COLOMBIA ATTACKS REBELS' DRUG PROFITS

The Colombian armed forces are for the first time having success with a new
policy aimed at undermining the country's warring factions by attacking
their source of income: Illegal drugs.

The Colombian military has been on the defensive for most of the last four
decades of civil conflict, as Marxist guerrilla armies have grown to over
20,000 fighters and right-wing paramilitaries to 8,000.

Between them they control up to half of Colombia and their coffers are full,
thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars earned every year from the drugs
trade.

But a new policy announced last year by General Fernando Tapias, the head of
the Colombian armed forces, is designed to undermine these illegal armies by
destroying drug crops and laboratories protected and sometimes run by
guerrillas or paramilitaries.

The plan is backed by the US with over $1bn worth of US military aid. In the
last week the military has announced that 30,000 hectares of coca, the raw
material for cocaine, had been fumigated as part of the world's most
ambitious aerial eradication programme.

Huge scale

Also in the last week there have been two military operations that have
destroyed drug rings of the guerrillas and the right-wing paramilitaries.

Operation Bolivar, in the province of the same name, saw troops of the
recently created Rapid Deployment Force move into a paramilitary stronghold
of the Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC).

The soldiers decommissioned a drug complex of industrial scale - some five
laboratories capable of processing more than a tonne of cocaine every week.
In Operation Black Cat, troops moving in helicopters and fast patrol boats
surprised 22 drug dealers in a base by the Brazilian border, where
guerrillas of the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, were
trading cocaine for arms.

Trafficker's wife captured

Among the seven Brazilians captured was Jacqueline Alcantara de Morais, the
wife of Brazil's most wanted drug trafficker.

The army seized over 22,800 weapons and $75,000 in cash during the raid. So
for the first time, the military - flush with US funds and more professional
soldiers than ever - has shown a marked offensive capability.

But analysts have cautioned people against believing there is any way the
military can destroy the illegal armies of the left and right - and have
stated categorically there is no military solution to Colombia's 37-year
civil conflict.

The price of coca base, the material refined into cocaine, has risen after
the military operation, but not for long.

And experts believe the flow of cocaine, and increasingly heroin, out of
Colombia will not be interrupted by the latest actions