COLOMBIA NOT NEW VIETNAM: CLINTON

President insists aid plan will not draw American troops into war with drug
traffickers

U.S. President Bill Clinton dipped his toe in Colombia's cauldron of
violence yesterday to rally support for the country's faltering leader and
his controversial antinarcotics plan.

During a nine-hour visit to picturesque Cartagena on the Caribbean coast,
Mr. Clinton insisted that a new U.S. aid package of $1.3-billion would not
draw American troops into clashes with drug traffickers or Marxist rebels.

"A condition of this aid is that we are not going to get into a shooting
war," Mr. Clinton said at a joint press conference with beleaguered
President Andres Pastrana.

"This is not Vietnam. Neither is it Yankee imperialism. . . . A lot of the
opposition to this plan is coming from people who are afraid it will work."

But as Mr. Clinton flew south from Washington, there were fresh signs that
support for Mr. Pastrana's drug-fighting Plan Colombia would include an
increase in U.S. military involvement.

Reuters news agency, citing military sources, said the Pentagon was
planning to post an army general to oversee implementation of U.S. military
aid.

It said the job would go to Brigadier-General Keith Huber, whose experience
includes counterinsurgency and a posting in El Salvador in 1987 as the
U.S.-backed army there battled leftist rebels.

The aid includes 60 helicopters for military and police units.

Critics of Plan Colombia, ostensibly aimed at cutting down the flow of
cocaine and heroin from the South American country, say it will drag the
United States further into Latin America's longest-running guerrilla war.

Two rebel armies with about 25,000 members control huge swaths of rural
Colombia. The larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has
built up a huge war chest with revenue from kidnappings, "taxes" and
protection money paid by drug traffickers and legal businesses.

U.S. pilots and advisers are already helping the Colombian armed forces
conduct antinarcotics raids, and most observers believe they are often
linked to counterinsurgency operations.

"You can't separate the two any more. . . .," said Stephen Randall, an
expert on Colombia at the University of Calgary. "One feeds on the other."

Right-wing paramilitaries, who say they are acting in "self-defence"
against the guerrillas, have carried out vicious massacres of peasants and
poor city dwellers, usually claiming they were rebel supporters. Colombian
media and human-rights defenders have exposed links between army units and
the paramilitaries.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in 1997 that 900,000
Colombians had been driven from their homes by the violence.

Mr. Clinton recognized complaints from human-rights defenders who say Plan
Colombia will lead to further atrocities. "Insurgents and paramilitaries
alike must end all human-rights abuses, as must the security forces
themselves," he said.

Besides military operations, Plan Colombia includes support for
crop-substitution schemes to persuade farmers to stop planting coca and
opium poppies. It also includes crop eradication with harsh crop-dusted
herbicides that peasants say have caused widespread illness.

The same measures were included in a multibillion-dollar aid package rolled
out by former president George Bush in 1990.

A decade and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, Colombia is no closer
to halting either drug trafficking or the insurgencies.

A taste of the threats Colombians face every day emerged yesterday when
police said they had caught two FARC supporters preparing a bomb six blocks
from a building that Mr. Clinton was scheduled to visit. They said the
device was designed to scatter leaflets.

Officials said violence had left at least 20 dead since early Tuesday.