COLOMBIA, U.S. READY TO LAUNCH DRUG WAR

Critics Fear for Region's Stability

LA HORMIGA, Colombia Deep in the hills of southern Colombia, coca
grows everywhere.

The leafy bushes blanket the deforested hillsides, reaching right up to
the only road that passes through this no-man's land, disputed by
leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and Colombia's army.

This lawless region is the heartland of Colombian cocaine production
and it will be ground zero in the U.S.-financed $1.3 billion war on
drugs in Colombia.

Supporters of the plan--including President Clinton, who will visit the
coastal city of Cartagena on Wednesday to emphasize his commitment--say
forced eradication of coca and direct confrontation with Colombia's
powerful narcotraffickers is the surest way to stop cocaine from
reaching U.S. streets and to bring peace to this nation riven by
political violence.

"It's very hard to imagine democracy surviving over the long term in
Colombia unless there can be both some reversal of the grip of the drug
traffickers and peace with the insurgents," said Samuel "Sandy" Berger,
Clinton's national security adviser, who hopes the U.S.-backed
offensive will drive Colombia's Marxist guerrillas to peace talks.

Opponents argue that by sending as many as 500 U.S. military advisers
into Colombia to fight a guerrilla war that they say can't be won, the
United States risks slipping into another Vietnam, and inadvertently
spreading Colombia's ugly drug violence to Venezuela, Ecuador and the
Brazilian Amazon.

"The governments of Colombia and the United States are blind and they
are going to start a war here," warned Manuel Alzate, the mayor of
Puerto Asis, a jungle town at the heart of Colombia's coca zone, in the
southern provinces of Putumayo and Caqueta.

"Americans are going to be in planes, in training centers. They will be
in the war," he warned.

For much of the past decade, Colombia has slowly descended into a drug-
induced hell. After the nation's infamous Medellin and Cali drug
cartels were broken, once-foundering left-wing guerrillas moved into
the power vacuum, seizing control of many coca-growing areas and
extorting protection money from remaining drug traffickers.

Over time, the guerrillas--and the brutal paramilitary "self-defense"
forces that have been created to combat them--have grown rich, well-
armed and increasingly powerful, profiting from drugs, kidnappings and
extortion.

Today guerrilla and paramilitary groups effectively control almost 40
percent of Colombia, and coca production has exploded to more than
300,000 acres as plantations in Bolivia and Peru have been eradicated.
Half of the world's cocaine now comes from the jungle plantations of
Putumayo and Caqueta provinces.

As the rebels gained strength, Colombia's notoriously weak military
proved no match, and efforts by President Andres Pastrana to lure the
rebels to peace talks largely have failed.

Today, as rich Colombians flee and investors shun the troubled nation,
now counted as one of the most violent in the world, Colombia has
fallen into its worst recession in 70 years. Unemployment hovers at 20
percent, and most Colombians feel their nation, which has suffered
35,000 political killings in a decade, is sliding toward ruin.

Now, with U.S. backing, Colombia is about to try a frontal attack on
its problems.

Under Plan Colombia, a program drawn up with U.S. advice, the United
States over the next two years will spend $800 million to supply
training and about 60 Black Hawk and Huey attack helicopters to two
Colombian army battalions charged with helping police fumigate coca and
destroy drug labs in Putumayo and Caqueta provinces.

The plan includes U.S., Colombian and European funding to help farmers
establish alternative crops and to promote development in rural areas.

The goal is to cut Colombia's coca production in half in six years,
something officials hope will effectively hamstring 15,000 rebels.

"The idea is to create greater costs for the guerrillas," said Ernesto
Borda, a political scientist at Bogota's Javeriana Catholic University.
"If we attack coca, we attack the income of all these illegal groups.
That could really create pressure for peace."

"If we cut narcotrafficking, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries
would be much weaker," added Luis Fernando Ramirez, Colombia's defense
minister. "It's the way to solve our worst problems."

While fumigation efforts may take up to a year to get fully under way,
they almost certainly will start at places such as La Hormiga, a town
of tin-roofed homes deep in guerrilla territory where coca grows in
back yards, behind the nearby Santa Teresa community center, amid
stands of bananas and yucca.

Political murders occur every day here. A city councilman died last
week when unidentified assassins invaded his home. The region's mayor,
Nelson Astaiza, thinks hard before saying what he feels about the
coming anti-drug effort.

"I'm not sure how the other actors in the conflict are going to react,"
he says finally, a reference to the guerrillas who have made clear
their opposition to coca eradication. What he knows for sure, he said,
is that the coming war "is going to be very hard on people. Fumigation
will be a social problem."

