CLINTON'S SUCCESSOR WILL INHERIT MAJOR DRUG WAR

U.S. Committed To Plan Colombia, A Potential Quagmire

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration is preparing to hand off to the
next president a large commitment to finance Colombia's drug war, an effort
that will take years to yield results and could widen to neighboring countries.

President Clinton and his advisers make their point again and again: The
new U.S.-funded war on drugs in South America won't turn into another
Vietnam. With the passage of Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion aid package, the
United States is, in essence, going in with its wallet, not with its boots.

Still, the hazards of what is certain to be a costly and lengthy jungle war
against Colombia's drug producers bear echoes of the Vietnam conflict.
Given Washington's opposition to committing U.S. troops, it almost
certainly will be less costly in lives than Vietnam was, but all signs
point to a long, expensive and possibly widening struggle.

"Turning the situation around in Colombia will take time, probably at least
three to five years," Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering said last
week after returning from a trip there. "And I think this is evolving now
into not just a pure Colombia issue but an Andean regional issue."

Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) and U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson got a
chilling reminder of the risks Friday when authorities in the violence-torn
town of Barrancabermeja found a bomb alongside a road near the airport
hours before the two arrived.Authorities arrested a suspected member of the
National Liberation Army, or ELN, which controls a section of northern
Colombia.

The U.S. and Colombia downplayed the possibility that the bomb was meant
for the U.S. dignitaries.

Wellstone was visiting Colombia to investigate allegations that the Bogota
government tolerates human-rights abuses, including kidnappings and
murders, by paramilitary groups with ties to the Colombian military.
Already Clinton has had to sign a waiver to keep aid money flowing though
Colombia cannot yet certify full compliance with human-rights requirements
imposed by Congress.

"I don't think we can conveniently turn our gaze away from this unpleasant
reality of the rash of extrajudicial killings, the rape, the murder, the
torture, the kidnappings," Wellstone said before leaving.

The ELN and the even more powerful Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, have threatened to escalate violence if Plan Colombia
becomes a war against rebel forces.

The $7.5 billion plan was developed by the Colombian government with
step-by-step help from Washington and the crucial support of House Speaker
Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). The goal is to cut coca cultivation in half over
five years. Colombia has pledged $4 billion, and Europe promised help.

Most of the U.S. taxpayer money will go to the Colombian military in the
form of 60 helicopters and training for three battalions. U.S. troop
presence in Colombia is capped at 500; 290 American soldiers are there now,
and they are forbidden from going on patrol.

The U.S. role is to finance an enormous effort by Colombian police, backed
by the military, to break the drug cartels and coca-growing operations
centered in the mountainous jungles of southern Colombia.

More than half the total would go toward economic development to give
peasants an alternative to growing coca leaves and to reverse Colombia's
economic tailspin, which is producing volunteers for the two major rebel
movements.

Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush endorse the effort to
stem the tide of cocaine and heroin from Colombia. Bush has pledged to make
Latin America a foreign policy priority.

"Should I become president, I will look south, not just as an afterthought
but as a fundamental commitment of my presidency," Bush said during the
campaign.

Only a few months into its life, Plan Colombia is showing some cracks.
European nations have chipped in far less money than hoped. Colombia has
barely begun to spend money on the program. U.S. military helicopters vital
to carrying the fight against drug cartels in jungle terrain are slow in
getting to Colombia.

"U.S. assistance to Colombia will take years to produce results," said Rep.
John Mica (R-Fla.), who led hearings on Plan Colombia.

U.S. policy in Colombia demands that American aid be limited to the drug
war and not for the civil war.

"This assistance is for fighting drugs, not for waging war," Clinton said
during his Aug. 30 visit to Cartagena, Colombia, to formally present the
$1.3 billion U.S. aid package to the Colombian government.

But the same U.S. officials who articulate this policy admit that the
guerrillas and the drug barons have become "inextricably linked," as
Pickering put it recently.

The problem posed by drug trafficking from Colombia is framed in stark
terms. Ninety percent of the cocaine seized in the United States comes from
Colombia, as does 70 percent of the heroin. Cultivation of coca, the raw
material of cocaine, has more than doubled in Colombia in the past five
years. The worst of the problem is concentrated in remote southern regions
out of reach of the Colombian army and police.

"The expansion of coca growing areas, especially in the [southern] Putumayo
Department, has progressed virtually unchecked," Brian Sheridan, assistant
secretary of defense for special operations, told lawmakers recently.

Colombia, Latin America's oldest democracy, is struggling through the
longest-running civil war in the hemisphere, dating back nearly 40 years.
The government of President Andres Pastrana, who has skillfully lobbied
Washington for support of the plan, has ceded a swath of territory the size
of Switzerland to guerrilla control.

More than 1 million Colombians are considered "internally displaced"
refugees. The country has the highest kidnap rate in the world.
Barrancabermeja, the town visited by Wellstone and Patterson, is the most
violent town in Colombia with nearly 500 politically related murders this
year alone.

After Congress passed the aid package this year, Colombia became the third
largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt. Lawmakers expect
annual requests in subsequent years for anywhere from $300 million to $600
million.

"We're in it for the long haul," says Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), ranking
member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Assuming Plan Colombia eventually gets off the ground, U.S. officials and
leaders of Colombia's neighbors worry that success in the field may merely
push trouble across borders, as drug producers and guerrillas flee a
strengthened, U.S.-trained Colombian military. Pickering calls this the
balloon effect: "If you push in on one end, it's bound to bulge out in others."

The balloon effect is precisely how Colombia became the world's largest
cocaine producer during the 1990s. Successful efforts by Peru and Bolivia
to slash coca cultivation and drive out traffickers pushed problems over
the remote borders into Colombia.

For this reason, countries such as Peru, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina
are conspicuously unenthusiastic about Plan Colombia.

"Peru and Bolivia have achieved enormous successes in the last four years.
It's almost unbelievable," says Barry McCaffrey, Clinton's drug policy
adviser. "But they don't want to see it go back the other way. . . . They
have huge anxieties, and they are justified."

Rubens Barbosa, Brazil's ambassador to Washington, says his government has
no view on Plan Colombia because it is "a bilateral agreement between
Colombia and the United States."

"The reality is that countries would just as soon have this problem stay in
Colombia and have this problem no longer be theirs," said a senior Latin
American diplomat.

Mainstream Colombian opinion strongly supports the U.S. help.

"Many times over the past decades, Colombians have felt alone on bearing
the burden of the international drug war," President Pastrana said at the
Cartagena ceremony.

Others view the U.S. commitment in Colombia warily.

"The truth is the United States won't physically invade Colombia," former
Colombian Justice Minister Edmondo Lopez wrote in Bogota's El Espectador
newspaper. "The issue is another kind of invasion."

In this new style, former Brazilian President Jose Sarney wrote in another
opinion column, Americans "provide the means, the leaders, the material and
the strategy, and we assume the risk."