THE SOUTHERN TERROR FRONT

Donald Rumsfeld's visit to Colombia yesterday is a welcome signal of solidarity
toward America's most reliable Latin American ally in the war on terror.

"The Colombians are in every sense holding up their side of the partnership
against narcoterrorism, and so we are always trying to find ways that we can be
helpful," the Secretary of Defense said in an interview en route to Bogota.
Perhaps even some holdouts in the State Department will now get the message.

As noted in a new terrorism index by the World Markets Research Center,
Colombia is the most likely country in the world to experience a terrorist
attack. The U.S. is fourth on the list, but Americans have not suffered
anything like what Colombians have endured for decades. President Alvaro Uribe
was elected in 2002 on a forceful anti-terror platform and it is in the U.S.
interest that he succeed.

Colombia's terrorists are drug-running Marxist rebels -- known as the FARC and
the ELN -- with little popular support. They plant land mines and once bombed a
church full of civilians. A favorite tactic is kidnapping a family and forcing
one of its members to deliver a car bomb as a precondition to freeing the
others. The bomb is then detonated with the driver still at the wheel.

This threat is all the more difficult to defeat because of sanctuary provided
by neighboring Venezuela. Numerous Venezuelan campesinos have told visitors
that the guerrillas are there with the approval of Hugo Chavez's anti-American
government. The Journal's Jose de Cordoba reported in April that one former
FARC soldier claims that he was present when a FARC commander "worked out a
deal with a local Venezuelan National Guard lieutenant."

So it was good to see Richard Myers, chairman of the Pentagon joint chiefs,
call Caracas on the carpet during his visit to Colombia last week. "I think
there is more to learn with respect to Venezuela, and we're going to have to
continue to explore that." General Myers pointedly raised what he called the
"Iraqi analogy," comparing any Venezuelan help to FARC to "countries like
Syria" allowing "foreign fighters to come into Iraq to kill coalition members."

Another problem is that some in Washington are better friends to Mr. Chavez
than to Mr. Uribe and Colombia. At the State Department, the habit has been to
pull the U.S. visas of Colombia's best generals and demand they be fired. The
official justification is typically on human rights grounds, but the charges
against them are often made by sources sympathetic to the FARC. This has
weakened the Colombian army and made the civilian population more vulnerable to
terror.

A second obstacle -- imposed by State at the behest of liberals in Congress --
is limits on the Colombian use of U.S. Blackhawk helicopters. Colombian
commanders must get the approval of the Narcotics Affairs section at State for
every helicopter use involving the rebel war. This makes using perishable
intelligence to surprise a rebel column next to impossible. It's useless to
have actionable intelligence if the military cannot act on it. No U.S. military
commander would accept such constraints.

The U.S. has been quiet about the purpose of the Rumsfeld and Myers visits, but
we hope it was to scout facts on the ground and see what more the U.S. can do
to help. President Bush rightly put the Pentagon in charge of security in
post-Saddam Iraq, and it wouldn't hurt to do the same for U.S. efforts to
assist Colombia. President Uribe is on our side, even if some American
diplomats don't want to believe it.