A BILLION-DOLLAR GAMBLE ON COLOMBIA

Clinton Visit Will Highlight Anti-Drug Aid To Bogota, But Many Question
Military Strategy

CARTAGENA, Colombia, Aug. 29 -- On a one-day visit to Colombia on
Wednesday, President Clinton will seal Washington's commitment to a
controversial U.S.-funded counter-narcotics offensive seen by many here as
an ineffective, misguided strategy that will likely fail to curtail illegal
crops while further escalating this nation's armed conflict.

EVEN BEFORE the first penny of a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package arrives in
Colombia, leftist rebels have stepped up their attacks, neighboring
countries are tightening military control of their borders, and labor unions
and students are staging street protests against the plan.

Rebels say the anti-drug fight is an excuse for the United States to
intervene in Colombia's three-decade-old guerrilla war and they are
preparing their defense.

"It is not a plan for [illegal] crop eradication, it is not a plan to fight
drug trafficking, it is a pretext for other plans that are clearly
interventionist," Andres Paris, a spokesman for the 15,000-strong
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) said Thursday.

The FARC, the nation's most powerful rebel group, controls much of the
southern territories targeted in the planned military offensive and where,
not coincidentally, more than half of Colombia's coca crops are located.

Colombia is by far the world's largest cocaine exporter, supplying an
estimated 80 percent of the market, and is a growing supplier of heroin to
the United States.

While the FARC has vowed not to disrupt Clinton's visit with guerrilla
attacks, it declared him "persona non grata" and called on Colombians to
protest his presence in the colonial seaport of Cartagena.

Labor unions already have announced peaceful protests in major cities on the
day of Clinton's visit.

DOUBLE-BARRELED STRATEGY

The $1.3 billion approved in the Colombia aid package is part of broader
$7.4 billion program, known as Plan Colombia, to fight drug trafficking,
improve the economy and arm-twist leftist rebels into a serious peace
negotiation.

But so far, most of the international aid Colombia has managed to secure for
the plan is concentrated on fighting the drug trade through military means.

The bulk of the U.S. funds are earmarked to train and equip anti-drug
battalions to lead a "push into southern Colombia," securing coca-growing
areas for police crop fumigation and eradication operations.

While U.S. officials maintain they will not be involved in
counter-insurgency operations, the battalions will inevitably clash with the
rebels that guard the crops and laboratories in exchange for some $500
million a year in "protection taxes," analysts say.

Washington insists that its aid to Colombia is purely for anti-narcotics
operations, but the Colombian army clearly sees it as a way to end the rebel
war by striking at the guerrillas' main source of funding and wrestling the
FARC into serious peace negotiations. The government launched peace talks
with the FARC in January 1999 but the negotiations have made little progress
toward an end to the rebels' 36-year-old uprising against the state.

"With Plan Colombia there will be a radical reduction in financing from
drugs. They [the FARC] will have to accept a negotiated solution from the
government," armed forces chief Gen. Fernando Tapias told Brazil's Folha de
Sao Paulo newspaper last week.

Whether the strategy against the rebels will work remains a mystery. What is
clear, analysts say, is that past repressive measures against drug crops
have failed to cut back coca production. In fact, in the decade since
widespread fumigation began Colombia's cocaine production has jumped by more
than 750 percent to an estimated 520 metric tons a year.

"A military strategy against drug trafficking has not borne any fruits in
the past and it won't do it in the future," says political analyst Arlene
Tickner, director of the Center for International Studies at the Universidad
de los Andes.

Jorge Devia, governor of the coca-carpeted province of Putumayo, says the
anticipated onslaught against coca farmers in his province has sparked two
opposite responses from coca-growing peasants. Some, he says, are accepting
weapons from the FARC to mount a "civilian resistance" to fumigation. Others
are proposing to manually eradicate their illegal crops in exchange for
support to switch to other crops.

Non-governmental organizations and regional leaders have called for the U.S.
money to be used for such alternative development programs and to address
the social problems that have led hundred of thousands of Colombians to turn
to cultivating drug crops.

"The idea must be to eradicate the coca culture, not just the coca," says
Devia. "But that won't be done with military aid no matter how many
helicopters, soldiers and weapons they send."

Devia, whose province borders Ecuador and Peru, says the military focus of
the drug fight will serve only to drive the coca crops into more remote
regions of Colombia and into neighboring countries.

Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru already have stepped up border controls to contain
a possible spillover of drugs, rebels and refugees fleeing the fumigation
although Washington's new ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson, said the
concerns were "a bit exaggerated."

RIGHTS RECORD QUESTIONED

Aside from concerns about the effectiveness of the military anti-drug
strategy, human rights organizations have criticized the plan for supporting
an army accused of widespread human rights abuses.

For years, the Colombian military was kept on the sidelines of the fight
against drug producers and traffickers partly because of U.S. laws against
giving aid to forces accused of human rights abuses. Military aid resumed
recently after the Colombian government began creating special army units
whose members have a clean rights record.

For the new aid package, Congress tied disbursement of the money to State
Department certification that the Colombian government has made progress on
specific human rights issues, by cracking down on abuses by the military and
by breaking long-standing ties between the armed forces and outlaw
paramilitary groups.

While Colombia failed to meet six of the seven conditions of the aid,
Clinton signed a waiver Aug. 23 to clear the way for Colombia to receive the
funds.

"I did it because I believe President [Andres] Pastrana is committed to
dealing with the human rights issues about which we're still very
concerned," Clinton said, explaining his decision to invoke the waiver.