COLOMBIAN REBELS QUESTION U.S. MOTIVES

FARC Says U.S. Plan To Protect An Oil Pipeline Is Really About Military
Intervention.

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The Bush administration's plan to help Colombia protect
an oil pipeline from guerrilla attacks proves that Washington wants to
intervene militarily in this country's civil war, a rebel leader said
Wednesday.

"The mask has been taken off," rebel commander Simon Trinidad said in a
telephone interview from a southern stronghold of the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, known as FARC.

Bush administration officials announced plans Tuesday to train and arm
Colombian troops to protect a key oil pipeline that has been a frequent
target of guerrilla attacks.

The move, which faces debate in the U.S. Congress, marks a departure from a
policy that had previously limited military aid to Colombia to wiping out
drug crops controlled by the rebels and their paramilitary foes.

FARC has long opposed Washington's anti-drug aid, which has provided for
the training of anti-narcotics troops by U.S. special forces, dozens of
combat helicopters and fumigation planes. The aid is part of an anti-drug
initiative called Plan Colombia.

"From the beginning, we said that Plan Colombia was a counterinsurgency
plan," Trinidad said. "No one believed the story that it was a plan against
drug trafficking. Now the mask has been taken off."

Rather than increase aid to the Colombian military, Trinidad said, U.S.
military personnel should be withdrawn from the country.

"They are here to pursue a war against our own people, and they have taught
the military the doctrine of ... state terrorism," he said by telephone
from Los Pozos, inside a safe haven that President Andres Pastrana granted
to the rebels three years ago.

The plan outlined Tuesday calls for Washington to provide $98 million to
train and equip Colombian troops to protect the nearly 500-mile Cano-Limon
oil pipeline, which ferries oil to the Caribbean coast for Los
Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum and other companies.

Colombia's state oil company, Ecopetrol, said rebel sabotage of oil
operations cost 24 million barrels in lost crude production last year.
Colombia is the 10th-biggest supplier of oil to the United States.

"We are committed to help Colombians create a Colombia that is a peaceful,
prosperous, drug-free and terror-free democracy," the U.S. delegation
leader, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, said Tuesday during a visit
to Colombia.

Grossman headed a delegation to Colombia this week. While he returned to
Washington on Wednesday, Randy Beers, assistant secretary of state for
counternarcotics and law enforcement, traveled to Arauca state, where the
pipeline is located, embassy officials said.

Under restrictions set by Congress, no more than 400 U.S. military
personnel can be stationed in Colombia at one time.

They have been deployed as part of Washington's attempts to undercut rebel
drug profits to stem the flow of cocaine and heroin to the United States,
U.S. officials say.

However, the tightening U.S. relations with Colombia also further link
Washington to a military with a weak human-rights record.

Colombia's war has ground on into its 38th year, even as President Andres
Pastrana's administration pursues peace talks with the 16,000- strong FARC.

The government and the rebels appeared light-years away Wednesday from
setting cease-fire terms by April 7, as the warring sides had pledged to do
last month.