ANTI-NARCOTICS PLANS REVIEWED BY COLOMBIAN HEAD, US OFFICIALS

CARTAGENA, Colombia - President Andres Pastrana met with two top Clinton
administration officials yesterday to coordinate Washington's $1.3 billion
anti-narcotics initiative.

The meeting with Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House National Drug
Control Policy Office, and US Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering came
the same day that Pastrana approved the extradition of an accused drug
trafficker to the United States.

McCaffrey and Pickering told a press conference after their session with
Pastrana that much work remained to be done in determining where some of
the funds should go.

Under the new aid package, the United States will train Colombian
anti-narcotic army troops and provide them with combat helicopters to seize
cocaine- and heroin-producing plantations from leftist rebels and
right-wing paramilitary groups, which have a lucrative protection rackets
going.

But the package, approved by Congress and signed by President Clinton last
month, also includes more than $400 million for nonmilitary projects such
as alternative crop development, McCaffrey pointed out.

The delegation returned to the United States yesterday afternoon.

The trip helped lay the groundwork for Clinton's Aug. 30 visit to Colombia.
It will be the first Colombian visit by a US president since George Bush's
in 1990.

Yesterday's meeting comes less than a week after 83 US Special Forces
personnel began training Colombian soldiers at a base in Colombia's
Amazonian jungle.

Also yesterday, Pastrana signed an order for accused drug trafficker
Alberto Orlandez Gamboa to be extradited to the United States to stand trial.

Colombia's Supreme Court this week had cleared the way for the extradition
of Gamboa, identified by US officials as one of Colombia's most ruthless
drug traffickers.

Meanwhile, Colombia's most-feared death squad leader has alleged that US
anti-narcotics agents sought to enlist his outlaw paramilitary gang to
combat drug traffickers, Reuters reported.

In a television interview late Wednesday, Carlos Castano, leader of the
ultra-right paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, said the
US Drug Enforcement Administration sent him a message asking him to force
Colombian drug traffickers to surrender to US justice.

The plan, he said, was also a way of eroding the economic mainstay of
powerful Marxist rebel factions, whom US and Colombian authorities accuse
of funding a long-running uprising from the booming cocaine and heroin trade.

In Washington yesterday, the DEA declined to comment on the allegations.

"The DEA ... sent me a message and through that there was a possibility of
ending narco-trafficking in Colombia," Castano said Wednesday, speaking
with RCN television in his stronghold in northern Cordoba province.

"I received a call saying the DEA was opening the doors so that Colombian
drug traffickers could surrender to US justice and ... it needed a
significant force in Colombia that would induce these people to take that
decision," added the ultra-right warlord.

Sectors of the US administration have called on President Andres Pastrana
to crack down on Castano's paramilitary group, who allegedly enjoy backing
from the military in their "dirty war" against suspected leftist
sympathizers. In practice, however, little has been done.

Despite Castano's claim Wednesday that he was an "enemy of drugs,"
Colombian and US officials have accused him of funding his
counterinsurgency crusade with drug money.

Castano's comments, however, renewed suspicion that US agencies have been
carrying out secret operations behind the back of the Colombian government
and the US Congress.

"When the United States is escalating military involvement in Colombia,
there are serious concerns about the nature of the US engagement and fears
about covert operations and escalating paramilitary activity," said
Winifred Tate, Colombia specialist at the non-governmental Washington
Office on Latin America.