CRITICS COMPARE COLOMBIAN AID PACKAGE TO EL SALVADOR

WASHINGTON {AP} When President Clinton said last week that the $1.3 billion aid package to Colombia will not lead to another Vietnam, some of the plan's main critics agreed. A better comparison, they say, is El Salvador.

In the 1980s, the United States helped the El Salvadoran military, despite its human rights abuses, to fight leftist guerrillas. In Colombia, where the "proxy war" is against drug traffickers and the leftist forces helping them, Clinton waived human rights rules to deliver the military aid package.

Even without a Vietnam-style buildup of U.S. combat troops in Colombia, the United States could aggravate and prolong the three-decade old Colombian civil war, critics argue.

"No, it's not another Vietnam, but it's still the wrong thing to do," said Lisa Haugaard, legislative coordinator of the Latin American Working Group.

In a brief visit Wednesday to Cartagena, Colombia, Clinton delivered the aid and said the United States will not get into "a shooting war" in Colombia. "This is not Vietnam," he said.

Administration officials have long stressed that the United States won't get dragged into Colombia's civil war. They say U.S. military aid is intended solely to help Colombia battle drug traffickers, who account for an estimated 90 percent of the cocaine in the United States.

In Colombia, however, the distinction between fighting drugs and waging war is murky. Colombian guerrillas finance their insurgency in part by protecting drug laboratories and fields of coca and poppy, the raw materials for cocaine and heroin.

Much of the U.S. aid will pay for helicopters and other equipment for two Colombian army anti-narcotics battalions to fight those guerrillas, allowing laboratories to be dismantled and coca fields to be eradicated.

The U.S. military equipment is generally restricted to counternarcotics operations. But those operations still involve Colombian soldiers fighting guerrillas, albeit guerrillas protecting coca and poppy fields.