A WARY LOOK AT LIFE'S BATTLES IN COLOMBIA'S COCAINE BELT

AGUAN RIVER, Colombia - Deep in the jungle, laborers scurried along wooden
walkways through a sprawling cocaine factory. The acrid stench of chemicals
hung in the air as coca paste, a breadcrumb-like powder made from coca
leaves, was refined into snow-white cocaine at the rate of more than a ton
a week.

A heavy-set man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat barked out orders
as he placed a kilogram brick of cocaine to dry in a microwave oven before
it was hermetically sealed in plastic - ready for the long and profitable
journey to the United States or Europe.

Here in the guerrilla-controlled jungles of the Caguan River region of
Caqueta province in southern Colombia, peasants sell their coca paste to
drug dealers for around $780 per kilogram (2.2 pounds). By the time that
kilo has been refined, cut, and sold on the streets of New York, London, or
Paris, among other cities, it will be worth as much as $170,000, according
to estimates of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

As Colombia's cocaine and heroin output soars, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the rebel army that controls up to 40 percent
of the country, has been accused of jettisoning its Marxist ideology and
becoming little more than an international drug cartel.

Those charges, leveled by US and Colombian military and civilian
authorities, are the driving logic behind Washington's billion-dollar
package of mostly military aid designed to attack the drug trade in
rebel-held regions of the south.

If escalating rebel involvement in the drug trade is proven, some analysts
say it could open the door to providing wider US counterinsurgency aid,
rather than the present more limited antinarcotics assistance.

The drug-trafficking claims also threaten to scuttle the two-year peace
process between the rebels and the Colombian government. President Andres
Pastrana has said he will scrap the talks if the drug charges are
confirmed. Such a move probably would trigger a surge in the 37-year war.

This corner of Caqueta province, like parts of neighboring Putumayo
province, is one of the biggest cocaine-producing regions in the world. But
if the government is correct about the growing rebel role in the drug
trade, there is little evidence of it here.

The rebel army is the undisputed master of the lower Caguan region. But the
secret laboratory was not ringed by guerrillas nor staffed by a rebel work
force, which government officials suggest is routine. There was not a gun
in sight, and most of the 50 or so workers questioned said they were
peasant laborers.

''As long as we pay our taxes, the guerrillas leave us in peace. They don't
even come round here,'' said a lab foreman, who gave his name as Elver
Gomez, 42. He rejected suggestions that the rebels guard drug complexes
like his.

''This is a very risky business,'' he said. ''But as long as there's hunger
in this country, this trade will not stop.'' The complex, built of wood and
stacked high with steel drums of chemicals, belongs to a cocaine capo from
Caucasia, in northwest Antioquia province, he said.

The lab is in a region that is firmly in the sights of the US-backed ''Plan
Colombia'' antidrug offensive that was launched in mid-December. There have
been a few aerial spraying sorties to kill coca plants, but the Colombian
Army's elite counternarcotics battalions, trained by US Green Berets, have
not yet seen action here.

For the time being, the drug trade continues uninterrupted.

On a recent weekend, peasants lined up outside a wooden shack on the
riverbank clutching small bags of coca paste.

Inside, a set of scales rattled, and a drug dealer burned a small pile of
coca paste on a spoon to test its purity. He pulled a stack of 20,000 peso
notes (each one worth about $10) from under a poncho and handed it to a
peasant. The peasant received $780 for his kilo of powder, the minimum
price decreed by the rebel army to ensure what they say is a fair deal for
growers.