COLOMBIA ROUSTS POOR AHEAD OF CLINTON VISIT

BOGOTA, Colombia Colombian authorities have rounded up some 300 street
children and beggars in the Caribbean coastal resort of Cartagena and
banished them to its outskirts in preparation for President Clinton's visit
next week, local media said Monday.

Clinton will meet President Andres Pastrana in the colonial walled city
Aug. 30 to discuss details of a record $1.3 billion U.S. aid package to
help Colombia fight the booming drug trade and powerful communist guerrillas.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Peru, President Alberto Fujimori said Monday that
authorities busted a major international arms smuggling ring that
parachuted thousands of weapons into Colombia to supply leftist rebels.

Fujimori said the operation highlighted growing concerns that the conflict
could intensify and spill into Peru just as Washington provides the
anti-drug aid to Colombia.

Authorities arrested six people, including three former Peruvian military
officials and a Russian, who had smuggled some 10,000 Kalashnikov automatic
rifles during the past year from Jordan to Colombia, with a stop in Peru's
Amazon.

Peru shares hundreds of miles of remote jungle border with Colombia, and
the government, fearing the Colombian conflict could spill over its
frontiers, has reinforced the region to fight incursions by rebels or drug
traffickers.

Fujimori said the deal was intended to supply Colombia's biggest rebel
army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. He said the guns
were obtained using a false order letter by a former Peruvian military
official in Amman. The weapons were loaded onto a hired Russian-made
Ilyushin plane and flown via the Canary Islands and Guyana.

The guns were dropped in southern Colombia, and the plane continued to the
Peruvian jungle town of Iquitos, purportedly to collect timber, Fujimori
said. Instead, it picked up drugs.

Such drug and arms trading played a role in Clinton's choice to visit
Cartagena.

The resort is also home to one of the largest internal refugee communities,
known as Nelson Mandela City, in northern Colombia. Across the country,
more than 1.1 million people have fled their homes to escape the effects of
the long-running civil war.

Diplomatic sources see the choice of Cartagena for Clinton's visit as a
tacit admission that the government does not have full control of the
capital, Bogota, where guerrilla factions and notoriously violent drug mobs
have detonated car bombs during the past year.