State collapse and social disintegration are wreaking havoc with Colombia, one of the most developed Latin American states. A conflict involving the armed forces, paramilitaries and guerrilla groups intimately bound up with drug production and trafficking, and long-standing rebellions against social injustice, has claimed thousands of lives in the last fifteen years.
It has now drawn in the United States, where President Clinton has pledged support for a large-scale aid plan to tackle the crisis, predominantly by channelling funds to Colombia's army in an effort to stifle the supply of drugs for the US market which fuels the civil war. Colombia produces approximately 80 per cent of the world's cocaine and 70 per cent of the heroin consumed on the east coast of the US. This is the background against which the country has become the third largest recipient of US security assistance after Israel and Egypt. That position will be decisively reinforced following Mr Clinton's acceptance of the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia, which promises an integrated programme covering the efforts to seek peace, fight illicit drug trading, rebuild the country's economy and deepen its democracy. He is to pay a brief visit there next week to support it.
These are undoubtedly worthy objectives. But the plan's many critics point out persuasively that in such a sharply polarised society its military emphasis - using helicopters to fumigate crops and a 15,000 joint task force to combat guerrilla movements associated with the drugs trade - will inevitably draw the US more and more into a Vietnam-like civil war it cannot hope to win. The conflict in Colombia has spawned a ruthless, rapidly-growing and increasingly effective paramilitary movement close to the armed forces, large landowners and urban business interests themselves corrupted by the drugs trade. This is a proto-fascist organisation in the making, with many atrocities to its name - among them the massacre of villagers in La Union in north-west Colombia last month, which was highlighted by a courageous Irish priest, Fr Brendan Forde. It is more menacing than the guerrilla movements which control much of the countryside with wide popular support, despite their own grisly human rights record.
The weakened Colombian state is not capable of asserting itself independently between these forces. Its own peace initiative is still alive, having made a remarkable journey through Europe earlier this year, including representatives of the main FARC guerrilla movement. European ministers are to meet next week to consider their attitude to this existing peace initiative. Fears that it will be upended or overwhelmed by the military elements of Plan Colombia appear well-founded. There is still time, but precious little, to revive it.