COLOMBIA TO ASK BUSH FOR ADDITIONAL FUNDS

BOGOTA, Colombia, Feb. 15 -- President Andres Pastrana said today that he
planned to seek a fresh infusion of U.S. financial assistance during his
first meeting with President Bush this month to spur economic development
in regions where U.S.-trained troops are destroying drug crops.

Pastrana said in an interview that the newly revived peace process with
Colombia's largest guerrilla group depended on an increase in such economic
assistance, perhaps as much as $500 million a year from the United States
alone. He said the money would be used to address high unemployment and
other economic obstacles that prompt Colombians to join the drug trade or
illegal armed groups for their livelihood.

Pastrana said his trip to Washington would be a way to introduce himself
and his country to the new administration at an important moment for his
anti-drug plan and the peace negotiations. The Bush administration has
inherited a two-year, $1.6 billion aid package that is designed to reduce
Colombia's role as the world's largest cocaine producer and deprive a
decades-old leftist insurgency of its chief revenue source.

Pastrana's words seemed calculated to refocus Washington's attention on
Colombia as a new administration faces a host of foreign policy questions.
By stressing non-military elements, Pastrana underlined his hope for a new
financial commitment to boost a development strategy he has often declared
key to the drug war's long-term success.

In addition to highlighting successes in the drug war -- much of which has
been the result of aerial fumigation, which has killed 65,000 acres of coca
crop in the southern province of Putumayo, the country's principal
coca-producing region -- Pastrana said he planned to make the case that the
United States must do more to help ensure that the drug trade did not resurge.

Pastrana said more resources must be committed to social development
programs that encouraged farmers to uproot lucrative drug crops for legal
ones. That strategy, along with other civilian programs such as human
rights and judicial reform, account for only 25 percent of the U.S. aid
package that forms the centerpiece of a multibillion-dollar anti-drug and
economic development program known as Plan Colombia. He said increasing
resources for small farmers was a key topic during his meeting with rebel
leader Manuel Marulanda last week that revived peace talks and for the
first time paved the way for international participation in the process.

"We are a poor country," Pastrana said in his office at the graceful
Colonial-era Casa de Narino, the presidential palace. "But we are spending
$1 billion a year of our money to keep drugs off the streets of Washington
and New York. We need more help. This is a long-term plan, maybe 15 to 20
years."

The United States is the largest market for Colombia's drugs. Former
president Bill Clinton, whom Pastrana remembered today as a staunch ally,
pushed through a package last year that included more than 50 transport
helicopters, military trainers and funds for development programs.

Pastrana, who was elected in 1998 on a peace platform, has argued that
depriving the illegal armed groups of drug profits will encourage them to
seek peace. Last week, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
agreed to rejoin talks with the government after a three-month lapse.
Pastrana said he believed the 18,000-member rebel army was beginning to
suffer financially because of Plan Colombia.

An 8,000-member privately funded paramilitary army that battles the FARC on
the same side as the army also is profiting from the drug trade. Human
rights groups have accused the Colombian armed forces of assisting the
paramilitary groups. But Pastrana pointed to the government's support for a
commission established with the FARC last week to study the paramilitary
question and a new investigative unit responsible for identifying the
group's financial patrons.

"The paramilitaries are not a problem between the government and the FARC,"
Pastrana said. "They are a problem facing the whole country. But they are
the result of the guerrillas. Once there is peace with the guerrillas, the
paramilitaries will end."

Pastrana said he had been trying to obtain a copy of "Traffic," the Academy
Award-nominated film about the global drug trade, to get a sense of the
popular U.S. perception of the drug war. But much of his concern today,
expressed with animation during a 45-minute interview, centered on the more
mundane aspects of how he intended to end his country's deep-seated drug trade.

He warned bluntly that without greater investment in drug-producing
regions, the drug trade would move more deeply into Colombia's jungle -- or
return in a few years. He said he hoped to lobby for more investment in
meetings with Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Trade Representative
Robert Zoellick and in his talks with Bush's national security team during
a visit that begins Feb. 25.

Unemployment here is hovering near 20 percent, and Pastrana said he needed
to create 350,000 new jobs to bring the rate down one percentage point. He
said government and FARC officials would soon tour European and Latin
America capitals to drum up foreign investment for rural areas that are the
primary arenas of the drug trade and civil war.