$1.3 BILLION WON'T WIN WAR IN COLOMBIA

President Clinton is poised to sign a foreign-aid bill that would give
Colombian President Andres Pastrana $1.3 billion in his fight against the
power of drug money.

Unfortunately, this legislation cannot achieve its objectives -- it will
not stop the flow of illegal drugs to the United States -- because it
targets the symptoms, not the root causes, of Colombia's unrest.

Instead of solving the problem, this misguided measure is likely to embroil
the United States in the internecine warfare that has plagued the Colombian
countryside for more than 50 years.

The aid package launches a dangerously open-ended U.S. initiative without
clear objectives and without any means of assessing success or failure.

What is needed instead is a long-range, sophisticated approach to
Colombia's complex problems that takes into account the country's unique
and unfortunate history.

The U.S. aid package was developed as a piece of "Plan Colombia," a $7.5
billion program that includes political reform, crop substitution and
anti-drug aid.

But Plan Colombia is little more than window dressing for the effort to
sell the U.S. military measure to Congress and the American people.

The comprehensive Plan Colombia, which depends on aid from Europe for its
most crucial components, is unlikely to be realized.

The government of Colombia, unlike other modernizing governments in Latin
America in the 20th century, never bridged the historical and cultural
divide between urban and rural areas.

The disdain of the urban elite for the peasants of the rural countryside
continues unabated. This pernicious legacy of Spanish colonialism still
poisons the thinking of contemporary Colombian leaders.

In the 1950s, Colombia's urban political leaders acted to bring years of
rural violence and political discord to an end. They notified the rag-tag
rural bands that the time had come to lay down their arms.

In the city, the political elites agreed to rotate the presidency and to
divide government posts among themselves. Since then, all the major
political positions have been openly contested in regularly held elections.

But rural leaders were left out of the process.

Their disenchantment led first to anger and then to armed struggle. Spurned
by their traditional patrons, small-time Liberals and Conservatives began
fending for themselves and turned to banditry.

Fighting government soldiers, the bandits hardened into guerrillas.
Right-wing death squads formed and took revenge for excesses committed by
the guerrillas. Originally directed by the army and property owners, the
death squads began answering only to themselves. Now, every armed group is
involved in the drug trade in a significant way.

The most heralded peace conversations in recent Colombian history began on
Jan. 7, 1999, between President Andres Pastrana and Manuel Marulanda Velez.
Marulanda Velez is the legendary, 70-year-old guerrilla leader of FARC, the
Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, the largest of various guerrilla
organizations roaming the countryside.

While Pastrana showed up for the meeting, tellingly, Marulanda Velez, known
as "Tirofijo" or "Sureshot" did not. Instead, he sent an emissary who
recited a list of grievances going back to the 1950s.

In particular, the statement noted an army attack on guerrilla headquarters
in 1990 that resulted in the loss of "300 mules, 70 horses, 1,500 head of
cattle, 40 pigs and 250 chickens."

Colombian government officials were stunned at the litany of grievances,
but failed to grasp the point: while Tirofijo had long ceased to be a
peasant, he still thinks like one. Land and animals remain uppermost in his
mind.

The conflict in Colombia is intense, enduring and personal. Colombia's
contemporary problems are based on historical mistakes that need to be
recognized and redressed. The country's government officials and their
allies in Washington must address the issues of social, economic and
political justice that lie at the heart of the rural conflicts. Otherwise,
the chaos will continue.

The Colombian government believes that the U.S. aid package will have a
dramatic impact on its fight against domestic producers and distributors of
cocaine and heroin. But as long as the warfare in Colombia -- and the
demand for cocaine in the U.S. -- continues, so will the traffic in illegal
drugs.

The current plan for U.S. military aid will succeed only in postponing a
political solution to the crisis.

Braun is a professor of Latin American history at the University of
Virginia. He is the author of "Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks: A Journey
into the Violence of Colombia," a book written about his experience
negotiating the release of his American brother-in-law who was kidnapped by
Colombian guerrillas in the 1980s.