COLOMBIAN DRUG WAR THREATENS BORDER AREAS

Bogota, Colombia -- As President Clinton prepares to visit Colombia next week and open the spigot of military aid, the country's neighbors are expressing concerns that an escalation of the fighting here could push coca growing, drug trafficking, refugees and even fighting across their borders.

The Colombian conflict has already led guerrillas to seek safe havens in Panama and Venezuela. U.S. military officials warn that one Colombian rebel group already exerts influence over Indian dissidents in Ecuador, and new Colombian plantings of coca and poppies have been reported in Peru.

But leaders around the region say the nature of the war is about to change with the release of $1.3 billion in U.S. aid over the next two years to train and equip an antinarcotics army brigade, and the impact of the war on their nations is likely to increase.

The brigade will be outfitted with 60 helicopters that will support police efforts to eradicate the coca fields and shut down trafticking operations in two southern Colombian provinces occupied, and largely controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the biggest rebel faction.

Whether or not the rebels stand and fight to support the coca growers and traffickers, whose protection money finances their war effort, tens of thousands of coca growers are likely to move far and wide, taking their seedlings and guerrilla protection with them.

That was the message Secretary of State Madeleine Albright heard from nervous Ecuadorean and Brazilian leaders on her trip through South America this month. It was repeated when Ecuador's president, Gustavo Noboa, came to Bogota on Wednesday to ask President Andres Pastrana that his government be kept informed of all military operations in southern Colombia so the Ecuadorean army could prepare for any incursions of coca growers, refugees or guerrillas across its fontier.

"Our worry is that the removal of this cancerous tumor will cause it to metastasize into Ecuador," Ecuador's foreign minister Heinz Moeller, told Colombian reporters on Wednesday. He noted that successful efforts by Peru and Bolivia to eradicate coca plantings in recent years encouraged more cultivation in Colombia, worsening this country's drug problem while having little impact on world cocaine supplies.

U.S. officials call it the "balloon effect" when they succeed in attacking drug activity in one country or region, only to see it pop up again somewhere nearby. They note that when the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration succeeded several years ago in helping the police in Colombia arrest the leaders of the country's biggest drug cartels, organizations emerged elsewhere to take their place and the flood of drugs continued. Those new organizations, weaker than their predecessors, sought protection from the Colombian guerrillas and have pumped up their powers with much financial support.

Even Peru's president, Alberto Fujimori, who took a hard line against guerrillas in his country in the early 1990s, told reporters this week that he was concerned that an escalation of the fighting in Colombia "could generate a wider conflict, one in which the FARC retreats into Peruvian territory."

U.S. and Colombian officials are trying to assuage Latin American leaders, arguing that the new military effort in southern Colombia which is part of a broader national military and humanitarian effort called Plan Colombia is an attempt to force the FARC to negotiate seriously in peace talks, which have stalled in recent months.

"This is a peace plan, not a war plan," 'says Foreign Minister Guillermo Fernandez de Soto of Colombia when characterizing his government's new initiative to his regional colleagues.

Gen. Fernando Tapias, the chief of the Colombian armed forces, argued last week that eradicating the coca fields in the Putumayo and Caqueta provinces of Colombia would deprive the FARC of a source of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and hence its ability to make war.

"There will be peace, but first there will be war," he said in an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo. "With or without Plan Colombia, things are going to get worse."