BROADER ROLE BY U.S. LIKELY IN COLOMBIA

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The United States is planning to expand its training
role in Colombia, instructing military units to fight drugs in parts of the
country where leftist guerrillas are becoming increasingly involved in
narcotics trafficking, the top U.S. official in the country said Wednesday.

So far, the U.S. has focused its training efforts on three special
counter-narcotics battalions that operate in southern Colombia, the source
of nearly half the cocaine sold in the United States.

But a plan under consideration by American Ambassador Anne W. Patterson
calls for the U.S. to begin training additional Colombian army units to
take down drug labs protected by leftist insurgents elsewhere in the
war-torn nation.

Under the plan, U.S. forces or private contractors would conduct the
training, embassy officials said.

Patterson said she envisioned a modest training regime, working with
perhaps one battalion at a time over the next several years. The plan would
have the added benefit of helping reform the Colombian army, which has a
long history of human rights abuses, she said.

"We can do a lot under the counter-narcotics rubric," Patterson said in
extensive remarks to a group of reporters Wednesday at her heavily guarded
residence in an upscale neighborhood of Bogota, the capital. "We think we
can do a lot to professionalize the army."

News of the training plan comes just after several members of the U.S.
House of Representatives expressed fears about deeper involvement in the
Colombian conflict during debate on military, social and economic aid
packages for Andean nations. The Senate will consider similar proposals today.

Opponents of current U.S. policy in Colombia said the plan would risk
drawing Washington deeper into Colombia's messy, four-decade internal war.

"We're definitely getting further into this," said Adam Isacson, a Colombia
expert with the Center for International Policy in Washington. "Not only
would there be more battalions and trainers, but they would be in new,
conflicted parts of the country."

Additional counter-narcotics troops could be used to help secure new
coca-growing areas protected or controlled by the leftist Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Colombia's largest rebel group, or by
right-wing paramilitary forces, whose ranks have soared in recent years.

In addition to allowing police safe entry to wipe out the coca crops, the
troops could have the additional effect of attacking a prime revenue source
for both the guerrillas and the paramilitary fighters, who have become
increasingly involved in the drug trade. Colombian police estimate that the
guerrillas make more than $500 million a year taxing and trafficking in drugs.

"The urgent issue is to take the money [earned from drugs] out of the hands
of the armed groups," Patterson said.

Part of the problem in Colombia is that military operations and recent
aerial surveys have detected extensive and previously unknown fields of
coca and opium poppies in rebel-held zones in the vast, mostly unpopulated
eastern plains of Colombia.

With more coca in more guerrilla-held zones, more troops with narcotics
training will be needed, embassy officials said.

"It's quite possible we've underestimated the coca in Colombia," Patterson
said. "Everywhere we look there is more coca than we expected. There's just
more out there than we thought."

Embassy officials said that the plan was only under consideration and that
the money was still not in hand. Although funds are available from current
State Department resources to support some aspects of the new training,
money to bring in new Special Forces trainers and for other large training
expenses would have to come from the Department of Defense budget now
pending in Congress.

In the past, it has cost about $20 million to train a battalion, excluding
costs for military hardware that may be needed, according to the Center for
International Policy.

Still, embassy officials do not anticipate strong objection to the new
training. In one form or another, the U.S. has been providing military
instruction to troops in Colombia for decades; the training ranges from
outboard motor repair to flying advanced helicopters.

"We don't think there is going to be a problem on the Hill with that. The
U.S. Congress would be notified if that plan goes forward," Patterson said.

The exact scope of the plan is under consideration. One embassy military
official recently told a visiting group of human rights workers that he
envisioned the U.S. training one battalion in every Colombian army brigade,
as well as supplying all of them with equipment.

Those battalions, the military official said, would be better able to
protect Colombian infrastructure such as highways and oil pipelines, which
are under constant attack by leftist groups.

"This is exactly the fear of mission creep that people have been having,"
said George Vickers, the executive director of the Washington Office on
Latin America, who spoke to the embassy military official last week.

That fear was a focus of discussion on the floor of the House on Tuesday
about whether the aid package was leading the U.S. into a quagmire similar
to the Central American conflicts of the 1980s, when the U.S. trained
troops to battle leftist guerrillas in places such as El Salvador.

In fact, the House explicitly voted down a White House request to lift
strict caps on the number of U.S. citizens and military officials who can
participate in operations in Colombia, citing mission creep as a concern.

Rep. John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat who worked out a deal to keep a
cap, said he worried that the embassy's new plan would lead the U.S. deeper
into Colombia's civil conflict.

"These are the kinds of developments that make it clear that we have to
monitor the activities between our government . . . and the rebels much
more carefully," Conyers said in a telephone interview. "What it sounds
like is that we may be in the process of erasing the line between the civil
war, the rebel activity and the counter-narcotics initiative. It's not
going to lead us in a good direction."

Patterson, however, stressed that U.S. training was devoted exclusively to
fighting drugs, not rebels. The three counter-narcotics battalions, for
instance, were instructed by Green Berets in how to seize a drug lab, avoid
firing at the workers inside and secure the scene for processing by police.

"The political stomach for going into the counterinsurgency business is
zero. It's not going to happen," Patterson said. "It's not an issue for
debate. It wasn't under the Clinton administration, it's not under the Bush
administration.

"When I do a briefing, I'm going to put up a sign: 'Colombia is not El
Salvador,' " she joked.