ANTI-DRUG ARMY UNITS GRADUATE

LARANDIA ARMY BASE, Colombia - Helicopters thunder past a reviewing stand
and out over a river snaking through the world's cocaine heartland. Rows of
grim-faced troops trained by U.S. Green Berets snap to attention. Martial
music plays, diplomas are presented, and a Roman Catholic priest sprinkles
holy water on the soldiers, the vanguard of a U.S-backed military push to
wipe out cocaine.

Graduation day in the war on drugs.

The soldiers honored Friday at this sprawling army base in Colombia's
rolling southern plains - a 620-man battalion prepared by U.S. special
forces troops based at Fort Bragg, N.C. - have their work cut out for them.

Under the offensive backed by a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package, the battalion
will venture out any day now into jungles and Amazonian tributaries teeming
with heavily armed guerrillas. Major operations are expected to get under
way by January at the latest.

The 15,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, is deeply
involved in the cocaine trade, yielding the rebels mounds of cash - and
making them a key target for U.S. and Colombian efforts to stamp out the
narcotics industry.

The elite, U.S.-trained battalions, coordinating with police and
prosecutors, aim to seize and destroy coca fields and laboratories, arrest
suspects who give themselves up, and attack anyone who fights back, whether
they are insurgents or common criminals.

``The bottom line is this,'' said the commander of U.S. military operations
in Latin America, Gen. Peter Pace, who attended the ceremony at Larandia,
located about 235 miles southwest of Bogota. ``If that person, male or
female, is trafficking in drugs, regardless of what ideology they have, they
are drug traffickers.''

The battalion christened Friday is the second of three Colombian army units
to be prepared and ferried into battle on dozens of U.S.-donated combat
helicopters.

A third battalion should be ready by the middle of next year, completing
training of nearly 3,000 troops and service personnel under President Andres
Pastrana's so-called Plan Colombia.

The specialized army battalions involve the Colombian military as never
before in counter-drug operations. The U.S. training program brings the
American military into a close partnership with Colombian forces long
accused of human rights abuses against civilians in fighting the rebels. But
officials are promising a clean operation, and no direct U.S. troop
involvement in the fighting.

In addition to general soldiering skills such as marksmanship, Green Beret
trainers said they are teaching the troops police-style tactics such as
handcuffing suspects and bagging evidence that could be used in trials.

Human rights instruction and ``target discrimination'' are also being
emphasized, to prevent unarmed civilians from getting killed in raids.

``We've learned that within the drug labs you'll have family members, you'll
have wives, you'll have children, you'll have livestock,'' the senior
American instructor at Larandia said. ``The soldiers are trained not to
initiate with lethal fire.''

The guerrillas view the U.S. assistance as counterinsurgency aid being
provided under a thin drug-fighting guise. American officials maintain the
purpose is strictly to stem the export of an estimated 520 tons of cocaine a
year from Colombia.