U.S. ANTIDRUG MONEY COULD FIGHT REBELS

Distinction Can Be Unclear In Colombia

Bogota, Colombia - 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.

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 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. A U.S.-trained counternarccotics
unit is already stationed at a base there - and surrounded by an estimated
10,000 rebel and parmilitary 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 who can do a lot of damage to a
fumigation airplane," he said.