COLOMBIAN SUMMIT SPONSORS DECRY U.S. MILITARY AID PLAN

Government Leaders, Guerrillas Meeting For Talks In Costa Rica

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica -- Colombian humanitarian groups ripped a U.S. plan to send $1.3 billion in military aid to their country as guerrillas and the government sat down here Monday for informal talks on the status of Colombia's 36-year civil war.

``Plan Colombia has endangered the whole peace process,'' said Ana Teresa Bernal, an official from the coalition of humanitarian and human rights groups sponsoring the three days of talks here. ``No good will come of this.''

The conference here is not being billed as a peace negotiation, although representatives of the government and the National Liberation Army (ELN), one of Colombia's Marxist guerrilla groups, are here, and a delegation from the Rebel Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was expected to arrive Monday night.

Rather, organizers are hopeful that putting everyone together at the same table might help ease the conditions of the war and perhaps rejuvenate formal peace talks between the two sides, which have slowed to a crawl even as the pace of the war quickens.

During the first eight months of the year, the rebels and right-wing paramilitary forces have carried out 314 massacres that left nearly 1,400 people dead. Easing the impact of the war on civilians is one of the key concerns of organizers.

Both sides must ``immediately begin to agree on respect for human rights and reach an agreement in this sense,'' said Development Minister Augusto Ramirez, the leader of the Colombian government's delegation to the talks.

That may prove difficult, since the paramilitary groups were not invited to participate here.

The majority of the 300 delegates represent humanitarian groups, and at a series of press conferences Monday they made it clear that they regard the so-called Plan Colombia -- a U.S. scheme to knock out the war's underpinnings by eradicating cocaine and heroin production -- as a disaster in the making.

``There is an even more dangerous war than the one taking place now, and that's the biological war,'' said Manuel Alzate, mayor of the Colombian city of Puerto Asis, referring to plans for aerial spraying of herbicides aimed at the coca and poppy crops.

Alzate and other speakers said they were worried that the herbicides would not only have unforeseen effects on Colombia's environment, but might threaten animal and even human life as well as the targeted crops.

``We want the eradication of the coca plantations to be done manually, without aerial spraying,'' said Armando Zalbuena, a representative of the National Indigenous Organizations of Colombia. ``We have started some types of manual eradication, but we need more time.''

Other delegates warned that the anti-drug efforts -- which will include helicopter deployment of troops into southern Colombia -- will drive thousands of peasants from their homes as the war intensifies.