US AWARE OF POSSIBLE COLOMBIA DRUG PROJECT SPILLOVER

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A top U.S. official said Monday the Clinton
administration plans to augment efforts to deal with the possibility that
Colombian drug traffickers will transfer their activities to neighboring
countries as Colombia develops more effective ways to crack down on the
narcotics trade.

The State Department's third ranking official, Thomas Pickering, said
attention to this issue will be a "centerpiece" of the administration's
counternarcotics assistance requests next year.

Pickering told a news conference that bipartisan support for the existing
$1.3 billion program, directed mainly at Colombia, ensures that the
counterdrug effort will continue regardless of who is elected.

"The issue of spillover is real," said Pickering, who spent two days in
Colombia last week, along with Gen. Barry McCaffrey, head of the White
House narcotics control office.

Pickering said drug operations have spilled into Colombia because highly
effective counterdrug operations in Peru and Bolivia forced traffickers to
relocate. As a result, production in Colombia has soared, he noted.

The U.S. goal, he said, is to strengthen countries where traffickers
already operate or that may be future targets. Among those are Venezuela,
Brazil and Panama, Pickering said, adding that that the spillover could
jeopardize the sharp reduction in drug trafficking in Peru and Bolivia.

The U.S. doesn't envision a regional anti-drug alliance among these
countries, but rather a series of bilateral assistance programs aimed at
strengthening their counterdrug capabilities, Pickering said.

The administration lost a key supporter recently when House International
Relations Committee chairman Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y., said officials made a
"major mistake" in shifting most counternarcotics assistance for Colombia
from the police to the military.

Gilman said the Colombian Army "is incapable" of controlling any of the
guerrilla- and coca-infested areas of southern Colombia now or anytime soon.

Pickering said the Colombian police continue to perform a major role. But,
he said, they can't carry out their mission without the additional security
protection of the military "as they go about destruction of laboratories,
manual and aerial spraying eradication of crops and interdiction of the
movement of crops."

Another critic, Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., plans to fly to Colombia on
Tuesday for an assessment of the administration strategy.

In an interview, Wellstone said he was concerned the administration's
counterdrug strategy in Colombia is becoming a counterinsurgency policy at
the same time, a reference to the powerful leftist guerrilla movement that
has been fighting for decades.

Wellstone said he wonders whether the two "have become merged, whether we
may be heading into the thick of the war there."

Rejecting that concern, Picking said U.S. aid is designed to support only
counternarcotics activities.

"We have so much to do in Colombia with the Colombians in that area that
the danger of slopping over into something that's purely counterinsurgency
is minimal for the next several years," he said.