US-FUNDED COLOMBIAN UNITS LINKED TO TERRORIST GROUP

US-funded Colombian antidrug battalions worked with a military brigade
accused of having links with an outlawed militia that Washington has
branded a terrorist organization, a human rights group charged yesterday.

Human Rights Watch said in a report that elite Colombian counternarcotics
battalions trained by the US military to fight drug trafficking in the
South American nation shared bases, intelligence, and logistical support
with the army's 24th Brigade during antidrug operations in the southern
Putumayo region in 1999 and in 2000.

The 24th Brigade, which Washington cut off from US aid and training in
October 1999 on suspicion of abuses, coordinated operations with right-wing
death squads fighting leftist rebels in Colombia's 37-year-old war, the
report said.

"We have found solid, compelling evidence that shows that antinarcotics
battalions that were created and trained by the US government have been
relying on logistic support and intelligence sharing with the 24th Brigade
in Putumayo," said Jose Vivanco, the group's executive director for the
Americas.

"The 24th Brigade has been excluded from US assistance precisely because of
their poor human rights record and close links to paramilitary
organizations," Vivanco said at a news conference in Bogota.

Citing evidence collected in 1999 and 2000, the Human Rights Watch report
accused some 24th Brigade officers of receiving regular payments from the
militia, the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, in return for their
cooperation.

It said the Brigade "regularly coordinated actions with paramilitaries and
allowed them to operate openly, and even establish one of their principal
bases within a short walk of an army installation."

The "close alliance," the report added, resulted in "extrajudicial
executions, forced disappearances, and death threats."

On Sept. 10, one day before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, the United States put the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia
- - known by its Spanish initials AUC - on a list of "terrorist organizations."

The 8,000-member AUC - a vigilante force that targets suspected leftist
collaborators - is blamed for some of the worst atrocities in a war that
has killed 40,000 people, mostly civilians, in the last decade.

The United States is spending nearly $1 billion to help Colombian President
Andres Pastrana's anticocaine offensive.

Washington has trained and equipped an elite 3,000-member Colombian
antidrug force to curb an annual flow of hundreds of tons of cocaine out of
the Andean nation, which is by far the world's biggest producer of the drug.

Human Rights Watch said the sharing of facilities and intelligence by the
antidrug battalions and the 24th Brigade was a "subversion" of the 1996
Leahy Provision, which bans the United States from providing assistance to
foreign security forces accused of human rights violations.

Vivanco called on Washington to conduct a careful and full investigation
into the matter and to make sure that all US military aid to Colombia is
"subject to strict conditions" of respect for human rights.