CLINTON STEPS UP U.S. WAR ON DRUGS

Aid to Colombia Not 'Yankee Imperialism,' President Vows

CARTAGENA, Colombia (Reuters) -- U.S. President Bill Clinton has vowed
that an anti-drug aid package worth $1.3 billion (U.S.) would not bring
"Yankee imperialism" to Colombia and has appealed to neighbouring
nations to support the war on drugs.

On a one-day trip to this Colombian port city, where police said they
arrested two rebels assembling a bomb near a building Clinton was to
visit, the president responded to concern in both Colombia and the
United States that the mostly military aid package would result in a
shooting war between Americans and drug traffickers or the Marxist
guerrillas who protect them.

"This is not Vietnam. Neither is it Yankee imperialism," Clinton said
yesterday during a joint news conference with Colombian President
Andres Pastrana.

Clinton stressed that conditions attached to the aid package made it
illegal for any U.S. troops to become involved in the anti-drug effort,
apart from several hundred advisers who will train two Colombian army
battalions. The plan also calls for the use of 60 American attack
helicopters.

The idea is for the battalions to protect police missions to destroy
drug plantations and labs in guerrilla-controlled areas of southern
Colombia.

The aid plan has been condemned by the country's powerful Marxist
guerrillas and labour organizations, who fear it will stoke a three-
decade-old war that has cost 35,000 lives.

"There won't be American involvement in a shooting war because they
(the Colombians) don't want it and because we don't want it," Clinton
said.

Pastrana defended his $7.5 billion (U.S.) "Plan Colombia," which aims
to destroy the Colombian drug market - the world's leading supplier of
cocaine - while pouring money into social resources to help turn the
country's economy around.

Police in Cartagena said they arrested two Marxist rebels as they were
preparing a 2-kilogram bomb about 400 metres from a building Clinton
was to visit later in the day.

A senior Colombian police source said two men, allegedly members of the
guerrilla force known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), were captured in a house in Cartagena's working-class
Chiquinquira neighbourhood.

The source said the bomb was designed to "cause panic but not huge
damage." Hundreds of pamphlets, signed by the FARC and protesting U.S.
"intervention" in Colombia, were found at the same location.

But Terry Samway, assistant director of the U.S. Secret Service,
indicated the bomb report might have been exaggerated.

"There was no bomb, although there were materials that could
conceivably be put together into one."

The FARC, with some 17,000 combatants nationwide and control of up to
40 per cent of Colombia, has staged attacks in at least eight of the
country's 32 provinces over the last 24 hours in protest at Clinton's
visit.

At least 20 people have died in the fighting.

An 18-year-old riot policeman was killed in clashes with hooded
students lobbing homemade explosives in an anti-American protest
outside Bogota's prestigious National University yesterday.

One of the worst incidents yesterday took place in southwest Huila
province when a FARC unit killed four police officers guarding a
highway toll. FARC fighters also killed three workers on a banana
plantation in the northwest Uraba region, police said.

A demonstration at the U.S. embassy got under way almost as soon as
Clinton's Air Force One touched down in Cartagena. As many as 5,000
protesters wearing "Uncle Sam" hats and skeleton masks shouted "Yankee,
Go Home!" and "Imperialism Out Of Colombia" as they thronged outside
the heavily fortified embassy. Demonstrators waved a huge U.S. flag
with skulls instead of stars.