Saving Colombia: President Uribe has done much, and needs more help.

Cartagena, Colombia

THE slums of Via Perimetral, the "Perimeter" around this city, don't make a natural showcase for a congressional delegation. Rows of shacks with corrugated metal roofs line dirt roads. Aswampy area right off the Caribbean Sea, it floods frequently and the sewage system leaks. Some roads are inundated with fetid water that half-naked kids pick their way around, in a desperate, tropical echo of Venice.

But President Alvaro Uribe accompanies a U.S. congressional delegation here. He is showcasing not only programs to improve services in Via Perimetral--a predominantly Afro-Colombian area, swollen with displaced persons from the country's guerrilla war--but one of the strengths of his leadership style: a willingness to confront problems.

The foul smell and the drenching humidity assault the visitor. Uribe, however, seems to be in his element, in a light cotton shirt and a traditional Colombian sombrero made from twisted cane. Uribe walks to the barricades where residents are straining to see him. He shakes their hands, working his way down the line one hand over the other until he arrives in a makeshift tent packed with local residents.

They greet him rapturously, and Uribe begins the kind of town-hall meeting he routinely holds around the country. He stands at one microphone and a few yards from him people stand at another. They launch into passionate speeches about the need for better housing, a better sewage system, and better education. Uribe smiles and promises to help. "Here," he says of the residents, "we have the best orators in our history."

Uribe asks Rep. Gregory Meeks, a black Democrat from New York, to say a few concluding words. Meeks is a supporter of Uribe's and committed advocate of Afro-Colombians. He assures the receptive crowd, "We come from the same place and we suffer the same problems. Only together can we change things."

It is a fine sentiment. If only there were any guarantee it would be acted on. Secretary of commerce Carlos Gutierrez has brought the delegation here as part of his effort to sell Democrats on approving a U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Democrats are threatening to block the deal, driven by two factors: the hatred of Uribe felt by left-wing groups in Washington, and, more important, union opposition. The defeat of this agreement would represent strategic shortsightedness on a par with the attempted rebuke of Turkey earlier this year. And, in human terms, it would be an act of shameful stinginess.

What has Uribe accomplished in Colombia? Nothing less than saving his country. In Colombia, horrific violence has almost been the norm, with vast bloodlettings in civil wars in the first half of the 20th century. In the 1960s, two Marxist guerrilla groups sprang up: the rural-based Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). (The acronyms, of course, are Spanish.) Both groups were successfully contained in the 1970s and the country experienced a period of strong economic growth and relative stability.

Then came the Medellin drug cartel. Its rise in the early 1980s precipitated a war of all against all as competing illegal armies grew flush with drug profits and corruption weakened the government. Vicious paramilitary groups mustered to fight the FARC, whose strength steadily grew. At its height, the FARC had 17,000 fighters and its weaponry was better than that of the Colombian military.

The army had only 20,000 professional soldiers and 20 helicopters to deploy around a country twice the size of France. In 1995, 58 percent of municipalities had a FARC presence (up from 17 percent ten years earlier) and 25 percent of municipalities had no police presence, according to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Crime of all sorts skyrocketed.

President Andres Pastrana responded to this crisis with a program of outreach and appeasement. He handed over an enormous "demilitarized zone" to the FARC that quickly became a base of operations for the guerrilla group. With negotiations getting nowhere, Pastrana finally ordered an end to the zone and launched what became Plan Colombia, an effort to bolster the Colombian state. The United States has poured more than $5 billion into Plan Colombia in what has been, in effect, a spectacularly effective nation-building program.

When elected to the presidency in 2002, Uribe inherited a country that could be compared very roughly to New York in the 1970s, the Balkans in the 1990s, or Iraq now. He immediately boosted the size of the military with a tax increase on the wealthy; there are now 78,000 professional soldiers and 260 helicopters. Within his first year in office, according to CSIS, he reduced the strength of the armed groups by 25 percent through combat losses and defections.

Uribe put police in every municipality, asserting lawful state authority around the country in a way no Colombian government had before. He threatened and cajoled the paramilitary groups into demobilizing, taking 30,000 illegal fighters off the battlefield. The FARC's strength is down an estimated 40 percent. From 2002 to 2006, murders dropped 40 percent, and, from 2000 to 2006, kidnappings dropped almost 80 percent.

The new Colombia is dramatically illustrated by Medellin, the city that had been synonymous with the late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. In 1991, 6,500 people were murdered in the city of two million; in 2006, 700 were. Medellin's murder rate is now lower than Baltimore's.

The outgoing mayor of Medellin, Sergio Fajardo, is a University of Wisconsin-educated mathematician who, in his jeans and casual shirts, looks like he just walked out of a seminar room. He swept into office four years ago, a leader in a citizens movement that was part of the ground-up revulsion against violence across Colombia. Listening to him explain his work in the city is like hearing a cross between Rudy Giuliani (in his commitment to vigorous policing) and Marian Wright Edelman (in his advocacy of social programs to give people hope).

Security is not enough for Colombia. The country is awash in stories of heartbreak. A displaced young woman working at a flower farm outside Medellin relates that her father, two brothers, and cousin were killed by an armed group. Her family had escaped unharmed when one armed group swept through its area. But when a rival group came, it assumed--in the awful logic of the conflict--that the family had been collaborating with the other group. The very act of surviving was a provocation, paid for in blood.

People like her--and there are millions of them--need jobs. By boosting the Colombian economy, the U.S.-Colombia FTA would make it easier to help them (Uribe already devotes 40 percent of his budget to social spending). Strategically, Uribe's Colombia is a bulwark against Chavez's V enezuela, which aids the FARC and would love nothing more to have an ally in Bogota instead of the democratic, pro-U.S. Uribe.

Uribe's left-wing critics in the U.S. point to all the corruption and violence that still exist in Colombia, blaming Uribe for merely dramatically improving his country, not rendering it perfect. But we poured money into Plan Colombia when everything was much worse. "After $5.5 billion, we're going to step back now?" asks an incredulous Secretary Gutierrez.

Then there are the unions, the most potent opposition to the FTA. They hate the deal even though most Colombian exports to the U.S. already benefit from trade preferences. The ostensible reason for their opposition is violence against Colombian union leaders, but attacks against unionists have tracked with general trends of violence--as killings have declined since 2002, so have murders of union leaders.

Some Democrats visiting here give the impression of looking for any reason to oppose the FTA. Astonishingly, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D., N.Y.) says that, from her perspective, the FTA has "nothing to do with Colombia. We have an obligation to the constituents that we serve." As if her constituents back in Brooklyn were competing with Colombian exporters whose main products are oil, coffee, and flowers.

New York Times writer James Reston once said that Americans would do anything for Latin America--except read about it. Watching Democrats come here and empathize with the plight of Colombians, only to go home and perhaps kill the FTA, suggests these humanitarians will do anything for Latin America--except cross the unions.

RICHARD LOWRY

Cartagena, Colombia