COLOMBIA DRUG WAR PUT ON HOLD

TRES ESQUINAS, Colombia - On this military base deep in Colombia's muggy
southern jungle, on the world's cocaine frontier, the air feels thicker
than usual with tension and the fear of death.

It could also just be the imagination at work, because the fact is that
nothing much is going on here these days: no helicopters clattering
overhead with rebels in their sights, no heavily armed soldiers stomping in
and out of transport planes with war smeared on their faces.

This will not be the case in as few as three months, military officials in
the region predict, but for now, as they wait for President Clinton to sign
the bill that will pour $1.3 billion in aid into Colombia to help fight
illegal drug production, activity at the base appears to be at a standstill.

In the Colombian government's plan to attack and eliminate the
narco-traffickers, the Tres Esquinas military base is at the vanguard of
the so-called Push Into The South, the plan to wipe out the vast coca
cultivations in the fecund southern reaches of the country.

The base sits on the border between the thinly populated states of Caqueta
and Putumayo, where well over half of Colombia's coca crop grows and where
rebel armies provide protection for plantations, laboratories, and trade
routes.

According to the plan, the base will be the center of joint armed forces
operations for southern Colombia and home to three US-trained
counternarcotics battalions, each comprising about 950 troops, who will
swoop into the drug-producing area using 18 US-supplied high-tech Blackhawk
helicopters and 42 Huey choppers.

One of the battalions has been trained and ready since September. The
battalion has gone on only nine missions, and most occurred during the
training period last year, said Major Jose Parra, the force's second
commanding officer.

According to Colombian and US officials, delays in the approval of the aid
package now sitting on Clinton's desk forced a temporary scaling back in
the counternarcotics effort. Hardest hit has been the battalion; it is
waiting for the helicopters, which are indispensable to its mission.

"The helicopter provides the element of surprise, the element of mobility,
and the element of mass," said Brigadier General Mario Montoya, chief of
the Southern Joint Task Force, based at Tres Esquinas.

"We demanded a lot from the men in training and we prepared ourselves well,
and then we got stuck like this," said Parra, who froze in the pose of a
runner midstride. "It's like a parachutist ready to jump and he's stopped."

The National Police also have been forced to cut back on spraying
herbicides in recent months because US money didn't arrive as expected,
according to recent news reports. But a US Embassy official said Friday:
"The spraying program has been slightly curtailed, but not to any great
extent."

According to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Colombian
and US officials were forced to make deep cuts in the helicopter program,
laying off dozens of contracted personnel, to enable the spraying program
to remain on schedule.

Last week at Tres Esquinas, the sprawling base seemed like a ghost town.
Wilson Vargas, 26, a soldier, was standing guard at the runway as visiting
journalists were flown in from Bogota.

He said the waiting was frustrating. The soldiers have been honing their
skills, trying to maintain their enthusiasm, fighting the boredom, he said.
The intramural soccer matches, he confided, were fiercely competitive.