U.S. AIDS ARMY IN COLOMBIA

Expanding role: Military support blurs line between drug, guerrilla wars.

WASHINGTON -- Concerned about the growing power of leftist rebels in
Colombia, the Clinton administration is expanding its support for
government forces fighting in the hemisphere's longest-running guerrilla
war.

U.S. officials say the aid is aimed at stanching the flow of illegal drugs
from Colombia, and will target the insurgents only where they protect the
production of heroin and cocaine. The officials say they have no intention
of getting mired in Colombia's internal conflict.

But government documents and interviews with dozens of officials here
indicate that the separation Washington has tried to make between those two
campaigns -- one against drug trafficking, the other against the guerrillas
- -- is increasingly breaking down.

Officials say more U.S. training and equipment are going to shore up basic
deficiencies in the tactics, mobility and firepower of the Colombian
military, rather than for operations directed at the drug trade. Faced with
a string of rebel victories, including a devastating ambush of Colombian
troops in March, U.S. generals have embarked on an ambitious effort to help
reorganize the Colombian army.

According to senior U.S. officials, the Clinton administration has also
been considering options that officials said include additional military
training, provision of more sophisticated helicopters and materiel, and
creation of a high-tech intelligence center that would be run by U.S.
officials on Colombian soil.

The limits of U.S. involvement in Colombia are still largely set by the
constraints on military, intelligence and foreign-aid spending in the
aftermath of the Cold War. Compared with the billions of dollars poured
into Central America during the 1980s, the hundred million or so dollars
the United States now spends annually on Colombia remains relatively modest.

Greater threat

Yet administration officials have begun to describe Colombia as another
grave strategic risk. If the rebels and the drug traffickers bond more
closely, the officials warn, both could become greater threats to the
region. Colombia's troubles could spill across its borders toward the
Venezuelan oil fields, the United States' chief source of imported
petroleum, or into Panama, home to the vital Panama Canal.

Colombia's stability, they contend, is a responsibility from which the
United States cannot run.

``This is not a one-night stand,'' said the commander of U.S. military
forces in Latin America and the Caribbean, Gen. Charles Wilhelm. ``This is
a marriage for life.''

Such admonitions come at an especially delicate political moment in
Colombia, where a new president will be chosen in a runoff election on June
21.

While Washington's concerns about the country have risen over the past
year, Colombian leaders were cutting their military spending and suggesting
a new willingness to negotiate with the insurgents. Business groups are
pressing for peace talks with the rebels, and last month thousands of
Colombians rallied against the violence. Both the candidates who emerged
from the first round of presidential elections on Sunday have said they
would make new efforts to reach a settlement.

The evolving U.S. policy is also the subject of a growing debate, one
almost as sharp in the administration as outside it.

At one end are officials who cannot consider the Colombia plans without
seeing Central American ghosts. They point to cases in which more than a
dozen Colombian army units given anti-drug training by the United States
were later linked to serious human-rights violations in the fight against
the rebels.

At the other end are officials who believe that even the most ambitious
policy proposals are inadequate, and that whatever the final administration
plan, political sensitivities will ensure that it falls well short of
Colombia's needs.

More quietly, other voices in the government are challenging important
arguments at the source of Washington's alarm.

46or instance, administration officials have argued that a boom in the
cultivation of coca in southern Colombia has brought the guerrillas a
dangerous windfall. They say the rebels, by in effect renting their forces
to protect those who grow coca and refine cocaine, have been able to pay
for new recruits, better weapons and more aggressive strikes against the
government.

But intelligence officials have said that evidence of a major change in the
insurgents' relationship with the traffickers is scant, and that the impact
of Colombia's coca boom on the availability of drugs in the United States
is probably not great.

Since the end of the Cold War and the waning of civil conflicts elsewhere,
Colombia has emerged as the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the
Western hemisphere.

The aid began to rise in 1990, with the Bush administration's ``Andean
strategy,'' a five-year, $2.2 billion plan to try to stop the cocaine
plague at its source.

U.S. officials believed that with global security threats shifting after
the Soviet Union's demise, soldiers and intelligence agents could find a
worthy new adversary in the bosses of Colombia's cocaine trade. And as such
efforts gathered momentum in the early 1990s, they focused largely on the
bosses themselves.

The expanding U.S. role also coincided with a turn in the region's oldest
guerrilla war.

Starting in 1990, several guerrilla groups agreed finally to lay down their
arms. Some 7,000 more, mostly of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (known by its initials in Spanish as the FARC) and the National
Liberation Army, rejected the peace.

