GRADUATION DAY IN THE DRUG WAR

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.

It's 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,
about 235 miles southwest of Bogot. "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 on
drug laboratories or coca fields.

In Putumayo province, the first state to be targeted in the offensive, tens
of thousands of farmers and coca harvesters live among the rebels, drug
traffickers and right-wing paramilitary units trying to muscle in on the
FARC's drug profits.

"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, speaking to reporters on condition of
anonymity. "The soldiers are trained not to initiate with lethal fire."

Guerrillas have declared the roughly 300 U.S. armed-forces personnel
working in Colombia as military targets, although none are known to have
been attacked. The Green Berets at Larandia work under tight security and
say they cannot leave the base or participate in operations.

Human-rights monitors remain skeptical of the program. Peace activists say
a military push into the FARC's main southern stronghold could trigger
heavy fighting and derail peace talks to end the 36-year war. Negotiations
are headquartered just a three-hour drive from Larandia.

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 - the world's main producer of the drug.

But they, too, increasingly recognize that these two wars are becoming
impossible to separate.

"I don't try to make a distinction like that," said Gen. Pace, a veteran of
the Vietnam War and of the U.S. military mission in Somalia. "It is clearly
true that many of the guerrillas, if not all, traffic in drugs, so trying
to define that line is very difficult."