U.S. LAWMAKER VISITS DEADLY COLOMBIA TOWN

BARRANCABERMEJA, Colombia - Hard-eyed men with Uzis stood guard as Sen.
Paul Wellstone stepped out of a helicopter and into a bulletproof car and
drove to a meeting with human rights activists. Hours earlier, police said
they discovered a bomb along the airport road.

U.S. and Colombian authorities Friday downplayed the possibility that
Wellstone and U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson, who accompanied the Minnesota
Democrat, were the intended targets of the bomb. Their visit marked the
first time a U.S. lawmaker or ambassador had come to the deadliest town in
all the Americas - a sweltering cluster of cinder block homes on the banks
of the muddy Magdalena River.

There was heavy security for the U.S. officials during their three-hour
visit Thursday. But Barrancabermeja's 195,000 residents have no such
protection: this year alone, 470 of them have been slain in politically
motivated attacks, human rights workers say. Massacres are commonplace, and
the killers are rarely caught.

Wellstone said he made the perilous journey to show support for the human
rights activists, who face immense risk.

``I don't know whether I was targeted, but I certainly know that the human
rights activists are targeted,'' Wellstone told an airport news conference
on his return to Minneapolis on Friday.

For Wellstone, a former civil rights activist and college professor, his
two-day visit to Colombia also was aimed at making a stand against Plan
Colombia, a drug-eradica-tion effort being funded by $1.3 billion from
Washington. Under the plan, dozens of U.S.-donated combat helicopters will
ferry U.S.-trained Colombian troops into cocaine-producing plantations to
seize them from insurgents.

But while the military is being strengthened, Wellstone says there is no
firm plan to provide coca farmers with alternative livelihoods. He fears
they will then be driven into the ranks of leftist guerrillas or the rival
right-wing paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia,
or AUC.

Moreover, Wellstone is concerned that President Clinton authorized delivery
of the aid even though the Colombian government has not met all the human
rights conditions set by Congress. Among outstanding concerns is that the
Colombian military has not severed its links to the AUC. The
paramilitaries, responsible for numerous massacres of suspected guerrilla
sympathizers, remain allied with the army in the field in anti-guerrilla
operations. Many AUC gunmen are former government soldiers.

Wellstone said he asked President Andres Pastrana on Wednesday for the
government to bring paramilitary leaders to trial and protect human rights
workers. Human rights workers whom Wellstone met with said the AUC was
responsible for most of the killings in Barrancabermeja, 155 miles north of
the capital, Bogota.

There were questions, meanwhile, about who was the intended target of the
bomb, and its location. Barrancabermeja's police commander said the bomb
was found on the road from the airport to the city. However, local
journalists who witnessed the device being dismantled said it was found in
a neighborhood far from the highway.

The White House said it did not view the two as targets and State
Department officials said it wasn't unusual for such devices to be found in
Barrancabermeja. Colombian police said first that it appeared to be an
assassination attempt, but then later said it did not.

Earlier Thursday, Wellstone and Patterson flew aboard a Black Hawk combat
helicopter to observe a raid by heavily armed Colombian national police on
a plantation near the village of Taraza, 220 miles northwest of Bogota.

Huddled on the mountainside, 32 coca harvesters watched as police torched
the lab.

It was quickly enveloped in flames, sending black smoke over the
jungle-covered mountains and a blast of intense heat that could be felt 100
yards away.