COLOMBIAN TROOPS MOBILIZE TO FIGHT COCAINE TRAFFICKERS

LARANDIA ARMY BASE, Colombia -- The men in thatched huts, lined with a
dozen microwave ovens drying coca leaves, feigned the business of making
cocaine.

Outside, in a silent tightening circle, 45 select Colombian army students
staging a practice drug bust approached the huts from the ridge above a creek.

"This is the most crucial moment for us," said Gen. Mario Montoya, head of
Colombia's Joint Task Force South, the chief recipient of an enormous U.S.
aid package.

"They are within 20 meters of us now. And you cannot see them or hear them."

Suddenly, a shout from the trees: "We are the anti-narcotics battalion! You
are completely surrounded!"

One of two people acting as armed guards, dressed in the rubber boots and
olive uniform of leftist guerrillas, opened fire with blanks.

And a column of men, faces streaked with green and black paint, rushed
toward the collection of huts arranged in a likeness of the real cocaine
processing labs that fill these southern jungles.

Once the area had been secured, a member of Colombia's attorney general's
office reviewed the "captured" drug traffickers, along with plastic bags
full of ersatz cocaine.

Soldiers hurried away a "wounded" man to a waiting helicopter.

"There were some problems," Montoya said after the exercise as a host of
U.S. officers in green berets and floppy camouflage hats looked on.

"You don't group the captured together. And there were too many people
inside the objective. Some should have stayed on the periphery. ... But
this is as realistic as it gets."

This staged "takedown" of a cocaine lab was part of a lesson plan designed
by the U.S. Army 7th Special Forces Group training Colombia's new anti-drug
battalions in the art of war on this vast base 240 miles south of Bogota.

The class is almost over for the current batch of 728 soldiers, who this
month will become the final battalion to finish the course and enter the
intensifying fight against Colombia's assorted illegal armed groups that
dominate the drug trade in the south.

Taken together, the 3,000 members of the four-battalion anti-drug brigade
are the human spearhead of Plan Colombia, supported by a $1.3 billion U.S.
aid package designed to attack a drug trade here that accounts for almost
90 percent of the world's cocaine supply.

Since December, the first two field battalions totaling 1,500 men have been
used mainly as ground support for an intensive aerial herbicide spraying
campaign over two southern provinces.

A handful of soldiers have been killed, including one Wednesday night in a
clash that also left seven guerrillas dead.

Colombian officials say that more than 60,000 acres of coca, perhaps as
much as a fifth of the country's crop, have been destroyed by the spraying
campaign that relies on U.S. intelligence for targeting.

With the last battalion's graduation and the impending arrival of
U.S.-donated Black Hawk helicopters, the drug war here is about to pick up
pace and shift slightly in focus to a more ground-oriented assault on the
labs that turn leaves into drugs, bringing the soldiers into closer contact
with the armed groups that guard them.

"They realized they had a unique opportunity to spray a lot of coca at one
time," said a U.S. military official here, explaining why the plan's most
controversial element has been the chief strategy so far.

To prepare for the social investment portion of Plan Colombia -- an effort
to help farmers abandon coca growing and turn to legal crops -- the
official said the Colombian military must start securing coca zones from
the armed groups that control them.

Most of the world's cocaine originates here in southern Colombia as coca
leaf; it ends up on the streets of U.S. cities in its processed powder form.

Much of the money from the sale of the drug fuels Colombia's civil
conflict, as armed groups of both the left and right profit by protecting
the coca fields, clandestine airstrips and processing labs.

Their role blurs the distinction U.S. policy makers have tried to make
between fighting drugs and fighting Colombia's decades-old leftist insurgency.

This base of rolling pastures and jungle-covered knolls was once the
hacienda of a powerful local farmer, killed decades ago by the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country's largest
rebel group.

It sits on more than 20,000 acres 65 miles southwest of San Vicente del
Caguan, the main city within a demilitarized zone that President Andres
Pastrana turned over to the FARC two years ago for peace talks.

Since April 1999, the base has served as the main U.S. training center for
Colombia's anti-drug battalions. Almost 90 U.S. military advisers, about
half of them trainers, work here with the Colombian troops.

The course includes topics from escaping a jungle ambush to administering
first aid and maintaining a tricky battlefield respect for human rights.

The 7th Special Forces Group, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., added human rights
training to the curriculum after some of its former clients -- the Atlacatl
Battalion in El Salvador, for example -- were accused of massive rights
violations during the 1980s.

Now human rights training, mostly taught through hypothetical scenarios and
role-playing, is woven into just about every element of the 18-week course.

To be selected, a soldier must be vetted by the U.S. Embassy to ensure that
he has a clean service record.

"We are teaching the value of human life here," Montoya said. "These are
narco-traffickers, but they are not enemies. When a man surrenders, he
surrenders."