COLOMBIA SAYS IT NEEDS MORE U.S. ANTI-DRUG AID

Bogota, Colombia -- President Andres Pastrana said yesterday that he plans
to seek a new infusion of U.S. financial assistance this month during his
first meeting with President Bush, to help spur economic development in
regions where U.S.- trained troops are destroying drug crops.

He said the newly revived peace process with Colombia's largest guerrilla
group depends on an increase in such economic assistance, perhaps as much
as $500 million annually from the United States alone. The money would be
used to address high unemployment and other economic obstacles that prompt
Colombians to join the drug trade or illegal armed groups for their
livelihood, he said.

Pastrana said his trip to Washington is a way to introduce himself and his
country to the new administration at an important moment for his anti-drug
plan and the peace negotiations. The Bush administration has inherited a
three-year, $1.3 billion aid package for Colombia that is designed to
reduce Colombia's role as the world's largest cocaine production center and
deprive a decades-old leftist insurgency of its chief revenue source.

Pastrana said he also plans to make the case that the United States must do
more to help ensure that the drug trade, if it can be diminished, does not
resurge.

Much of Colombia's success so far has been the result of aerial fumigation,
which has killed an estimated 65,000 acres of coca crops in the southern
province of Putumayo, the country's principal coca-producing region.

But Pastrana said more resources must be committed to social-development
programs that encourage farmers to uproot lucrative drug crops for legal
ones, a strategy that accounts for only 25 percent of the $1.3 billion in
U.S. aid.