Potomac fever has overtaken US Latin American policy once again - this time triggered by the failure of Washington's "drug war" in a presidential election year, and corporate lobbying by US arms manufacturers and oil men.
The result: last week's US Senate vote to approve $1.3 billion in new military aid for Colombia, which will recklessly propel the United States into the vortex of Colombia's civil war, burying the fragile peace hopes with frightening implications for the entire Andean region. The vote was immediately hailed by the US drug czar, Mr Barry McCaffrey, as "a crucial step . . . that will greatly enhance counter-drug efforts in Colombia". Mr McCaffrey should know. It was his announcement of "a drug emergency" in Colombia last summer that pushed the panic button in the Clinton White House.
President Clinton commended the Senate vote as showing that the US was "committed to a democracy and to fighting the drug wars in Colombia, and to strengthening the oldest democracy in Latin America".
The vote has still to be reconciled in conference with leaders of the House of Representatives, who passed an even more generous version of the aid bill last March.
The Republican Senate leader, Mr Trent Lott, who destroyed efforts to reduce funds for the Colombian military and redirect the money to social programmes and alternative crop development in Colombia, and to drug treatment and prevention programmes in the US, said: "To those worried about slipping toward being involved (in Colombia), where better to be involved? . . . This is a question of standing up for our children, of standing up and fighting these narco-terrorists in our part of the world, in our neighbourhood, in our region." When the roll was called last Thursday, the senators voted 95 to 4 to quadruple current US aid to Colombia.
Another Republican senator, Mr Slade Gorton, who cast one of the four No votes, disagreed with Mr Lott, saying: "The capacity of this body for self-delusion appears to this senator to be unlimited. There has been no consideration of the consequences, cost and length of involvement."
The bill, he said, "let's us get into war now and justify it later. Mark my words, we are on the verge . . . of involvement in a civil war in Latin America, without the slightest promise that our intervention will be a success".
Mr Gorton's efforts to make deep cuts in the package were routed, 79 to 19.
The bulk of this massive escalation in US aid will go to the Colombian army, at a rate equivalent to $2 million a day over two years, to finance three new battalions, trained by US Special Forces, and equipped with American hardware and a fleet of American combat helicopters. With a minimum training, 2,800 young Colombian soldiers will go on the offensive against drugs and insurgents in the remote jungles of one of Colombia's most neglected and lawless regions, the south-western state of Putumayo.
Marine Gen Charles Wilhelm, commander-in-chief of US Southern Command, and the man responsible for overseeing this joint American-Colombian military strategy, told the Senate last February that the objective is to "push" thousands of guerrillas out of their jungle bases to facilitate US spray planes to fly in and eradicate the region's coca crops. Once they have dispatched the most powerful insurgent force in Latin America, the new battalions are expected to "secure" a vast and impenetrable jungle area and "assist Colombia . . . to reassert its sovereignty over its territory and to curb growing (drug) cultivation".
In Senate testimony last February, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, State Department Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, indicated how this assistance would address Colombia's complex crises: "fighting the drug trade, fostering peace, increasing the rule of law, improving human rights, expanding economic development . . . and giving the Colombian people greater access to the benefits of democratic institutions".
Mr Pickering was Ronald Reagan's ambassador to San Salvador and oversaw the US's disastrous involvement in the Salvadoran civil war.
Critics note that his testimony is at odds with realities on the ground. Putumayo's 600 square miles of jungle and river produce 50 per cent of Colombia's coca leaves. FARC guerillas dominate the countryside, and right-wing paramilitaries, with the complicity of local police and army officers, control the towns. Twothirds of Putumayo's 300,000 inhabitants are small coca farmers and migrant leaf pickers, and many are refugees, already displaced by the civil war.
In implicit anticipation of the human suffering that will result from the assault on the coca fields, funds have been allocated to assist up to 10,000 displaced people with emergency relief. However, Ecuador, which shares a border with Putumayo, has been alerted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to prepare for the arrival of 30,000 people fleeing the US spray planes.
Perhaps, most disturbing, is the hermetic silence of US officials in the face of persistent reports that the paramilitaries are organising to support the military operation.
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