Violence in Colombia

* “If the United States wants peace in Colombia,” said your May 18 editorial, “it will have to send arms and other equipment.” Does the irony of this prescription fail to register at The Times? Your editorial observed that the Colombian revolutionaries (FARC) are perhaps the only self-sustaining insurgency in the world. That is, FARC makes “more than $1 million a day from its criminal enterprises.” You can bet that at least 90% of that money is drug-related. If the U.S sends guns, the affluent FARC will buy counter-guns. This pattern has played itself out all over the world with terrible consequences.

Sending more arms to Colombia will not work. End the insane war on drugs--that will work. The long-range answer to crime is economic, not military.

CHARLIE K. MITCHELL

Venice

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I strongly disagree with your editorial. Your silence about abuses committed by the rightist para- military and extreme governmental corruption provides an eerie reminder of Vietnam. No aid to the Colombian government. Let Colombia sort out its problems without meddling from Washington’s unclean hands.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Los Angeles

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Looking at the picture of Elvia Cortes with that bomb around her neck (May 17) and the accompanying one of her shell-shocked son, I wonder if the human race is God’s Frankenstein, a noble experiment that somehow got away from him. BARBARA SCHRATWIESER

Studio City

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I hope the horrifying photograph of a victim about to have her head blown off gives pause to those who are wont to say taking drugs is a victimless crime. There will come a day of reckoning when we will be made to pay for the indescribable horror we have visited upon countries like Colombia in our voracious, insatiable appetite for drugs.

CATHERINE COVENEY

Los Osos