Beyond 'Drugs and Thugs'; A new report says the Andes could destabilize the hemisphere.

Byline: Jimmy Langman and Joseph Contreras

A newly appointed U.S. diplomat to an Andean country was asked recently how he viewed his assignment. His response: "Ah, you know, it's all about drugs and thugs." That, says a new report issued by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), America's leading foreign-policy think tank, is precisely the problem with U.S. policy in the Andean region. Over the past two decades, the United States has contributed roughly $25 billion in aid to the area. But most of the money has been used to fight coca growers and cocaine traffickers--not the pressing social and economic ills plaguing the 120 million residents of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia. "Sustainable, peaceful democracies in the Andean region depend as much on political, legal and socioeconomic reform... as on 'hard' counter-narcotics and counter-terror initiatives," warns the report, which is titled "Andes 2020: A New Strategy for the Challenges of Colombia and the Region."

As recently as three years ago, Colombia and its neighbors ranked at or near the top of U.S. foreign-policy priorities. The reason: about 80 percent of all the cocaine consumed by Americans comes from that country. In what has been a typical approach, the U.S. Congress in the summer of 2000 allocated $1.3 billion to jump-start Plan Colombia--a five-year antinarcotics initiative aimed at cutting drug production in half. Almost overnight Colombia became the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid outside the Middle East. Tens of thousands of coca farmers have been put out of business by an aggressive aerial fumigation program.

But eradication campaigns have done little to slow drug trafficking, and they do nothing to stimulate economic growth or create jobs in an impoverished region. In fact, they typically have the opposite effect. Coca production in Bolivia has fallen dramatically over the past decade, but the net gain for Bolivians has been increased poverty even as cocaine consumption in the United States continues to rise. GDP growth in the Andes averaged less than 1 percent annually between 1998 and 2002. "The average [Andean citizen] my age has seen no economic progress in his lifetime," says Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, 40, a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of Defense who attended three CFR discussion groups on the issue. The authors of the CFR report foresee a bleak future for the region's fragile democracies unless Washington quickly conceives a broad strategy to foster development. Without it, warns the report, "simmering conflicts could escalate... and directly threaten the ...