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In November, on a visit to New York, Santos, 35 and editor of his family's newspaper, could barely contain his optimism for Colombia's prospects. "We will turn around the violence. People are making their wishes for peace known," he said. Santos was in the middle of building the No Mas movement, another civic venture that had encouraged 10 million Colombians, from every walk of life, to march down the streets of every major city and demand their right to a peaceful existence.

Also Today U.S. drug policy: Are we doing the right thing? The White House responds to Michael Massing's critique of the war on drugs, and Massing replies.

Organizing the marches was a gutsy move in Colombia, where a generation's worth of violence between the government and armed groups from both the left and right has resulted in the virtual disintegration of civil society. Today, two decades after Gabriel García Márquez brought honor to Colombia by becoming one of Latin America's first Nobel laureates, the country's story continues to be told by grim statistics: 800 people kidnapped for ransom every year; 1,500 people killed in massacres last year; 20,000 to 30,000 people killed violently every year during the past decade; 149 journalists murdered for doing their work in the past 20 years.

Yet the marches had changed the tone in Colombia and given people hope. "The one who is defenseless in our country is the simple citizen, the worker, the person who does not carry a weapon. The working poor, who have a lot to lose. And for them the marches were an answer," explained Santos.

Then on March 10, Colombians learned the inconceivable: Leftist guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) had ordered Santos killed for his organizing against terrorism and he had fled to the United States. The guerrillas had hired gunmen, who had been pursuing him around town. "It is very hard when they force you out. But I had to leave; there are too many dead people in Colombia already. Dead I can't do anything," a dejected Santos said.

He was only the latest casualty of Colombia's vicious terrorists: the leftist guerrillas and rightist paramilitary gangs who have targeted journalists, university professors, students and writers in the past few months, as the war in Colombia intensifies.

Santos arrived in the United States just as debate began in Washington over a proposed $1.7 billion military-aid package to Colombia. The money will mainly be used for drug-interdiction operations and to train anti-narcotics personnel in Colombia. Some of the funds will be shared with Peru and Bolivia for anti-drugs operations, but Colombia will get the lion's share of the money, including about $388 million for Blackhawk helicopters for the Colombian army.

On March 30, the aid package made it through the House of Representatives 263-146. It now faces tough going in the Senate, where critics will try to toughen the conditions under which the money will be granted or scuttle the aid altogether.

To some, the aid proposal raises the specter of another misguided military intervention in Latin America. Others oppose it as a militaristic extension of the White House's ill-founded War on Drugs. The aid has also been questioned by some in the Pentagon, who feel it is not the duty of the U.S. military to fight a foreign war.

It's the connection between the Colombian army and paramilitary groups that evokes comparisons with the Central American wars, where death squads were responsible for thousands of political assassinations. And even though the government of President Andres Pastrana has cracked down on military involvement in human-rights violations, the country's ombudsman's figures for 1999 are hair-raising: 311 massacres. Of those, 165 were carried out by paramilitary gangs, 65 by the guerrillas and six by the armed forces. There were 75 by undetermined forces.

As the final aid package makes its way through Congress, members who remember past mistakes have tried to put conditions on it. One key restriction is the Leahy Amendment, introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in 1998, which bars military aid to any unit involved in human-rights abuse.

Despite American reservations, 70 percent of all Colombians approve of U.S. assistance, according to a recent poll, and that includes Santos. "The worst thing that could happen is for the United States to abandon Colombia," he said last week after the aid package made it through the House. He shares the bad memories of military aid in Latin America most U.S. citizens remember.

"I was a student in Texas during the Central American wars and I was quite against U.S. aid to El Salvador," he explained. "But the Colombian conflict is different, this is like comparing apples and oranges. To begin with, there was a Cold War during the Central American wars, and the conflict was purely political. Our conflict has the element of politics, but it is completely penetrated by drug trafficking."

Even Human Rights Watch in New York, which has done the most effective exposés on military and paramilitary abuses in Colombia -- most recently reporting that half of Colombia's 18 army brigades had been involved in human-rights violations -- has tried to influence the language of the aid package, rather than oppose it outright.

"The debate is an opportunity to develop the right mechanisms to help the international community to come up with the right language to force the Colombian military to break its ties with the paramilitaries," the group's Americas director, José Miguel Vivanco, said. The Colombian police force, Vivanco and others note, has effectively cleaned up its human-rights record since it started getting U.S. aid and training.

Next page | The plague of kidnappings affects the rich, poor and middle class alike