COLOMBIAN ARMY WARNS REBELS OF DEPORTATION TO U.S.

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombian military officials on Wednesday
accused the country's top rebel force of controlling the Andean nation's
massive drug trade and warned rebel leaders they faced deportation to the
United States.

The comments by Colombia's army chief and defense minister are believed to
be the armed forces' strongest denunciation yet of alleged large-scale drug
dealing by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

"We know that the FARC grow coca, that they deal with chemical precursors,
they own drug laboratories and airstrips, that no drug trafficker operates
without their permission and that they sell (cocaine) to international
cocaine cartels," Army chief Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora told a news conference.

"All this has been proved. All we need now is to find these FARC bandits
selling cocaine in the streets of New York City."

U.S. and Colombian officials have said the 17,000-member FARC makes
millions of dollars every year in drug profits -- financing a 37-year-old
war which has killed nearly 40,000 civilians in the last decade.

President Andres Pastrana, who is engaged in two-year peace talks with the
FARC, a left-leaning peasants' army, has accused it of profiting from vast
coca plantations in rebel-held areas in southern Colombia, but has declined
to brand the rebels a "drug cartel."

Colombia is the world's No. 1 cocaine producer, exporting an average of 500
tons every year, mostly to the United States. The FARC, which admits
receivingprotection money from drug producers, has denied it is involved in
large-scale drug trafficking.

On Wednesday, Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez warned FARC rebels
they could be deported to the United States to face charges of drug
trafficking.

"If somebody is involved in drug trafficking he is a drug trafficker and he
faces being extradited (to the United States). If, as a defense, the drug
trafficker says he is a guerrilla member, that is no excuse," Ramirez told
a news conference.

In 1997, Colombia's Congress passed a law that allows Bogota to extradite
Colombian drug traffickers to the United States.

In an interview posted on the rebels' Web site on Wednesday, FARC spokesman
Carlos Antonio Lozada said accusations implicating the FARC in drug
trafficking were intended "to prepare the ground for growing involvement of
U.S. military advisers'' in Colombia.

The United States has earmarked $1 billion in mostly military aid to stamp
out the cocaine industry in Colombia -- an aid the FARC has criticized as
"Yanqui imperialism."