the guerrillas have ever wanted to end the war in the first place. With little public support, no real political movement of their own, no demonstrated governing skills in the areas they have controlled, and no temperament for routine, the insurgents are not about to exchange life in the field (relieved by occasional junkets to glamour sites like Stockholm or Ottawa) for collecting the garbage in Bogota.

How and why has the FARC—an organization with probably no more than 17,000 fighters—managed to immobilize one of Latin America's largest and most important countries and what should be one of the continent's most dynamic economies? Part of the answer lies in Colombia's difficult and complicated geography—the nation is crisscrossed by mountain ranges that carve it into inaccessible culs-de-sac. Among other things, this has made it difficult and expensive for any government to extend adequate services to its remoter provinces, or even to exert effective political and military control in those areas. Colombia also has a tradition of social banditry and rural violence going back at least to the 1940s—the subject of Gabriel García Márquez's famous novel, A Hundred Years of Solitude. But probably the most important reason is that the FARC, unlike many guerrilla movements elsewhere, does not depend upon external sources of financing. Rather, its active participation in Colombia's cocaine trade makes it arguably the most prosperous revolutionary movement in the world.

An End to "Softball" in Colombian Politics

Pastrana's decision comes very near the close of his presidential term, which ends in August. Elected on promises to end the war through negotiations, he will leave office under a cloud of disenchantment. This is clear from the fact that Alvaro Uribe, gratuitously described in the U.S. media as the most "hard-line" of the candidates to succeed Pastrana, is so far ahead in the polls (with 53 percent) that he would win on the first round of balloting, easily besting Liberal Horacio Serpa (24 percent) and Noemí Sanín (11 percent), both of whom have consistently favored continued peace talks. Significantly, the candidate of Pastrana's Conservative Party, Juan Camilo Restrepo, registers a mere 1 percent in polls—a commanding reproach to the president's efforts to reach agreement with the insurgents.

A former mayor of Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city, and also former governor of its larger Antioquia province, Uribe is not one to mince words. As he explained to the press recently, "I am going to convince the majority of Colombians that the surest road to peace is the path of authority, because when those who practice violence sense that they are running up against resistance on the part of the state, then they suddenly begin to take negotiations for peace seriously."[1] During his governorship he sponsored the creation of armed civic groups to protect communities from guerrillas. His campaign platform calls for greater professionalization of the Colombian army (an end to conscription) and the acquisition of up-to-date communications equipment to allow the military to more effectively assert its control over the national territory.

All of this is bound to ruffle the feathers of the international human rights community, for whom Colombia is a sort of pornographic movie. A joint briefing paper released in early February by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Washington Office on Latin America opposes the extension of further U.S. military aid to that country on the grounds of having found "overwhelming evidence" of government failure to suspend military personnel guilty of gross human rights violations, of unwillingness by the military to cooperate with civilian prosecutors and civilian judicial authorities, and of collusion between the military and the so-called paramilitary forces. These latter are informal armies that have sprung up in areas where the army is poorly represented or ineffective. For their unlovely activities—they specialize in vigilante justice, often meted out with little attention to guilt or innocence—the "paras" have been classified as terrorist organizations by the U.S. Department of State. But of course they would not likely exist in the first place if there were no reason for them, that is, if the Colombian army were capable of providing security for the vast majority of citizens.

The U.S. Obsession with Aid

Whatever the U.S. government may make of these findings, it seems likely that aid will continue. Colombia has already been authorized to receive more than $1 billion in U.S. military and economic assistance—the U.S. portion of what is supposed to be a larger multilateral effort (known as Plan Colombia) involving the major Western European countries. In fact, however, most of the Europeans have refused to make contributions to the project on the grounds that the U.S. and Colombian approach to the war is excessively geared to military action instead of social reform. Cynical and self-serving though this posture may be, it is not wholly off base: Much of U.S. aid is in fact intended either to train military units, transfer equipment, or purchase special Blackhawk helicopters—exceedingly expensive vehicles that will give Colombian brigades unusual mobility over low-slung mountain ranges.

The Clinton administration was able to coax money out of Congress for Plan Colombia by pretending that its sole purpose was to fight drug trafficking. Even though much of the drug trade is carried out by guerrillas, the United States was somehow supposed to pursue its antinarcotics goal without becoming entangled in Colombia's civil war. At the same time some 400 private contractors have been hired to spray coca fields with herbicides, and an equal number of U.S. military advisers are helping their Colombian counterparts to locate and destroy field laboratories.

So far, however, neither Colombia nor the United States has much to show for its efforts. A recent report by the Central Intelligence Agency concludes that the land surface under coca cultivation has actually increased. Another report by the U.S. Government Accounting Office released last month expresses doubt that the Colombian government even possesses the capacity to eradicate illicit crops; for one thing, it points out that the government does not even control many of the areas where coca is grown. (The report also cites a case of bungling by the National Police, which accidentally fumigated one area devoted to alternatives.)[2] Meanwhile, the FARC has nearly doubled in size, and there is some evidence that it has been able to increase its hold on the drug trade thanks to the temporary concession of a huge zone of the country. Nor has there been any letup in casualties; at present the war is claiming roughly 3,500 lives a year.

