LATIN LEADERS FEAR OUTCOME OF DRUG WAR

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.

Leaders in Colombia's neighbors - Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and
Venezuela - say the nature of the war is about to change with the release
of $1.3 billion in new U.S. aid over the next two years to train and equip
a Colombian anti-narcotics army brigade.

The brigade will be outfitted with 60 helicopters that will support police
efforts to eradicate the coca fields and shut down trafficking operations
in two southern Colombian provinces. Those provinces are also occupied and
largely controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC,
a rebel faction that has been fighting the Colombian government for
decades. The rebels extort ``protection money'' from the coca growers and
use that money to finance their war effort.

Whether or not the rebels stand and fight to support the drug producers,
tens of thousands of coca growers are likely to move far and wide, taking
their seedlings and their guerrilla protectors 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 frontier.

``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 county or region, only to see it pop up
again in some other country nearby.

They note that when the Central Intelligence Agency 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 the guerrillas with
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,'' is how Foreign Minister Guillermo
Fernandez de Soto of Colombia characterized 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.''

On her South American trip, Albright offered Ecuador $15 million to help
Colombian refugees.

Ecuadorean leaders publicly backed Plan Colombia, despite their concerns,
but Brazilian leaders told her they would not contribute to the program.

``Brazil does not have the same level of commitment as the United States in
the program to fight drug trafficking in Colombia,'' said Brazil's foreign
minister, Luiz Felipe Lampreia.

Panama, which has not had an army since the U.S. invasion that overthrew
Gen. Manuel Noriega in 1989, has begun moving hundreds of police officers
to the Colombian border and has requested $30 million from Washington to
bolster efforts to defend itself from a growing number of border incursions
by Colombian guerrillas, drug traffickers and coca growers.

Brazil has also begun to reinforce its long, porous border with Colombia,
and it is buying four French Cougar AS-532 helicopters to increase the
mobility of its border patrols.

Peru has moved a fleet of MI-17 helicopters from its border with Ecuador to
its Colombian frontier in recent months.

And Venezuela, which has long complained of Colombian guerrilla incursions,
has also beefed up its border guard, which now stands at an estimated
25,000 troops.

Venezuela's foreign minister, Jose Vicente Rangel, said his government's
concerns about an escalation of the four-decade-old civil conflict in
Colombia would be vigorously voiced at a meeting of Latin American
presidents in Brasilia next Thursday, the day after Clinton's eight-hour
trip to Colombia to kick off Plan Colombia.