As it examines U.S. foreign policy, the new administration should take a hard look at Plan Colombia -- a $1.6 billion effort that can only increase division in the country and the region. As it happens, that country's capital offers living proof of the efficacy of a more reasoned approach. Pacific News Service associate editor Andrew Reding directs the Americas Project of the World Policy Institute, where he is senior fellow for hemispheric affairs.

As the new Bush administration reviews U.S. policy toward Colombia, it would do well to look closely at the one bright spot in an otherwise darkening picture.

For while violence, drugs, and corruption hold sway in most of the country. Its capital city, Bogota, is becoming a better place to live. The murder rate is half what it was six years ago, the number of kids attending school is up a third, tax collection has doubled and competitive bidding is replacing kickbacks.

Homeowners in hundreds of marginal neighborhoods now have land titles, enabling them to get water, light, and paved streets. Every household is expected to have potable water by the end of the year.

How did this happen? Not with a beefed-up military, but with two maverick mayors who targeted the country's underlying problems: corruption and poverty.

Antanas Mockus won on a shoestring campaign in 1995, free of IOUs to the corrupt Liberal-Conservative establishment. He was succeeded in 1998 by Enrique Penalosa, a public administration expert who never lost sight of his native roots.

Neither is an ideologue. Both privatized inefficient public enterprises -- yet both also extended the delivery of public services to the city's poorer barrios. In so doing, they have transformed Bogota - a city of seven million -- into a showcase of what is possible for Colombia as a whole.

Unfortunately, their insights cannot be found in the $1.3 billion U.S. aid package intended to curtail drug smuggling and improve stability in the Andean region. Because it ignores socioeconomic realities, Plan Colombia is destined to make things worse, not better.

A look at recent World Bank and UN statistics -- readily available to Washington decision makers -- exposes the faulty logic behind Plan Colombia. For while cocaine trafficking has intensified corruption and fueled rural insurrection in Colombia, it is but a symptom of a much deeper problem.

At root, Colombia is a country torn by extreme inequality -- so deeply divided that it can be seen as two vastly different countries united by a legal fig leaf of statehood.

There is urban Colombia -- modern, prosperous, with relatively high levels of educational attainment and social services.

And there is rural Colombia -- desperately poor and neglected. More than half of rural Colombians live below the poverty line, almost twice the rate in the big cities. More than nine out of ten urban dwellers have access to safe water, as opposed to less than half of rural inhabitants, who are exposed to the parasitic ailments that spread in unprotected water supplies. This shameful neglect of rural areas is what caused Colombia's guerrilla insurrections in the first place, long before cocaine entered the picture. It is also what turned Colombia's peasants into coca cultivators. Guns and coca have unfortunately been the only means of social and economic advancement in the country's grim hinterlands.

Plan Colombia fails to address the underlying problem. Of the $860 million destined for Colombia, three-quarters is allocated to security forces - 60.4% to the military, 14.3% to the national police. Less than 8% is allocated for developing viable economic alternatives to coca cultivation.

By funding security forces infamous for human rights violations, and failing to provide any real prospect of economic advancement for rural Colombians, the plan can only add fuel to the fire.

What's more, it threatens to regionalize the conflict. Adjoining Colombia to the south are Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador, all with extreme rural poverty - 46 % in Brazil, 61% in Peru, and at least 50% in Ecuador. Peru and Ecuador have mountainous regions suitable for coca cultivation, and share a history of political instability.

Moreover, their rural hinterlands adjoin the region of Colombia under rebel control. That leaves them extremely vulnerable as Colombian peasants and guerrillas cross borders in response to U.S.-backed military offensives.

U.S. efforts to shore up the Ecuadorean military will only exacerbate social tensions in an unstable country that is mostly indigenous but run by a privileged and unpopular white elite.