The Bush administration is presently debating whether to ask Congress to expand the drug war in Colombia by letting the U.S.-financed antinarcotic brigades attack rebel forces.[3] Although this eventuality was obvious from the very beginning, it professes to shock some members of Congress. "For the first time," thunders Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), "the administration is proposing to cross the line from counter-narcotics to counter-insurgency."[4] This is disingenuous in the extreme. There was never a possibility of separating the drug war from the guerrilla war, and both the administration and its critics surely know it. (Nor, for that matter, has it been possible to separate the activities of the paramilitaries from narcotics trafficking, since they too rely upon drugs to finance their activities.)

In its most recent aid package for Colombia, the administration has identified more than 300 sites there as possessing infrastructure deemed of strategic importance to the United States. Central among them is the Caño Limón oil pipeline, for protection of which the administration is offering $100 million. This facility, utilized by the Occidental Petroleum Company, traverses 490 miles of Colombian territory, much of it along the Venezuelan border, before terminating at an outlet on the country's Caribbean coast. Like other such pipelines, it has been periodically subject to terrorist attacks. (The ones inflicted upon it last year cost the country $500 million.) When asked by Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) whether such assistance would not in effect cause the United States to "cross the line" from antinarcotics to counterinsurgency, Secretary of State Colin Powell replied, "I think it's a close line. I don't think it's quite into counterinsurgency, to the extent that they're not using this investment and this new capability to go running into the jungles looking for the insurgents, but essentially to protect a unique facility."[5]

The Ultimate Agenda

Secretary Powell's argument has been fleshed out by U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson, who explains that while "it is true that this [the Caño Limón project] is not an antinarcotics issue . . . it is important for the future of Colombia, for our petroleum supplies, and for the confidence of our investors." Of its importance to Colombia there can be no doubt—oil is the country's leading (official) export, followed by coffee and coal. Its strategic value to the United States is quite another matter. The Caño Limón pipeline carried 600,000 barrels of oil last year—less than 2 percent of U.S. oil needs. As for "our investors"—it represents only 5 percent of Occidental's global production. Of course, in a broad sense any attack on a major economic facility in Colombia is a bad thing to the extent that it further fuels the pressures to engage in illicit economic activity. But this looks like a tortured argument, as if the administration were searching around for an excuse—any excuse—to get involved militarily in Colombia, and more than that, if worse comes to worse, to take over the war from the Colombian army with troops of our own.

Is the administration indeed angling to get more deeply involved militarily? Who can say? Colombian foreign minister Guillermo Fernández de Soto proudly insists his country "will never accept" U.S. military intervention. In spite of the minister's brave declarations, some recent polls have shown that as many as three in five Colombians favor just such an eventuality—weary as they are of the war and its dislocations to the economy and society. While Colombia is not, and cannot be, "another Vietnam"—the insurgents have no meaningful domestic support and no foreign allies, except possibly Venezuela's Colonel Hugo Chávez, soon to leave us—there is no reason to think that U.S. troops could bring to a conclusion a war that has already dragged on for four decades. If, as the Europeans, Canadians, and Colombian social reformers often claim, the real causes of the war—and by extension, of the country's deep involvement in the drug trade—are "poverty, social exclusion and inequality" (in the words of Colombian intellectual Pablo Molina Valderrama), then those most directly concerned should be invited to attend to them. It may take decades to right society's chief wrongs there, but the United States-as opposed to Colombia-has all the time in the world.

Alternatively, if the best solution to Colombia's civil war is, indeed, a military one, then perhaps the United States should get out of the way and allow those better prepared to fight it—the Colombian military—to do so without requiring semiannual report cards from the U.S. Congress on the army's conduct in the field. Paradoxically, this—a Colombian army operating without foreign restraints—is precisely what the so-called human rights community is lobbying for, perhaps without realizing it. The idea that a war—any war—can be fought without some human rights violations is simply unrealistic. Better training, greater professionalization, and better leadership can make soldiers more effective from both a military and a political point of view. But to hold up a standard of performance that no army can meet, least of all one engaged in a complicated civil conflict, is a cynical exercise. The Bush administration would be foolish indeed to play the role written for it in the psychodrama of the human rights community, whose underlying purpose in Colombia is to discredit the United States at home and abroad.

To be sure, this is not an argument the Bush administration can use—nor should it. In these crucial weeks it ought to be asking itself how much political capital it wishes to spend on a project that is unlikely to win congressional or popular support, unlikely to be brought to a successful conclusion, and even unlikely to show incremental results. In the case of Colombia, we might well hearken to the sound counsel of President John Quincy Adams, who warned the United States against venturing abroad "in search of monsters to destroy." The Colombian drug-cum-guerrilla monster is one with many heads, and an apparently eternal life span.

Notes

1. El Nuevo Herald (Miami), February 15, 2002.

2. Gerardo Reyes, "Agoniza plan para erradicar la coca en Colombia," El Nuevo Herald (Miami), February 26, 2002.

3. Rowan Scarborough, "FARC Triggers Concerns in the U.S.," Washington Times, February 11, 2002.

4. John Diamond, "Officials Seeking Shift in Colombian Drug War," Chicago Tribune, February 18, 2002.

5. "Bush Budget Seeks More Colombian Aid," Las Vegas Sun, February 13, 2002.

Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.