Q&A with Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos

The Colombian leaders face a steep challenge: persuading the new administration to maintain $556 million a year in military and economic aid as it braces for an era of trillion-dollar deficits. Santos will have to fend off critics who say Plan Colombia has fallen short of its coca eradication goals and that the military's battlefield gains against leftist rebels have been stained by human rights abuses, including "false positives" -- the killing of innocent civilians passed off as battle casualties.

But the Harvard-educated scion of a family that operates and partly owns his country's biggest newspaper, El Tiempo, argues that dramatic battlefield successes against the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas, known as the FARC, and Colombia's importance as a U.S. ally in an often unfriendly region are reason for Obama to not "pull the rug out from under us."

Santos was interviewed Thursday by The Times in the capital, Bogota.

This is not an ideal time to be going to Washington to look for money.

The way we see it, the cost of support for Colombia is small in relation to the $1-trillion deficit, but that the usefulness of this help is huge and at minimal cost compared to Iraq, for example.

When it started in 2000, Colombia was not in the hands of the state but in those of paramilitaries and the guerrillas. I remember in 2000, when President Clinton came to Cartagena just before Plan Colombia started, the country was on the verge of becoming a failed state. Today, we are one of the most solid democracies, where institutions are working, where the scandals such as false positives have come to light because of those functioning institutions.

We are winning, but we haven't won yet. This could backfire very rapidly. [The end of Plan Colombia] is what the rebels want.

How has Plan Colombia helped Colombia achieve this?

Military training, intelligence, strengthening of institutions and, of course, the added military capacity that has resulted from things like [Black Hawk] helicopters that we have received through Plan Colombia. It's the quality of the help we get that matters. The quality of training, of the intelligence, for example, which doesn't cost the United States anything but which we can't produce ourselves.