A short drive outside of La Hormiga, Pedro Ariza, 40, a farmer in black
rubber workboots, tends 7 acres of coca bushes on mortgaged land he
bought six months ago. He is a typical coca grower, a peasant farmer
trying to find some way to support his wife and two young daughters.

Before coming to La Hormiga, he farmed coffee in the rich Cauca Valley,
north of Cali, but was forced out when a virus destroyed his fields.

He would like to grow something other than coca. But with bananas or
yucca or passion fruit, he said, "you can't make it since there aren't
cooperatives to buy it. What we lack is stable markets."

Coca, on the other hand, draws a steady stream of buyers who pull up in
front of his wood stilt shack and hand over $900 per kilo of cocaine
base, which he processes in a little lab in a ravine out back. That
pays for food for his family, and the fertilizers and pesticides he
needs.

If the fumigators come, he said, he'll have to move on again, probably
to start more remote coca fields deeper in the Amazonian rain forest,
further from the reach of fumigation planes.

"I don't know politics. I'm just a producer," he said, hiking a muddy
path among his hillsides thick with light green coca leaves. "But if
they fumigate here we'd have to move because otherwise we'd go hungry."

Even supporters of Plan Colombia concede that up to 40,000 peasant
farmers could be displaced by the fumigation effort, with many likely
to congregate as homeless refugees in the region's cities or move
deeper into the rain forest, prompting new deforestation.

Because Colombia's main coca zone lies on its borders with Ecuador,
Peru and Brazil, refugee coca farmers may well spill across national
boundaries, followed by the guerrillas that profit from their crops, a
major worry for Colombia's neighbors.

Brazil, in particular, is already beefing up border patrols in the
Amazon and continues to express deep reservations about Plan Colombia.

"If they fumigate in La Hormiga, the growers will move to small plots
in the jungle where fumigation is impossible. All Amazonia will be coca
within a few years," warned Alzate, the Puerto Asis mayor. "How many
acres of rain forest are we going to lose to this battle?"

What Alzate and others in Colombia's south would prefer to see is U.S.
money going to fund crop substitution programs and basic development,
an area of U.S. aid that has undergone dramatic cuts in recent years
throughout the world.

If remote and underdeveloped provinces like Putumayo and Caqueta had
money to improve roads and infrastructure, build factories for products
such as palm hearts, pay technical agriculture advisers and create
export markets for their new crops, farmers could be persuaded to
abandon coca without war, he and a host of human-rights officials in
Colombia argue.

At the base of Colombia's guerrilla and drug problem, they say, is
enduring poverty and a lack of development that leaves peasant farmers
little option but to grow coca. The upcoming eradication campaign, they
say, will do nothing to address that problem.

"What people really want is stability and there is no stability with
coca," said Aldemar del Cristo, a mayoral assistant in La Hormiga. "Buy
our yucca, our corn. Sign a contract with us. That will give us
security.

"If you had children and no job," he noted, "you'd be growing coca
too."

The problem with alternative crop programs, said Gonzalo de Francisco,
the government's lead adviser on social programs within Plan Colombia,
is that much of the jungle soil in Caqueta and Putumayo isn't suited
for long-term crop production, and the guerrillas who control the
region aren't likely to allow farmers to pull up coca and plant
alternatives, even if that's what the farmers prefer.

That leaves fumigation as the only real option, Colombian officials
say.

U.S. funding for the effort is coming despite deep concerns about human-
rights violations by Colombia's military, which has been linked to
massacres and has continuing ties to paramilitary groups, rights
officials charge.

Clinton last week overrode those concerns, saying sending the money to
Colombia was a matter of national security, and that Pastrana's
government had taken steps to improve the army's human-rights record.

Jose Miguel Vivano, the head of Human Rights Watch/Americas, called the
decision a clear case of rights issues being subordinated to anti-drug
policies.

Now the worst elements of the Colombian military "will feel some sense
of endorsement by the gringos, and that is extremely dangerous," he
said.

Equally worrying to many Americans is the possibility that sending U.S.
funds and advisers to Colombia could ultimately lead to deeper
involvement in what many see as an unwinnable guerrilla war.

U.S. officials deny that could happen and say training Colombians and
pushing the guerrillas to a peace accord--not winning a war against
them--is their goal in Colombia.

"There is no plan, and there is no proposal, and there is no idea of
committing American forces in Colombia to do anything but ... provide
training," insisted Thomas Pickering, U.S. undersecretary of state for
political affairs, at a recent Washington briefing.

Just how bad things have gotten in Colombia is evident in the itinerary
for Clinton's visit Wednesday. The U.S. president, the first to visit
Colombia in nearly a decade, will stay only five hours. He will not
venture to the relatively insecure capital of Bogota, remaining instead
in the Caribbean vacation city of Cartagena with his entourage.