COLOMBIA-DRUG WAR

BOGOTA - Lobbying skeptical lawmakers for a huge aid package for Colombia,
U.S. officials repeated it until they were blue in the face: The money,
they insisted, is for fighting drugs, not rebel insurgents.

But on the ground in Colombia, where the proposed aid would finance an
unprecedented military push into jungles flush with rebels and cocaine,
that distinction is not so sharply drawn.

Military officials here see U.S. helicopters and trainers as a way to
battle drugs while simultaneously depriving leftist guerrillas and rival
paramilitary militias of the cash cow that finances their violence.

"They'll keep growing unless we act, gaining more resources to buy arms and
recruit people," Colombian Defense Minister Luis Ramirez said in an
interview Friday.

Destroying the coca crops they tax and protect, Ramirez added, "will
indirectly solve the problem of paramilitary groups and the guerrillas by
taking away their principal source of financing."

The U.S. Congress agreed this week on the outlines of the $1.3 billion aid
package for this South American country that produces 90 percent of the
world's cocaine and a growing amount of its heroin.

While some details need to be finalized, Washington appears firmly
committed to providing dozens of helicopters and Green Beret trainers for
two new 1,000-strong army units that will try to retake Colombia's
coca-growing south.

Once remote areas are "secured," police planes will fumigate the
cocaine-producing plants from the air while civilians officials implement
projects to help poor peasants grow alternative crops or to resettle them
elsewhere in Colombia.

The country's largest guerrilla band, the leftist Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC, sees the aid package as a thinly veiled
counterinsurgency effort. Critics believe it will only inflame a 36-year
conflict and undermine fragile peace talks.

Operations will center in Putumayo, the state on Ecuador's border that
produces two-fifths of the country's coca. One 1,000-man U.S.-trained
counternarcotics unit is already stationed at a base there -- and
surrounded by an estimated 10,000 rebel and paramilitary fighters.

Ramirez downplayed the risk of major fighting as the troops hit the jungles.

"I don't expect to find huge armies of guerrillas and paramilitaries, but a
well-armed group of five people can do a lot of damage to a fumigation
airplane," he said.

Still to be determined in Capitol Hill negotiations are what kind of
helicopters Colombia will receive: sophisticated Blackhawks approved by the
House or cheaper "Hueys" approved in the Senate. Ramirez made a plea for
the Blackhawks, saying their speed, range, high-altitude ability and
troop-carrying capabilities are needed for Colombia's jungle and mountain
terrain.

While predicting minimal bloodshed, Ramirez is bracing for potentially
violent protests when as many as 50,000 residents of Putumayo are driven
from the area in coming months.

Most are migrant coca pickers, he said, although about 10,000 are coca
farmers who'll need assistance -- some of it provided in the U.S. aid
package -- to plant new crops.

Finally, Ramirez rejected predictions that if coca production is eliminated
in Colombia it will simply shift to neighboring countries like Peru,
Ecuador and Brazil.

Those countries, he said, don't have hardened drug mafias and entrenched
guerrillas and paramilitary fighters willing to protect the crops to the death.

"It would be difficult to replicate Colombia's situation in any other
country," he said.