LATIN AMERICANS SKEPTICAL ON COLOMBIA ANTI-DRUG PLAN

Defense Ministers Fear The Battle Against Traffickers May Spill Over

MANAUS, Brazil -- U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen promised Latin
American defense ministers Tuesday that Colombia's expanding drug war would
not prove to be another quagmire like Vietnam.

But in interviews, defense leaders from countries bordering Colombia said
they feared that they would suffer escalating cross-border movements of
Colombian drug traffickers and the guerrillas that thrive on protecting them.

Speaking to a summit of 30 defense ministers from Western Hemisphere
countries, Cohen stressed that Plan Colombia, a $7.5 billion international
anti-drug effort that includes $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid to
Colombia this year, is essentially a training and equipping mission. It is
not, he insisted, the first stage of an eventual U.S. military intervention.

``Anything you read or hear to the contrary is false and fabricated. We
want to be of assistance. We will work with Colombia. We hope others can
help in their own individual ways,'' Cohen told his counterparts.

Congressional limits restrict U.S. participation to 300 civilian and 500
military advisers in Colombia's anti-guerrilla effort. Advanced U.S.
military choppers are being given as part of the Plan Colombia package to
airlift troops into remote areas to pounce on drug labs and disrupt drug
traffickers. The Clinton administration insists Colombian units can bust up
drug operations without U.S. troops getting sucked into an escalating civil
war against rebels protecting Colombia's narcotics.

But its neighbors say Colombian rebels already are trying to draw them into
a widened conflict in an effort to weaken regional support for Plan
Colombia. The intervention is the biggest U.S. involvement in the region
since the Central American conflicts of the early 1980s.

The kidnapping last week in eastern Ecuador of a group of oil workers,
including five Americans, is part of that campaign, Ecuadorian military
officers said. They told the Mercury News Rio de Janeiro Bureau that
intercepted radio communications indicated that the kidnappers are rebels
from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish
acronym FARC. FARC is a 15,000-solider strong guerrilla movement that
dominates guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Colombia.

``I don't have information as to who is responsible, whether it's FARC or
someone else. That will not alter Plan Colombia,'' Cohen told a news
conference. ``Plan Colombia is designed to deal with `narco-trafficking'
and other elements that are trying to basically take democracy away from
the people of Colombia.''

Ecuador, already politically and economically unstable, is likeliest to
suffer if the Colombian army moves against southern Colombia's
`narco-guerrillas' and coca fields -- the raw material used to make
cocaine. Ecuador fears refugees and guerrillas fleeing across the border to
escape Colombian troops. They also fear a coca-production shift into
Ecuador if suppression in Colombia works.

On Colombia's eastern border, Venezuelan forces reportedly crossed into
Colombia over the weekend in pursuit of suspected drug traffickers.
Venezuela's leftist, authoritarian President Hugo Chavez has warned the
U.S. presence in Colombia could follow the pattern of Vietnam and escalate
into a regional armed conflict.

``Worries remain in the countries that are neighbors of Colombia,'' said
Venezuelan Defense Minister Gen. Ismael Eliezer Hurtado. He said he awaited
a briefing today from his Colombian counterpart, Luis Ram(acu)rez Acuna.

On Colombia's northwestern border, a group of Colombian insurgents stormed
across the border into Panama's Darien region on Saturday, killing an
11-year-old girl and wounding nine civilians and three border police
officers, according to Panamanian officials.

``This makes us think that in some form, they want to provoke Panama, or
push Panama,'' into the conflict that Colombia is experiencing now, said
Pablo Quintero Luna, chief of Panama's national security board, in an
interview.

Panama used the defense ministers' forum to voice its concern about
spillover effects from Plan Colombia.

In his address to defense ministers, Cohen acknowledged a risk of spillover
effects. But they ``will only worsen if we do nothing,'' Cohen said.