The United States has Colombia's President Ernesto Samper agarrado por el cogote--by the scruff of the neck--as Colombian commentators describe it. Actually, the Clinton administration has Samper by another part of his anatomy and the nation's pain is becoming unbearable.
This was always the major danger from Samper's unbending insistence on holding on to power no matter what. Weakened by the stigma of his presumed links to Cali drug traffickers--he is suspected of taking $6 million for his 1994 presidential campaign--the president has no more room to negotiate. And the United States is happy to take advantage of his predicament.
The lengthening chain of punishment imposed by the Clinton administration began as Samper took office in August 1994. The stage was already set for Colombia's current humiliation. First came the mysterious "narco-cassettes" in the days before the president-elect's inauguration. According to the Washington Post, the Drug Enforcement Administration's station chief in Bogota, who later resigned, gave U.S. and Colombian reporters tapes of tapped phone conversations among Cali cartel drug lords and their operatives about the contributions to the Samper campaign. Then last March, the administration "decertified" Colombia for insufficient cooperation in the war on drugs, putting it in the category of outcasts like Iran and Syria. Over the past few weeks, the administration yanked visas of Gustavo de Greiff, Colombia's ambassador to Mexico and its ex-chief prosecutor and of Samper himself-- each measure viewed by Colombians as a resounding slap in the face. U.S. Ambassador Myles Frechette has told disbelieving Colombians that the goal is not to bring down Samper. Colombians see the U.S. goal as more insidious: to have the country "pressured, mortgaged and brought to its knees," as columnist Enrique Santos wrote recently in El Tiempo.
As the presidential election looms in the U.S., administration officials fear a Republican attack for appearing to be weak in the so-called war on drugs. One State Department official admitted recently that the administration needed a country "to throw to the dogs," and vulnerable Colombia was there.
Still, the most feared punishment of all--economic sanctions, as provided for under Colombia's decertification--hasn't been invoked. The State Department says that Clinton will decide in October whether to trigger them, depending on whether Colombia does its bidding. These trade sanctions will harm millions of Colombians. but this is about something else. As another Colombian saying puts it, the United States is trying "to kick goals into more than one field."
