The Colombian government came to the gathering of 27 nations and several international agencies in Madrid last Friday hoping to raise $1 billion for Plan Colombia, President Andres Pastrana's blueprint intended to bolster Colombian peace and counter-narcotics efforts.
But when the meeting ended, only Spain, Norway and Japan had committed funds for a plan that the majority of Colombia's European allies, together with Canada, find dangerously incoherent.
The Inter-American Development Bank and the Andean Corporation for Development also jointly contributed credits worth $300 million. With an additional offer of $131 million from the United Nations, the government received a total of $621 million.
The Colombian government desperately needs committed multinational financial and political support, and it needs it now, if war on a scale never before experienced on the continent is to be averted. But Plan Colombia is failing to inspire international confidence, since the social and development programmes for which the government sought support in Madrid are in direct contradiction with Plan Colombia's other flagship programme. Under this, the US is providing $1.3 billion for a military counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency campaign in the Amazonian stronghold of the FARC guerrillas.
It is not surprising that the failing civilian government has lost the political will it once had to combat the paramilitary phenomenon, which continues to grow exponentially. Nor is it surprising that FARC leaders increasingly sense a crippling absence at the peace table of a viable negotiating partner.
Yet, although tenuous peace negotiations have lurched from one crisis to the next for several months, just one week ago negotiators for both sides finally exchanged ceasefire proposals.
Conceivably, this moment holds some potential and may present a first, crucial turning point along the hard and twisting road towards ending the savagery of both sides' engagement in a civil war everyone knows cannot be won militarily.
International intervention to persuade the US to change from a policy of aerial fumigation of coca plants to one of manual eradication, combined with economic development, is urgent. Those the fumigation policy identifies as the enemy are 11 1/2 million growers, who could be persuaded to abandon the crops they are forced to grow by poverty.
Last May, a political scientist, Dr Juan Tokatlian, wrote that the time had come in Colombia for "a broad diplomatic effort with Latin American leadership" similar to the Contadora Group effort