CE9sar Gaviria, then Colombia's president, attacked the holdouts as
``deranged fanatics who have not read in the newspapers the sorry story of
the end of communist totalitarianism.'' Confident that history was on his
side, he doubled military spending and increased the size and authority of
the armed forces.

The guerrillas and their supporters also came under new assault by
right-wing paramilitary forces that often worked with government troops. In
many cases, drug traffickers have also armed the paramilitaries against the
insurgents; victims of the squads have included thousands of peasants and
unionists, and hundreds of the rebels who gave up their guns.

Kidnappings, extortion

By the mid-1990s, the remaining insurgents had dug in militarily and begun
shoring up their finances. They stepped up ransom kidnappings, extortion
and the protection of coca fields, jungle laboratories and clandestine
airstrips.

The collaboration of some guerrilla fronts with the drug trade became the
central plank of government propaganda campaigns against them. It also
began to emerge as a justification for the difficulty that officials had in
keeping U.S. aid from going to Colombian units that fought mainly against
the insurgents.

``They're guarding drugs, they're moving drugs, they're growing drugs,''
the White House drug-policy director, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, said in 1996,
adding that he was ``uneasy'' with U.S. efforts to restrict Colombia's use
of advanced UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters that it was then buying from the
United States. ``They're a narco-guerrilla force, period.''

Beginning in 1994, Congress required the Clinton administration to verify
that U.S. military aid would go only to troops that ``primarily'' carried
out anti-drug operations. In March 1996, the administration reacted to
evidence that President Ernesto Samper had taken money from Cali
traffickers, by cutting off almost all U.S. aid to Colombia except what was
designated to fight drugs, a step known as decertification.

Refusal to `disengage'

Yet according to many officials, the Pentagon quietly distinguished itself
by finding creative ways around the restrictions. ``We refused to
disengage,'' said a Defense official who spoke on the condition that he not
be identified.

Overall, U.S. anti-drug aid granted to the Colombian military and police
rose from $28.8 million in 1995 to at least $95.9 million in 1997,
according to State Department figures. Military sales to Colombia jumped
from $21.9 million to $75 million over the same period, largely on the
Colombian army's purchase of the six Black Hawks.

Unlike the early stages of the civil war in El Salvador, when whole
battalions were flown to U.S. bases for training, the Pentagon's efforts to
overhaul Colombian forces have been conducted mainly in Colombia by small
teams of special-forces trainers.

Administration officials describe the curriculum as heavy doses of
anti-drug tactics with some counterterrorism, hostage rescue and medical
training thrown in. But military officials familiar with the programs said
they concentrate less on weak links in the cocaine trade than on
shortcomings of the Colombian army.

One instance of the vague definition of ``counter drug'' preparation are
the courses that U.S. Army trainers, drawn largely from the 7th Special
46orces Group at Fort Bragg, N.C., often lead in the Pentagon's Joint
Combined Exchange Training, or J-Cet program.

Working with Colombian units, Defense Department officials said, the teams
teach skills as basic as marksmanship and jungle maneuvers. At the end of a
course, the trainers will typically plan a ``graduation'' attack on the
guerrillas and then wait at their base while the students carry it out.

Another program, Joint Planning Assistance and Training, often involves the
preparation of psychological operations against guerrillas and drug
traffickers. Still other teams analyze military intelligence information to
help the Colombian army to plan its operations.

U.S. officials do not deny that many of the Colombian units they train go
back into battle against the rebels. The Colombian army has no forces
dedicated entirely to fighting drugs, and the use of U.S.-trained troops is
left up to Colombian commanders.

By 1994, both the General Accounting Office and the Defense Department had
found that the light-infantry skills taught in anti-drug training were
easily adapted to fighting the rebels. When the U.S. Embassy in BogotE1
reviewed the matter in 1994, officials said they discovered that anti-drug
aid had gone to seven Colombian brigades and seven battalions that had been
implicated in abuses or linked to right-wing paramilitary groups that had
killed civilians.

Conditions subsequently imposed by Congress sought to cut off aid to any
Colombian units involved in human-rights violations. But some U.S.-trained
forces have continued to be accused of abuses, and Colombian prosecutors
are investigating reports that a massacre of suspected rebel sympathizers
last year around the southern village of Mapiripan was carried out by a
paramilitary squad flown into the nearby military air field at San JosE9
de Guaviare, the staging base for U.S.-supported anti-drug operations in
the region.

Intelligence officials said there was now some guerrilla activity in
perhaps 700 of the country's 1,071 municipalities. And they estimate the
insurgents' strength at as many as 18,000 combatants -- 10,000 or 11,000 in
the FARC, 7,000 in the National Liberation Army -- up from as few as 8,000
fighters six years ago.