From the archives: Drug Battle: ‘Own Little Vietnam’

BOGOTA, Colombia -- “It’s like waking from a nightmare and finding that reality is more frightening than the bad dream. Life was bad enough before the drug war started, but now things are almost intolerable. And for what? To save you Americans? It’s not worth it. Either the Americans stop using drugs, or we should legalize it.”

These words from a prominent legal scholar run counter to the Colombian government’s policy, the editorial stands of all major newspapers and perhaps even the beliefs of most Colombians. But increasingly, they reflect a disillusionment, even a cynicism, among intellectuals, lawyers, journalists and some leading politicians that the struggle against the multibillion-dollar cocaine cartels is an American war and not worth the pain.

Such thinking reflects what one European diplomat calls “the Colombian pendulum: For years it swung to the side of tolerating drugs because drugs didn’t seem to hurt Colombia. Then after Galan, it swung to the other side, weighted by outrage. Now it’s swinging back.”

The reference was to Luis Carlos Galan, a leading presidential candidate killed Aug. 18 by gunmen thought to be connected to the drug gangs. Galan’s death provoked the government of President Virgilio Barco Vargas to crack down on the drug cartels; the drug lords have retaliated with escalating violence.

If the pendulum has swung back, it is driven by the weight of a combination of factors, legal, political, practical and even venal.

Equipped with the enormous profits that flow from a $4-billion-a-year business and willing to kill to get their way, Colombia’s cocaine producers reportedly have bought off or frightened some prominent figures, including judges, police and military officers and even, according to U.S. officials, leading candidates for president in forthcoming elections.

The officials will not name any of those suspected of ties to the drug traffickers, not even while disclosing that the U.S. Embassy has drawn up a list of prominent Colombians, one a potential presidential candidate, who will not be admitted to the United States.

According to some diplomats, that corrupt element is using the legitimate doubts and second thoughts of respectable people to create a public reluctance to pursue the war.

One powerful source of those doubts is a growing belief among legal scholars that the Colombian Supreme Court will invalidate many, if not all, of the decrees being used by the government to carry out the anti-drug effort. These include extradition of accused traffickers to the United States, confiscation of their property, the increased militarization of the drug war and restriction of civil rights.

Pointing out that the Supreme Court had earlier overturned the extradition treaty with the United States on a technicality, one important law professor, who asked that he not be named, said the high court is likely to do the same thing to Barco’s decree that reinstated the treaty last month.

“President Barco issued the decree without attempting to remedy the problems the court used to invalidate the treaty. It is doubtful that the same court will now accept the decree,” the professor said.

Agreed With Prediction

Several other legal experts writing in a recent issue of the weekly newsmagazine Semana agreed with that prediction, saying that in Colombian law, extradition falls under the jurisdiction of Congress and the courts, through their powers to safeguard the rights of defendants.

Some also expressed doubt that the constitution allows the president to order the confiscation of suspected drug dealers’ property without trial and compensation.

Seizure of property has been one of the most successful government tactics since the current drive against the traffickers began. In the last month, the government has seized hundreds of homes and ranches of major drug trafficking suspects, at least 500 planes, vehicles and boats and thousands of cattle.

In the single case of Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a leader of the cocaine production center near the city of Medellin, police have taken 18 ranches, including one of 22,000 acres, along with other property valued in the tens of millions of dollars.

However, as the expert panel wrote in Semana, “Such confiscation is absolutely prohibited under Article 34 of the constitution.”

The view that the high court is likely to overturn Barco’s decrees is supported by reports from sources within the government that court members have advised Barco to capture and extradite as many accused traffickers as fast as he can before the tribunal rules by mid-October and invalidates the decrees. These sources say the ruling will not be retroactive.

Major Dealers Elusive

So far, only one suspect has been extradited to the United States and only three others liable for extradition are under arrest. American officials fear that the major dealers will not be caught before the high court rules.

Whatever the legalities of the extradition decree and in spite of a poll taken last month showing more than 60% of Colombians support it, increasing numbers of leading politicians and journalists are calling for an end to the practice.

Alberto Santofimio Botero, one of the leading candidates to head the presidential ticket of the ruling Liberal Party next year, said in a speech last Saturday that “I will not be party to delivering Colombians to jails under other skies, in another language, under another form and idea of life, under different laws, far from their family and from the possibilities of a legal defense.”

And Juan Diego Jaramillo, a respected columnist for El Tiempo, Colombia’s largest and most influential daily newspaper, said the government should refuse to extradite drug dealers if they surrender to Colombian officials.

Such a surrender, in fact, is one of the offers made by a group of traffickers who call themselves “the Extraditables.” These are the men who have declared “total war” on the government and are carrying out the terrorism that daily strikes Bogota, Medellin and other cities.

Anti-Extradition Voices

The arguments by respectable and powerful voices against extradition are accompanied by recommendations that Colombia negotiate with the drug bosses and legalize cocaine production.

The call for talks with the traffickers is strongest from Mayor Juan Gomez Martinez of Medellin, who is also owner of that city’s principal newspaper, El Colombiano. Gomez argues that the government should negotiate an end to the violence in exchange for ending extradition.

Jaramillo is another who thinks that negotiations should be considered, declaring that because the government has been talking with the country’s leftist guerrillas, it can also talk with the drug dealers. That posture is shared by Hernando Duran Dussan, another leading presidential candidate, who says he cannot understand a double standard that allows negotiations with the guerrillas but not with the traffickers.

Mixed with doubts about the legality of the government’s tactics and the arguments against extradition and in favor of negotiations are fears of either too much American intervention or too little.

“We insist that they come and die daily like our soldiers and police,” said Mike Forero Nougues, a columnist for the newspaper El Espectador. El Espectador has been one of the strongest voices supporting the anti-drug war, so much so that it was badly damaged Sept. 2 by a bomb that the police blamed on the traffickers.

‘Our Little Vietnam’

But, according to Antonio Caballero, another El Espectador writer, the American involvement in the anti-drug war “will be our own little Vietnam.” That is a fear that intensifies each time President Bush and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney refuse to rule out the use of U.S. troops here, even though Barco has said he will not ask for American military intervention.

Another factor that is giving thoughtful Colombians pause about the drug war, or at least the way it is being fought, is concern that Colombia is being left to fight a war that it cannot win on its own.

Maria Jimena Duzan, another leading El Espectador columnist and editor who lives under daily death threats from the drug dealers, expressed this concern when she said the world expects Colombia to defeat the traffickers with insufficient outside help.

Arguing that Bush’s newly announced war on drugs really does not commit the United States to any sacrifices, she points to some ironies in the demands of Americans and others that Colombia drive out the cartels.

One, she says, is that besides being the world’s largest consumer of illicit drugs, the United States also is the largest supplier of the arms that reach the drug dealers.

“In the last 38 massacres attributed to the narco-paramilitary groups in Colombia during 1988, and the nearly 400 people who have died, the murderous bullets came from AR-15 semiautomatic rifles (made by) Colt Industries, an American company,” she said.

When is the United States going to take a role equal to Colombia’s, she asked. “How many dead do we have to lose before the world knows that this war is not only Colombia’s war?”