The conflict is deep-rooted, complex, and brutal. In El Salvador in the 1980s, the Reagan administration justified its military intervention on the grounds that the Salvadoran insurgents were not real revolutionaries, that they took up arms not in their own cause but only as hirelings of Moscow and Havana. In Colombia, the Clinton administration has proved even more imaginative. To overcome American reluctance to intervene in another country's civil war, administration aides have written our drug-war priorities into a preexisting Colombian plan and represented the radically altered outcome as a Colombian request for military assistance. It provides funding for sixty attack helicopters, an array of dubious intelligence activities, and three counternarcotics battalions.
Truth is again the first casualty of war.
General Barry McCaffrey, U.S. drug czar and former commander of the Southern Command, has emerged as the administration's leader on Colombia, and by his definition the crisis requires military action to interdict drugs. While all his statements taken together do not add up to a coherent policy, McCaffrey has repeatedly insisted that our intervention rests on the bedrock of Plan Colombia. Although Clinton has yet to make a major policy address on Colombia, he too has made repeated references to Plan Colombia. Pastrana was elected to the presidency on the strength of his campaign promises to end the war by means of negotiations and to transform Colombia by means of a broad-ranging reform program. To the authors of the original Plan Colombia, the problem of illicit drug crops is inextricably bound up with the desperate struggle of campesinos to survive in a region of total government neglect.