COLOMBIA'S NEIGHBORS FEAR WIDENING OF DRUG WAR

They were told that a U.S. role would be limited and that the conflict
would not become another Vietnam.

MANAUS, Brazil - U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen promised Latin
American defense ministers yesterday 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 they would suffer escalating cross-border movements of
Colombian drug traffickers and the guerrillas that thrive on protecting
them.

Speaking to a quarterly summit of 30 defense ministers from Western
Hemisphere countries, Cohen stressed that Plan Colombia, a $7.5 billion
international antidrug effort that includes $1.3 billion in U.S. military
aid to Colombia, was essentially a training and equipping mission. It is
not, he insisted, the first stage of a U.S. military intervention.
"Anything you read or hear to the contrary is false and fabricated," Cohen
told his counterparts. "We want to be of assistance. We will work with
Colombia. We hope others can help in their own individual ways."

Congressional restrictions limit U.S. participation to 300 civilian and 500
military advisers in Colombia's antiguerrilla effort. Advanced U.S.
military helicopters 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 that Colombian units can break up drug
operations without U.S. troops getting sucked into an escalating civil war
against rebels protecting Colombia's drug trade.

But the country's neighbors say the rebels already are trying to draw them
into a widened conflict 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 10 workers at oil fields,
including five Americans, is part of that campaign, Ecuadoran military
officers said. They said intercepted radio communications indicated that
the kidnappers were rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,
or FARC. The FARC is the largest rebel group 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."

On Colombia's eastern border, Venezuelan forces reportedly crossed into
Colombia over the weekend in pursuit of suspected drug traffickers.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has warned that 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,"
Venezuelan Defense Minister Gen. Ismael Eliezer Hurtado said yesterday. He
said he awaited a briefing today from his Colombian counterpart, Luis
Ramirez Acuna.

On Colombia's northwestern border, a group of Colombian insurgents stormed
into Panama's Darien region on Saturday, killing an 11-year-old girl and
wounding nine civilians and three border policemen, 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," Pablo
Quintero Luna, chief of Panama's national security board, said in an
interview.

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

He likened drug trafficking to cancer.

"If you let the cancer go untreated, if you think that your country will be
safe if it just stays over in Colombia and can never touch us, you - and we
- - are mistaken," Cohen said.