REBELS LINKED TO DRUG TRADE BY ARRESTS IN COLOMBIA

RIO DE JANEIRO, March 3 -- The capture in Colombia of the chief
lieutenant and a common-law wife of Brazil's most notorious drug
trafficker has exposed what authorities are describing as a flourishing
guns-for-cocaine network run with Colombia's rebels.

The two, Ney Machado and Jacqueline Alcantara de Morais, were
apprehended with four other Brazilians in a counternarcotics operation
that the Colombian military began on Feb. 11 in the province of Guainia,
which borders Brazil and is a stronghold of the rebel group called the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Both are wanted in
Brazil on drug-trafficking charges, and the Brazilian government has
asked for their extradition.

Notebooks were captured with Ms. de Morais that, Colombian and Brazilian
authorities say, document a recent transaction in which the rebels
received more than 500 rifles and machine guns and 2,250 pistols and
revolvers as well as ammunition and explosives in exchange for a
shipment of cocaine.

She was also carrying a signed photograph of Luiz Fernando da Costa,
boss of the Brazilian drug ring, that authorities say she was using as a
passport in the rebel zone.

The arrests and the seizures of the documents, which also referred to
money laundering activities, are significant because both the rebel
group and its supporters in the United States and Western Europe say the
rebels are not directly or actively involved in drug trafficking. The
group's spokesmen have repeatedly maintained that the group merely
"taxes" coca growers and that it welcomes official efforts to shift
peasants away from coca cultivation.

The arrest of the Brazilians, however, bolsters the longstanding
contention of Colombian military and American counternarcotics officials
that the Marxist guerrillas are involved in every phase of the cocaine
trade, from cultivation to distribution.

"This operation clearly demonstrates the ties between drug traffickers
and the FARC," Col. Alejandro Navas of the Colombian armed forces told
reporters last week.

President Andres Pastrana of Colombia has been reluctant to make such
accusations, however, fearing that they could damage the peace
negotiations with the rebels that his government began in November 1998.
As a gesture of good faith, he granted the guerrillas control of a
Switzerland-sized area, which American and Colombian military officials
say is now used to process cocaine and hold kidnapping victims hostage
and as a depository for weapons and chemicals.

Since January of last year, the Colombian Air Force has destroyed at
least half a dozen planes with Brazilian registration after they landed
in guerrilla-controlled territory outside the formal demilitarized zone
with what authorities say were shipments of arms.

But Brazilian vessels are also known to sail up the Rio Negro, a
tributary of the Amazon that extends into Colombia, with arms and
chemicals and to return with cocaine.

A recent Brazilian congressional investigation designated Mr. da Costa,
better known here by the nickname Fernandinho Beira-Mar, or Little
Freddie Seashore, in honor of the oceanside slum neighborhood where he
was raised, as the country's most dangerous drug trafficker. Mr. da
Costa was twice convicted and jailed in 1996, but escaped to Paraguay
nine months later and is said by Brazilian authorities to have flown to
the rebel-controlled territory last April.

The Brazilian police say that Mr. da Costa, operating through
associates, remains the leading supplier of cocaine here. His
trafficking organization is heavily armed, and, according to the police,
has easy access to large stocks of weapons of all sorts that have either
been smuggled from Paraguay or bought in the United States or on the
local market.

Colombian and Brazilian authorities say Mr. da Costa is now under the
protection of Tomas Molina Caracas, commander of the rebel group's 16th
Front, which operates in two provinces bordering Brazil. Mr. Molina is
said by American and Colombian officials to be one of the group's chief
fund-raisers, and was cited by Peruvian authorities last year as the
recipient of 10,000 machine guns that disappeared en route from Jordan
to the Peruvian Army.

The operation in which the Brazilians were arrested has focused on the
area around Barrancominas, a village less than 120 miles from Brazil
that Mr. Molina has used as a base of operations in the past.

In commando-style raids there, Colombian troops have found airstrips,
military encampments, processing laboratories and some 25,000 acres of
coca fields, which they say were capable of producing two tons of
cocaine a week.