<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Americas/2001-02/druglords250201.shtml> Colombia appeases its drug lords to stop US-backed war
By David Smith in Bogota
25 February 2001
"They tell me the movie Traffic is a big hit in the United States," Colombia's President Andres Pastrana said as we sat down at the presidential palace in Bogota last week. "I hope America gets it. Together we are fighting the war against narco-traffickers. The war is against the traffickers, because they are the ones financing the violence in my country."
As soon as Tony Blair leaves Washington, Mr Pastrana will be arriving, demonstrating President George Bush's international priorities. His first foreign trip was to Mexico, to see another new President, Vicente Fox, and to focus on the worsening drugs war. Mr Pastrana comes calling at the White House on Tuesday.
Clearly Traffic, with its graphic focus on the drug runners of Latin America and the devastating influence of cocaine and heroin on the US, has struck a chord in Colombia, the world's main drugs producer. Next day, as we visited left-wing guerrillas in the sweltering southern jungle province of Caqueta, a rebel commander brandishing an AK-47 said: "So it takes a Hollywood movie for America to wake up to the drugs war, does it? Will America get it now?"
The question is particularly important for Colombia, where Bill Clinton bequeathed the largest unilateral US military build-up since Vietnam. Hundreds of Green Berets are training the Colombian army for war and batches of Black Hawk helicopters are delivered here almost by the week to make the army supremely mobile in the war zone, all in the name of a "new drugs war" conceived by, General Barry McCaffrey, Mr Clinton's drug tsar. The amount of aid money alone, $1.3bn (£900m) over the next few years, makes Colombia a US priority for as long as Mr Bush is President.
"The problem is, we don't know whether Pastrana truly wants to fight this war," a US diplomat confided at the fortified embassy in Bogota. "You have to be sceptical when you see him in action lately."
In the past few days Mr Pastrana has torn up the rule-book, going alone to the jungle encampments of his enemies, placing himself in the hands of those who vow to overthrow him, negotiating away control of a swath of his country the size of Wales, and offering ceasefires, exchanges of prisoners and a de facto armistice.
"I was elected to bring peace to Colombia," says Mr Pastrana, once a television anchorman whose father was President in the Seventies. "I will do anything and everything to make it happen. If it means going to the jungle, to talk for days with the rebels, so be it. Anything less would be abdication of responsibility."
He is convinced his chief enemy, the guerrilla leader Manuel Marulanda, is sincere. "I have looked in his eyes and I see it. He wants peace, not decades more of war."
Mr Pastrana is far less sure-footed when asked what concessions he has received from the rebels in return for handing over land. "What have we got in return? Negotiations, that's what we've got," he says, somewhat defensively.
Make the tortuous journey south, passing first through government lines, then the roadblocks of the guerrillas, and you can see his dilemma. The lush hills and forests of the Amazon Basin, now populated by revolutionaries on the left and murderous paramilitaries on the right, evoke the military nightmare of Vietnam. This terrain is not for conquering.
Guerrillas of the Armed Revolutionary Force of Colombia (Farc) are dug in across a farming province of 16,000 square miles, much of it planted with coca. This state within a state is defended by a well-trained, well-paid and highly disciplined force, but its young men and women fighters are likely to spend as much time on computers as on the firing range. Farc's sophisticated internet operation spreads the word to support groups across the world, especially in Europe.
These Marxist fighters talk openly of their links to the drug cartels. "Yes, we levy a tax on drug production, just as we raise taxes on any commercial activity in our land," said Carlos Losada, Farc's softly spoken, middle-aged spokesman. "We make money out of the drug trade, but we are not the producers or the traffickers."
The wealth that comes from drugs, and the military power it has given the guerrillas, makes them ever less inclined to negotiate. Simon Trinidad, once a banker, now a rebel representative, became angry when it was suggested that both sides would have to compromise. "Why should we make concessions?" he demanded. "We want power. Power in Colombia."
Mr Clinton decided there was no alternative to confrontation, but Mr Pastrana is trying to make peace before the US makes war. Mr Bush now has to decide what he is going to do. No wonder his people hint privately that there is more at stake with Mr Pastrana than with Tony Blair.