by Gordon Barthos

About the author: Gordon Barthos writes foreign affairs editorials for the Toronto Star, a Canadian newspaper.

Life is cheap in cocaine—and heroin—rich Colombia.

Three farmers were murdered in January 2001—for their sneakers.

It wasn’t theft. It was politics.

The men were sporting runners from a shipment hijacked by Marxist guerrillas. They ran into some right-wing paramilitary killers.

The killers didn’t much care whether the farmers were guerrilla fighters, sympathizers or customers.

Colombia’s political war has taken 35,000 lives in the past decade, and displaced 2 million. But it’s also inherently one of the most violent societies anywhere, with 35,000 non-political murders a year.

Strapping its military boots on, the United States has just waded into this mess.

Plan Colombia