COLOMBIA'S DECLINE RAISES FEARS IN U.S.

Guerrillas, Paramilitaries Weakening Bogota's Control

WASHINGTON - After Congress approved $1.3 billion in military and other aid
to Colombia this summer, a Colombian friend of political consultant Peter
Schechter added this heading to his e-mails: "From the Mekong Delta."

Mr. Schechter doesn't agree with the suggestion that Colombia could become
another Vietnam, where sending U.S. military aid and advisers to help fight
Communist guerrillas led to intervention by U.S. troops.

But Mr. Schechter, who formerly represented the government of Colombia in
Washington, says his friend's e-mail heading reflects growing fears that
the government of President Andres Pastrana is losing control of the
country to left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug
traffickers.

"The situation in Colombia is deteriorating," said a senior Pentagon
official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The engagements and activity
of the paramilitaries back and forth with the [guerrillas] are threatening
to turn the government of Colombia into a bystander."

President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, described the
situation this way: "It's very hard to imagine democracy surviving over the
long term in Colombia unless there can be both, A, some reversal in the
grip of the drug traffickers, and, B, a peace with the insurgents."

Mr. Clinton is to visit Colombia on Wednesday to lend Mr. Pastrana moral
support to go with the new U.S. aid package, which includes more than 60
Black Hawk and Huey helicopters and Special Forces trainers.

A group of 111 U.S. Special Forces advisers is already at a base in
Larandia, Colombia, to train that nation's second 780-man anti-narcotics
battalion, said a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. George Rhynedance. U.S.
advisers are to train a third anti-drug battalion in 2001.

The American soldiers are teaching the Colombians tactics so they can
protect Colombian National Police as they destroy coca and poppy fields or
raid clandestine laboratories that refine those plants into cocaine and heroin.

Both the left-wing rebels and the right-wing paramilitaries who oppose them
finance their operations largely by protecting and "taxing" peasants who
grow coca and poppies and the traffickers who smuggle the drugs abroad,
Colombian officials say.

The U.S. aid also includes money to train judges and prosecutors and to
bolster human-rights groups. Congress conditioned the aid on Colombia's
taking steps to stop human-rights abuses by its military.

Mr. Berger said Mr. Pastrana hasn't yet had time to meet all the
human-rights conditions, and Mr. Clinton waived the restrictions last week,
saying that Colombia's situation was too desperate to withhold the U.S.
assistance.

The U.S. aid is part of Mr. Pastrana's $7.5 billion "Plan Colombia," a
package of initiatives aimed at ending the guerrilla war, stopping drug
traffickers and strengthening Colombian democracy.

Mr. Clinton has said his one-day visit to the port city of Cartagena is
meant to "personally underscore America's support for Colombia's efforts to
seek peace, fight illicit drugs, build its economy and deepen democracy."

The hefty military component of the aid package, combined with the
perceived erosion in the Colombian government's power, leads some critics
to warn that direct U.S. military intervention could lie ahead.

"It might be that suggesting another Vietnam is somewhat of a reach," said
Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a frequent
critic of U.S. policy in Latin America, "but of course, suggesting that
Vietnam would be Vietnam back in the early 1960s was also somewhat of a reach."

Given the increased U.S. presence, Mr. Birns said, "There is no question
that some Americans are going to be killed, and the question is, what's the
reaction of Congress and the American people going to be?"

Limits to involvement

U.S. officials and other analysts in both the United States and Colombia,
however, say that direct U.S. military intervention is all but inconceivable.

"We don't think there is a military solution to the guerrilla war in
Colombia, nor does President Pastrana," Mr. Berger said.

Colombian Ambassador Luis Alberto Moreno said in an interview that neither
his government nor the vast majority of the people in his country want U.S.
troops to join in their fight.

"Colombians would never ask for any kind of direct U.S. participation in a
problem that is totally Colombian and must be resolved by Colombians," he said.

Miguel Silva, president of a publishing house that owns the major Colombian
weekly Semana, said from Bogota that Colombian leaders wouldn't want U.S.
troops because their presence would serve to legitimize the major guerrilla
group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish
acronym FARC.

The FARC, with an estimated 17,000 fighters, operates relatively freely in
rural southern Colombia. But while active for decades, the group has been
unable to make inroads in urban areas.

U.S. and Colombian analysts agree that the FARC's claim to be fighting for
the people and democracy long ago lost credibility because of the group's
use of kidnappings for ransom and its "taxing" of the drug trade to finance
its activities.

Inserting U.S. troops into Colombia "would turn the FARC from a guerrilla
whose political motivation is questioned because of their relationship to
narco-trafficking to a full political guerrilla with a lot of political
support," Mr. Silva said. "I think everybody agrees it would be complete
stupidity."

Maj. Tony M. Martin, a former Special Forces officer who teaches Latin
American politics at the U.S. Military Academy, said Colombian opposition
to the use of U.S. troops is a major difference with what happened in Vietnam.

"The South Vietnamese people wanted U.S. assistance," Maj. Martin said.
"The Colombians want U.S. aid, but they do not want troops on the ground."

Former Army Col. Dan Smith of the Center for Defense Information, a
watchdog group that monitors the Pentagon, said another difference with
Vietnam is that there is no opposing superpower backing Colombia's
guerrillas. The American leaders who got the nation involved in Vietnam saw
that conflict as one front in a global battle with communism in which the
U.S. way of life was at stake.

No incentives

U.S. military commanders, scarred by the mistakes made in Vietnam and
schooled in avoiding them ever since, also have no incentive to involve
U.S. forces in Colombia's maelstrom of conflicts, officials and other
analysts added.

"I can tell you there is no serious planning of any kind to intervene in
Colombia anywhere," said Brian Sheridan, assistant secretary of defense for
special operations. "I am very familiar with what we are doing in Colombia,
and there is not a scenario that has us intervening there."

Speaking on condition of anonymity, another Pentagon official said that
within the military, "there is absolutely no interest in a military
intervention in Colombia - categorically, absolutely no interest."

"What would we do there, invade the whole country?" this official asked.

During the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, U.S. experts estimated it
would take at least 100,000 troops to forcibly occupy that Connecticut-size
province of Yugoslavia. Colombia is the size of Texas and California combined.

"Second, it doesn't seem to threaten our national interests," the official
said.

Mr. Smith, the defense analyst, agreed: "The ground rule that I think runs
through the military today is, don't get engaged in anything except a
battle where your vital interests are involved. I don't think that, from
the military's point of view, the drug war is a vital interest."

Mark Falcoff, a Latin America adviser to Gov. George W. Bush's presidential
campaign, said the official U.S. attitude is unlikely to change no matter
who wins the November election.

"If we get to the point where the only alternative is to get involved in
this thing militarily ourselves or to walk away from Colombia, I believe we
will walk away from Colombia," Mr. Falcoff said.

Indeed, Congress already has restricted the number of U.S. personnel
allowed in Colombia to no more than 500 military and 300 civilian contract
employees.

The senior Pentagon official acknowledged that U.S. personnel in Colombia
are at risk but noted that military personnel are under strict orders
against going into combat with Colombian forces. Other military officials
say U.S. troops are authorized to shoot if fired upon.

"We equip them, we'll train them, we'll give them logistical support, we'll
give them intelligence support," the official said of the Colombian
military, "but after that, they're sort of on their own."