COLOMBIAN CANDIDATE QUESTIONS PLAN

BOGOTA, Colombia -- A U.S.-backed program for aerially eradicating drug
crops here has failed, a front-running Colombian presidential candidate
said Sunday, just days before the Bush administration's first high-level visit.

"Today there is more cocaine being produced, more trafficking, more
traffickers and larger areas under cultivation," Horacio Serpa, a former
interior minister who is leading polls ahead of May's elections, wrote in
an editorial in Bogota's Cambio news magazine.

"New and alternative formulas are needed along with a recognition that the
(counter-drug) policies applied to date have been a failure," wrote Serpa,
a member of the opposition Liberal Party.

Elsewhere Sunday, the army announced that U.S.-trained counterdrug troops
seized a jungle refinery where leftist guerrillas were allegedly making
gasoline used to process cocaine. It was the first such report of a rebel
refinery.

The spraying of cocaine and heroin-producing crops and U.S. troop training
are part of a $1.3 billion drug-fighting program approved under the Clinton
administration. That program is reportedly undergoing a review.

Top State Department, White House and Pentagon officials are scheduled to
arrive Wednesday to discuss future U.S. support for the drug war with
President Andres Pastrana's administration. Secretary of State Colin Powell
is also considering a stop here next month, officials have said.

The visits come as U.S. policy in the world's leading cocaine- producing
nation is being questioned from many angles.

Environmentalists say the spraying is toxic and pushes desperate farmers to
cut down more virgin Amazon forest. Peasant farmers say the spraying is
killing food crops as well as coca and opium poppies -- and making their
families ill.

U.S. officials insist the spraying is safe and that only large-scale coca
plantations run by drug traffickers are targeted. They stress that
Washington is also providing cash assistance to small farmers who agree to
voluntarily eradicate their drug plots.

But in his column, Serpa claimed there has been "indiscriminate fumigation"
of peasant drug plots, and that accords with small farmers are not working.
He called for an "urgent evaluation" of the strategy.

"After spraying more than 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) of coca, the
area under cultivation is three times larger than it was five year ago,"
Serpa wrote.

He said Colombia should renegotiate its counterdrug aid from Washington,
while continuing only to spray large-scale coca plantations following
environmental impact studies and with international auditing.

Some voices in Washington are reportedly urging the Bush administration to
turn U.S. aid -- currently earmarked for counterdrug operations alone --
against the country's guerrillas. Critics worry that could draw the United
States directly into Colombia's brutal 37- year civil conflict.

Underscoring the rebel links to the drug trade, the army said the refinery
seized by its troops near the town of Puerto Asis was an abandoned
government installation capable of making 2,000 gallons of gasoline a day
for cocaine processing. Coca farmers use gasoline and other chemicals to
convert coca leaves into semi-processed cocaine.

The army said six fighters from the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, were killed by members of a U.S.-trained brigade while
defending the refinery in southern Putumayo State -- Colombia's main
cocaine-producing province along the border with Ecuador.

The report could indicate the FARC is having to compensate for government
success in stopping drug-making chemicals from entering Putumayo along its
labyrinth of rivers.