PLAN COLOMBIA FACES SCRUTINY

Bush, Pastrana To Hold First Meeting Tuesday

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Asked recently whether Colombia's myriad problems ever
gave him nightmares, President Andres Pastrana said he slept well. "It's
when I wake up that the nightmares start," he said.

But as Pastrana readies for his first meeting with President Bush on
Tuesday, he might be losing some sleep over a U.S. president and Congress
much different from the ones that sent him $1.3 billion last year in mostly
military aid for a crackdown on Colombia's narcotics industry.

Today, Washington is rife with doubts about the U.S. policy of interdicting
drug trafficking abroad, the stress on military aid to Bogota, the
Colombian security forces' ability to fight and their alleged links to
right-wing paramilitary killers.

Underlining Washington's interest in Colombia, now the third largest
recipient of U.S. aid behind Israel and Jordan, Pastrana will be only the
fourth head of government to meet with Bush, who has met with President
Vicente Fox of Mexico and prime ministers Jean Chretien of Canada and Tony
Blair of Great Britain.

Pastrana arrived Saturday in Washington to begin meetings with political
and business leaders before he sits down with the U.S. president.

Today he is scheduled to see Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans.

Plan Colombia, Pastrana's ambitious $7.5 billion plan to strengthen the
government, make peace with rebels and reduce cocaine and heroin production
by half in five years, is now widely perceived in Washington as being in
need of serious rethinking.

"This administration is going to take a hard look at the overall policy,
starting with Pastrana's visit," said Michael Shifter, an analyst with the
Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. "This is not going to be simply how
many coca fields were destroyed, but what's the real purpose of U.S. policy?"

Pastrana has himself spoken of a desire to refocus U.S. aid away from the
military side, condemned by neighboring countries that are afraid that a
squeeze here will force Colombia's war and drugs across their own borders.

"We have already said it: More than money, we need opportunities for our
exports in the U.S. market," the president told foreign businessmen last
week as he previewed some of the topics he will discuss with Bush.

Pastrana Wishes

He wants lower U.S. import duties on Colombian textiles and apparel, which
now generate 400,000 jobs in a nation with 20.5 percent unemployment,
saying that a good salary is the best way to keep Colombians from turning
into drug traffickers or guerrillas.

But whatever Pastrana says to Bush, it's clear that he would like a
continuation of the U.S. largess.

Penciled into the proposed U.S. fiscal 2002 budget is $400 million in
follow-on aid to the $1.3 billion approved last summer, a bit less than the
$500 million mentioned by some Colombian officials in recent weeks.

Most of the new money is earmarked for continuing the non-military parts of
the U.S. aid package, such as alternative-crop incentives for coca and
opium poppy farmers, judicial reforms and human rights protections.

But the new money, some of its congressional critics argue, would
effectively make the U.S. involvement in Colombia all but permanent.

"There's a lot of confusion about what the U.S. is trying to do there --
solve the drug problem, save democracy or defeat the FARC," Shifter said,
referring to the leftist guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Easing Restrictions

A Bush aide during the election campaign spoke of a possible easing of the
restrictions on U.S. aid to the Colombian military, now limited to
drug-fighting missions, and allowing its use for fighting the leftist
guerrillas.

Reps. Benjamin Gilman, R-NY, and Dan Burton, R-Ill, lead a group of
conservatives arguing that more U.S. aid should go to the Colombian
National Police, whose charge it is -- not the military's -- to fight drugs.

And human rights groups in Washington want to halt all aid to Colombia
until the military severs its alleged links with right-wing paramilitary
units accused of massacring thousands of suspected rebel sympathizers.

Shift In Focus

It is a situation ripe for shifting the focus of Plan Colombia without
changing its military component, said Arlene Tickner, Chicago-born director
of the Center for International Studies at the University of the Andes in
Bogota.

"Pastrana will try to stress social and economic issues in seeking to
'de-narcotize' relations with the U.S.," Tickner said.

"But neither the U.S. side nor the Colombian side see an alternative to the
military strategy, given the strength of the guerrillas and the paramilitaries."