Sticking It to a Troubled Nation

The United States has Colombia’s President Ernesto Samper agarrado por el cogote--by the scruff of the neck--as Colombian commentators describe it. Actually, the Clinton administration has Samper by another part of his anatomy and the nation’s pain is becoming unbearable.

This was always the major danger from Samper’s unbending insistence on holding on to power no matter what. Weakened by the stigma of his presumed links to Cali drug traffickers--he is suspected of taking $6 million for his 1994 presidential campaign--the president has no more room to negotiate. And the United States is happy to take advantage of his predicament.

The lengthening chain of punishment imposed by the Clinton administration began as Samper took office in August 1994. The stage was already set for Colombia’s current humiliation. First came the mysterious “narco-cassettes” in the days before the president-elect’s inauguration. According to the Washington Post, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s station chief in Bogota, who later resigned, gave U.S. and Colombian reporters tapes of tapped phone conversations among Cali cartel drug lords and their operatives about the contributions to the Samper campaign. Then last March, the administration “decertified” Colombia for insufficient cooperation in the war on drugs, putting it in the category of outcasts like Iran and Syria. Over the past few weeks, the administration yanked visas of Gustavo de Greiff, Colombia’s ambassador to Mexico and its ex-chief prosecutor and of Samper himself-- each measure viewed by Colombians as a resounding slap in the face. U.S. Ambassador Myles Frechette has told disbelieving Colombians that the goal is not to bring down Samper. Colombians see the U.S. goal as more insidious: to have the country “pressured, mortgaged and brought to its knees,” as columnist Enrique Santos wrote recently in El Tiempo.

As the presidential election looms in the U.S., administration officials fear a Republican attack for appearing to be weak in the so-called war on drugs. One State Department official admitted recently that the administration needed a country “to throw to the dogs,” and vulnerable Colombia was there.

Still, the most feared punishment of all--economic sanctions, as provided for under Colombia’s decertification--hasn’t been invoked. The State Department says that Clinton will decide in October whether to trigger them, depending on whether Colombia does its bidding. These trade sanctions will harm millions of Colombians. but this is about something else. As another Colombian saying puts it, the United States is trying “to kick goals into more than one field.”

Look deeper into the list of 20 demands by the United States with which Colombia must comply to avoid the Big Stick. They go far beyond tougher controls of the drug cartels, new restrictions on money laundering and the demand for extradition of traffickers to stand trial in the United States (the last is prohibited by Colombia’s 1991 constitution). They include requirements absolutely unacceptable in any other context, requirements that have nothing to do with the issue of drugs: Colombia must break its treaty on banana trade with the European Union, must sign a bilateral agreement with the United States on protection of U.S. investments and on intellectual property rights, must appoint a new ambassador to Washington who has no presidential aspirations.

All of this, of course, is the kind of open intervention that would be laughable in any other context. Yet, Samper himself opened the doors wide with poor management of the crisis that has accompanied him since his first day in office. His government’s nationalist and defensive attitude toward the United States and its “imperialism” no doubt won him points with supporters and lessened internal political pressure. After all, we Latin Americans love any opportunity to attack the “Colossus to the North” for meddling--especially when we’re right. Unfortunately, right doesn’t make might. In this globalized world where the U.S. is undisputed king, Colombia as a pariah nation cannot possibly win in a faceoff.

Samper, surrounded, is playing a dangerous double game. While his spokesmen, especially Interior Minister Horacio Serpa, scream “Yankee go home!” the president tries to obey Washington. Last week, at his request, the Colombian Congress began discussing a package of constitutional reforms that would toughen the laws against drug trafficking. A provision to reopen extradition of traffickers to the United States, a central issue between the two governments, goes to a special legal commission for review.

The buzz in Bogota is that the reform package has about as much chance of passing Congress as Samper has of replacing Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the U.N. Colombians struggled through the bloody era of narco-terror, when Pablo Escobar successfully waged war on the state to force its surrender on extradition. They remain afraid of a new battle with the narcos. The simple mention of a judicial study of extradition has triggered threats from another group of “extraditables” who warn of a “blood bath” if the president does not behave “more sensibly.”

It doesn’t take a political genius to see that Samper has no exit. He has bought himself a bit of time with the constitutional reform plan. Let’s hope that, for the good of his country, he takes advantage of the breather to prepare an honorable way out. Then, perhaps, Colombia can recover something of its lost dignity.