Don’t Knock Colombia for Dealing With the Devil : Drug war: The cocaine king’s surrender buys the government a peaceful interlude; ending the trade requires action in the U.S.

Before Americans rush to condemn Colombia’s President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo--as U.S. drug czar Bob Martinez seems to be doing--for making a deal with Medellin drug lord Pablo Escobar, they should at least suspend judgment until all the details of the arrangement become known.

Escobar, who surrendered to Colombian authorities last Wednesday, is in a jail near Medellin designed and presumably paid for by him. Friends and family have free access and his security is assured as much by his own bodyguards as by the police.

This follows years of violence where Escobar and the Medellin cartel amassed billions of dollars and were responsible for killing thousands of Colombians. In the past decade, violent deaths in Colombia have exceeded 80,000, with 18,000 in Medellin alone, according to Colombian human-rights procurator Jaime Cordoba Trivino. The slain include Cabinet ministers, Supreme Court justices, law-enforcement officials and prominent journalists.

Against this background, it helps to remember that 90% of Colombia’s estimated $2 billion to $3 billion in cocaine exports is consumed in the United States. Without the American market, the Colombian drug trade, and the violence and huge profits associated with it, would never have grown to its current size. Yet American assistance to Colombia to combat the cocaine traffic amounted to only $85 million last year, while Washington has largely ignored Bogota’s requests for lower U.S. tariffs on its principal legal exports--coffee (worth as much as $2 billion a year) and cut flowers (up to $200 million a year).

Gaviria, elected in 1990 after three of the presidential candidates, including front-runner Luis Carlos Galan, were assassinated by drug lords, faced an impossible choice: either preside over a deepening cycle of violence and corruption with no end in sight, or try to reach some form of accommodation with the leading drug traffickers. Americans should at least understand Gaviria’s reasoning for seeking a negotiated accommodation, even if it is still premature to condone the agreement.

It is one measure of the Colombian government’s effectiveness in pursuing the war against the drug cartel that leaders like Escobar have come to feel they need government protection. Moreover, much of the recent anti-government terrorism was organized by the self-styled “extraditables,” the top drug lords who faced extradition to the United States under the terms of a 1980 treaty between the two countries.

As a candidate, Gaviria announced that he favored repeal of the treaty if the principal drug traffickers would turn themselves in. The Parliament has just repealed the extradition treaty, which never had popular support. Although two dozen Colombians were sent to the United States for trial under the terms of the treaty, only three have been extradited since late 1989 when the United States seized Manuel Noriega in Panama and forced him to stand trial in Miami--a move widely condemned in Colombia and much of the rest of Latin America.

Any final judgment of the success and fairness of the Garviria-Escobar pact will depend mainly on two factors:

-- Will the Medellin cartel close down even if this means allowing them to transfer much of their illicit gains into legitimate business operations and being spared heavy jail terms? Heavy fines on Escobar and his associates would at least reduce their financial benefits from the arrangement.

-- After dealing with Escobar, will Gaviria move to force the Cali cartel, Colombia’s second-largest drug ring, and lesser traffickers to accept similar terms? Unless virtually all of the Colombian drug operations are put out of business, the Escobar arrest will have little effect on cocaine prices in the United States.

Although such actions would not signal a victory against the Colombian drug cartels, they might provide a basis for compromise preferable to prolonging the murderous status quo indefinitely.

Neither the Colombian government nor the traffickers were likely to prevail militarily anytime soon. Above all, neither the United States nor other drug-consuming nations has been willing to provide any of Colombia’s democratically elected governments with enough resources or promises of significant reduction in cocaine demand to tip the balance in favor of Colombia’s efforts.

Looking to the future, America’s interest might be better served by dramatically curtailing Colombian cocaine traffic, rather than by continuing to insist, fruitlessly, that the drug lords simply be brought to justice.

It may be that the Colombian government, rather than pursuing indefinitely a murderous and unwinnable war, has found an imperfect but justifiable way out of a desperate dilemma for which it is only partially to blame.