BUSH REJECTS JOINING COLOMBIA PEACE TALKS WITH MARXIST REBELS

WASHINGTON -- President Bush assured Colombian President Andres Pastrana
yesterday that the United States would push ahead in its war on drugs, but
refused his request to join peace talks with Marxist guerrillas who are
financed by the drug trade.

After a 45-minute meeting in the Oval Office, Bush praised Pastrana for his
efforts to fight drug trafficking and his steps to improve the economy and
bring peace to Colombia.

"President Pastrana is a courageous leader who's dealing with very
difficult problems," Bush said.

"I explained to the president that we're fully aware of the narcotics that
are manufactured in his country, but I also told him that many of them
wouldn't be manufactured if our nation didn't use them. And we've got to
work together to not only help Colombia, but help our own country," he said.

In Bogota yesterday, police said Colombian and U.S. agents smashed a drug
ring that smuggled up to a ton of heroin every year into the United States.
Police arrested 30 people in the two countries.

But Bush rejected a request by Pastrana to reconsider the U.S. policy of
not talking with the rebels as a way of helping advance Colombia's
struggling peace process.

Pastrana revived peace talks this month with the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia, or FARC, in an effort to end a 37-year conflict that has
killed 35,000 people in the past decade alone. Last week, the FARC and
Pastrana's government invited the United States and Cuba to join a group of
nations in another round of peace talks in March.

But Bush, who visited Mexican President Vicente Fox earlier this month and
has said he wants to improve relations in the hemisphere, said the United
States would not participate.

"This is an issue that the Colombian people and the Colombian president can
deal with," he said.

The U.S. government, which held tentative talks with the FARC in 1998, has
refused to renew ties with the guerrillas until they account for the 1999
murder of three Americans who were killed while working with natives in
Colombia.

Under former President Clinton, the United States committed almost $1.3
billion in mostly military aid for Pastrana's "Plan Colombia" -- a plan to
destroy coca fields in the world's largest cocaine producer.

Pastrana's plan aims to destroy the drug market while pouring money into
social resources to boost the economy.

Critics of the U.S. aid, which includes the delivery of 14 Black Hawk
helicopters to deploy Colombian drug battalions, say it could end up
dragging the United States into a war.

The U.S. military has between 100 and 300 personnel in Colombia training
the military in counter-narcotics methods.