Clinton will promote "Plan Colombia", which many observers see as a vehicle his State Department has devised to permit the US to enter the counter-insurgency war against the FARC guerrillas under the cover of "counter-narcotics". Plan Colombia is the biggest aid package every offered to a Latin American country.

Yet it is opposed by many in Colombia who have no sympathy with the guerrillas, because they believe it will provide no exit from the quagmire of 30 years of conflict. Far from bringing peace, they believe it will drag the country deeper into bloodshed. Besides the Colombian President, Clinton will meet selected business interests but not the representatives of civil society, including church groups, trade unions and peace activists, who reject the US plan.

Ironically, with Clinton keen to enhance the image of his presidency, Plan Colombia may leave a stain on his legacy and present a poisoned chalice for his successor. It also poses a problem for his European allies who will need to unite if they are not to be dragged into the Colombian quagmire.

Far from helping Colombia to "strengthen its democracy", Clinton's policies have done the opposite. The Pentagon has formed an alliance with an army that refuses to disengage from drug trafficking and from the notorious "paramilitaries" - Colombian jargon for right-wing death squads. "Army watched gunmen kill Colombian peasants" is how Reuters headed its report of last month's massacre in La Unión. This is the village where an Irish priest, Father Brendan Forde, has courageously decided to stay, despite threats from the paramilitaries to kill more members of his "peace community".

While the US Embassy recites statistics about the number of Colombian officers who have passed Washington-sponsored army human rights courses, Colombians continue to be terrorised, driven into exile and slaughtered with impunity. La Unión is just one instance in a trail of massacres - 402 last year - attributed to "paramilitaries". Their military strategy consists of slaughtering defenceless villagers with macabre cruelty.

However deplorable the methods of the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and ELN (Army of National Liberation) guerrillas, it is not left-wing terrorism but the rapid rise in the political and military power of the "paramilitaries" which now presents the greatest risk to the elected government. Only Washington has the financial and political clout to rein in this threat. Last week there were alarming signs that the US is moving in the opposite direction. Serious allegations have emerged that agents of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) have offered to subsidise the "paramilitary" leader, Carlos Castaño, in return for his support in combating the traffickers.

Speaking on national television from his northern fiefdom, Castaño said he did not know whether a request for his help reflected US policy or came from agents acting on their own initiative. A DEA informant, who says he acted as translator at meetings between DEA agents, traffickers and members of Castaño's paramilitaries, claims it was agreed that US officials should meet Castaño to conclude a deal.

"They [the DEA agents] were supposed to bring US Army officials, even people from the Department of State, and a series of politicians [to meet Castaño]," he said. "They spoke of 10 or 12." The story may be a fantasy, as the Clinton administration claims, but it would not be the first time US intelligence agencies have had dealings with Carlos Castaño. In 1993, while working for the Cali Cartel, he collaborated with the CIA and the Colombian police to bring down the fugitive drug baron, Pablo Escobar.

Paramilitaries have been endemic to Colombia since President Betancur began peace talks in 1983. When Betancur opened a door to the guerrillas, the army sought allies for a dirty war to derail the talks. They turned for help to the Medellin cartel.

Escobar and his partners provided the money and the generals contracted crack Israeli and British mercenaries to come to Colombia to run a death squad school. Carlos Castaño was the school's star pupil.

He has never been out of a job: hit man for Escobar; drug trafficker; death squad leader contracted by the army to cover their tracks while they eliminated the Unión Patriótica party in the late 1980s; founder of a paramilitary group in the 1990s which he used to murder his way to control a neo-feudal empire stretching across half of northern Colombia. Castaño's criminal career neatly encapsulates Colombia's institutional collapse.

Today Castaño is in a process of metamorphosis, from psychopathic gangster to political icon. In the last two years he has unified the disparate, autonomous, regional paramilitaries into a national force of some 10,000 men in uniform. Under his leadership, this army provides the muscle for a shadowy, fascist political movement, whose civilian leadership is invisible though its goals are not: first, to close down the peace talks between the government and FARC; then, to provide a launching pad for a military-civilian "national unity government".

Castaño now controls territory and population in the Middle Magdalena valley, right up to the strategic oil refinery river port of Barrancabermeja. Since April, he has mobilised "popular protests" against the establishment of a neutral zone where talks with ELN leaders could begin. The talks have been blocked for months. Last month, when the Swiss government invited the Colombian government to come to Geneva with the ELN leaders and a civic society delegation to start peace talks in neutral territory, some of Castaño' s friends came too.

His paramilitaries almost wrecked the conference through a savage onslaught on ELN villages timed to coincide with the talks. After the conference, two men cornered the sound engineer in a hotel elevator and made off with the only official recordings of the two-day peace meetings. Castaño's CIA contacts are back in business. Such fears may be paranoid or they may not. But one thing is clear: in the midst of chaos, Castaño is the only political actor who is consistently gaining gound. He now has a large, rapidly growing following in among the middle class in Colombia. Castano personifies what happens to societies in failed states.

Next month, EU officials meet in Bogota to decide on their response to Plan Colombia. One week ago, a coalition of 37 Colombian human rights and other NGO groups signed a statement rejecting the plan's funds for development. Citing "ethical and political difficulties (in) receiving aid from this programme", they told Clinton his money was tainted. Their message to Europe: withhold support from Plan Colombia and become actively involved in the search for alternatives.

© 2000 ireland.com

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