SPECIAL REPORT: REBEL HELD

IS THE FARC A DRUG CARTEL?

By Earning Millions From The Narcotics Trade, The Guerrillas Help Finance
Their War Effort.

MARANDUA, Colombia -- After a monthlong army dragnet in the Colombian
jungle that led to the capture of a Brazilian drug kingpin,
authorities were elated.

They pointed out that the smuggler, Luiz Fernando Da Costa, had
admitted working hand-in-glove with the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, to export tons of cocaine to Brazil every month.

Yet Colombian officials seemed at odds over what it all
meant.

As Da Costa was paraded before television cameras at a remote military
base in eastern Colombia, then-Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez
steadfastly refused to call the FARC a drug cartel and urged
Colombians to support peace talks with the rebel group.

By contrast, the army's top brass described Da Costa as a kind of
smoking gun, ironclad evidence that the guerrillas had mutated into
camouflage-clad dope peddlers.

"We have the proof," Colombian army chief Jorge Enrique Mora said.
"Anyway you slice it, the alliance between drug traffickers and the
FARC is obvious."

The debate over the guerrillas' ties to Colombia's booming
drug-trafficking industry has gone on for years. As far back as 1984,
Lewis Tambs, then the U.S. ambassador to Bogota, used the term
"narco-guerrillas" to describe the FARC.

But these days, the polemic is much more than an argument over
semantics.

If a consensus emerges that the FARC has evolved into an international
drug cartel -- meaning the rebels exist to get rich off the production
and exportation of drugs -- support for Colombia's 21/2-year-old peace
process would evaporate, analysts say. Pressure would mount on the
army to crush the guerrilla group.

"The consequences of accepting these postulates are clear," Eduardo
Pizarro, a Colombian academic who has written several books on the
FARC, said in a speech at the National Defense University in
Washington, D.C.

"Given that it is only viable to carry out negotiations with political
actors, the delinquent composition of the guerrillas would oblige the
state to give them treatment exclusively penal and military in nature."

What is clear is that drug profits have fueled the FARC's explosive
growth over the past decade and that Colombia provides most of the
cocaine and heroin sold on U.S. streets.

According to Alfredo Rangel, a Colombian military analyst, profits
from the drug trade now make up 48 percent of the rebels' income,
amounting to nearly $180 million annually. Others say the figure runs
higher.

The FARC, which has grown from 6,000 to 17,000 troops over the past
decade, also rakes in millions of dollars by extorting businesses and
kidnapping civilians.

Until 1982, rebel leaders considered the cultivation of drug crops
counter-revolutionary and prohibited them in many areas under their
control.

But as the crops became more lucrative, the FARC began levying a 10
percent tax on fields of coca and opium poppies, the raw materials for
cocaine and heroin, and collecting fees for every narcotics flight
leaving rebel-controlled zones.

Besides raising money for the war effort, the practice helped
consolidate control over the peasantry.

After the breakup of the Medellin and Cali drug rings in the early
1990s, the FARC's involvement in the narcotics trade grew. The
so-called "mini-cartels" that sprang up often turned to the rebels for
protection.

Now, says Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, "the FARC
is into narco-trafficking in a big way."

"There is no question that the FARC is involved in the internal
transportation and production of drugs. As for exportation, we are not
sure, but we think so," she says.

Patterson notes that individual rebels could be targeted by U.S. law
enforcement agents if it becomes clear they are involved in the export
of drugs to the United States.

FARC leaders, however, say the guerrilla organization plays no role in
cocaine production or drug smuggling inside or outside Colombia. They
say narcotics use among rebel troops is prohibited.

"We are not drug traffickers," says rebel spokesman Raul Reyes. "The
FARC is a guerrilla army of men and women who are fighting 24 hours a
day to change the country. The rest of what they say is lies."

Some observers view the growing tendency to paint the rebels as
narco-traffickers as part of a campaign to drum up support for U.S.
military assistance to Colombia.

Last year, the U.S. Congress approved a $1.3 billion package of mostly
military aid to help the Bogota government combat drug traffickers.
Critics note that much of the assistance is being used to target the
rebels.

"Calling the FARC narco-guerrillas justifies everything we are doing
in Colombia," says Bruce Bagley, a Colombia expert at the University
of Miami. "It's all rhetoric. You play fast and loose with the truth,
because it's convenient for policy purposes."

Still, according to U.S. and Colombian officials, evidence suggests
that the FARC has become a drug-trafficking organization.

Da Costa, for example, told investigators after his arrest last spring
that the rebels control nearly every facet of the drug trade in
Colombia's eastern jungles, according to Gen. Fernando Tapias, chief
of the nation's armed forces.

The rebels, Tapias says, helped Da Costa export more than 200 tons of
cocaine to Brazil during the past year, receiving $500 for each
kilogram of the drug and $15,000 for every narcotics flight that left
the area.

Jorge Visbal, head of the Colombian Ranchers Federation, maintains
that the guerrillas systematically stash their drug profits in foreign
bank accounts.

However, scant evidence of personal enrichment among FARC members has
emerged.

Rafael Pardo, a former Colombian defense minister, insists that the
FARC funnels most of its drug money into the war effort and,
therefore, remains a legitimate guerrilla organization.

Rebel leaders "are not living at Hilton hotels," adds Daniel
Garcia-Pena, a former Colombian peace commissioner. "If they were in
it for the money, why would they bother with all this Marxist-Leninist
rhetoric? Why would they live in the mountains and wake up at 5 a.m.
to march?"

Eduardo Gamarra, who heads the Latin America and Caribbean Center at
Florida International University in Miami, says Colombians of all
stripes have been stained by the illegal drug trade, including former
President Ernesto Samper, who won the 1994 election with the help of
$6 million from the Cali cartel.

The FARC, Gamarra says, is capitalizing on Colombia's status as the
world's leading producer of cocaine.

Drug income allowed the rebels to fight on as other insurgent groups
signed peace pacts or went down to defeat after the Soviet Union
collapsed, Garcia-Pena says.

Unlike Marxist guerrilla groups elsewhere, the FARC never depended on
Moscow or Havana for funding.

"The left in the rest of the democratic world has had to sit down and
say, 'Oh my God, this socialism thing didn't work out too well,'"
Garcia-Pena says. "The tragedy here is not so much that the FARC has
caved in, but that it has remained unaltered."