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Rutherford Institute sues Columbine officials
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Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, meanwhile, has publicly pledged her support for Pastrana's efforts to negotiate peace with the guerrillas. But given the guerrillas' intransigence this year, one can easily imagine Albright switching to a get-tough stance. And the co-chairmen of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus are circulating an Amnesty International report in both houses of Congress, asking their colleagues to consider the civilian cost of the armed conflicts: "On the one hand, they are murdered in ever more frequent massacres by paramilitary forces allied to the military, and on the other, subject to mass kidnapping, extortion and ... killings by insurgent forces."

These policy conflicts aren't new. When President Clinton focused his drug policy on treatment programs and demand reduction in the United States, congressional Republicans blasted him for being soft on drugs and ignoring the supply side of the narcotics trade. Now that he's paying more attention to Colombia, some have suggested he's just playing election-year politics. Given the patchwork quilt of policy statements made in recent years, it's no wonder Colombians question just what the United States is up to. "'Schizophrenic' is a word you hear people use a lot down there" to describe U.S. policy, says Adam Isacson, head of the demilitarization program at the Center for International Policy.

That's unfortunate, since Colombia is suffering from its worst economic recession since 1931 and needs reliable support from the international community. Its gross domestic product is shrinking, a fifth of its urban population is unemployed and the peso has lost nearly a third of its value against the dollar so far this year.

And as Colombia's economy falters, drug lords offer far more money to poor farmers to grow coca and poppy -- from which cocaine and heroin are derived -- than the farmers could ever earn cultivating traditional crops like bananas or coffee. Other peasants join guerrilla groups, rather than take legitimate jobs, and receive up to twice the pay of Colombian army recruits.

At the same time, Colombia's internal refugee population is the third largest in the world, estimated at 1 million people. And hundreds of thousands of Colombians have emigrated in recent years, leaving behind a nation with a corrupt and ineffective judicial system, a police force that undertakes "social cleansing" operations and a military with persistent ties to death squads -- all set against the backdrop of a brutal four-decade civil war that continues to claim the lives of many civilians.

But now that the United States has a chance to redefine its Colombia policy, "it may get coherent in a way that's dangerous," says CIP's Isacson. Human rights organizations suggest that the all-but-inevitable increase in aid to the Colombian military will only exacerbate a growing human rights crisis there. Few in the Clinton administration seem willing to acknowledge that U.S. aid, in the form of training and equipment, can be used by the military and police to strengthen the right-wing death squads that, according to the State Department, now commit as much as 70 percent of the political killings in Colombia.

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