COLOMBIA HAS GROWN INTO AMERICA'S NARCOTICS NIGHTMARE

Colombia -- Nearly half the world's supply of cocaine originates within 150
miles of this isolated Colombian military outpost on the Putumayo River.
So, when Lt. German Arenas and his anti-drug troops recently set out by
boat, they knew that finding a target would be the easy part.

Four hours later, his squadron of young marines stopped and marched into
the equatorial wilderness, guns at the ready.

By nightfall, they had found three crude cocaine-processing laboratories in
the open jungle; more than 6,000 seedlings of a new, more potent variety of
coca plant; a half-dozen large fields brimming with ripening coca bushes;
and four hapless peasants.

Still, after they had destroyed as much as they could, arrested the
peasants and headed back downriver, the soldiers left behind at least 200
more labs hidden in the dense, trackless jungle and thousands more acres of
coca plants, visible from the air everywhere across southern Colombia.

To the growing alarm of the Clinton administration, which has been
bankrolling much of the anti-drug fight here, coca production in Colombia
has more than doubled in the past five years.

Using recent satellite images, U.S. officials estimate that the country now
grows or processes more than 500 tons of cocaine a year, or some 90 percent
of the world's supply, and that Putumayo and Caqueta provinces are
responsible for two-thirds of that.

As in many parts of southern Colombia, the army and the police dare not
send spray planes and helicopters to eradicate the fields here, because the
instant they appear, the aircraft invariably draw ground fire from the
Marxist guerrilla forces that thrive on the drug trade.

The principal rebel group, the 15,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, has been fighting the Colombian government since the
mid-1960s, financing its war for most of that time with kidnappings and
extortions.

Yet that has changed sharply in recent years. With the smashing of the
notorious Medellin and Cali cartels, the guerrillas gained greater access
to a far more lucrative source of income: coca and heroin. Now the rebels
provide protection and support to the dozens of smaller trafficking groups
that have sprung up to replace the cartels, and they are earning, by the
Colombian government's estimate, more than $1 million a day.

That, in turn, has blurred the lines of what was once painted in relatively
simple terms as an ideological battle between a pair of left-wing
insurgencies that enjoy almost no popular support and a flawed but
functioning democracy.

Along the way, the focus of the conflict has shifted, so that while the
government still controls most of the country's territory, the war itself
is increasingly being fought over cocaine and heroin.

The U.S. predicament

On one side is the popularly elected government of President Andres
Pastrana and its thin and poorly trained security forces. On the other are
the increasingly well-armed and richly financed leftist guerrillas.

Equally menacing are the right-wing death squads that have a long history
of collusion with elements of the Colombian military and also deal in drugs.

"It is the only self-sustaining insurgency I have ever seen," said Gen.
Charles E. Wilhelm, who is responsible for Latin America as commander in
chief of the U.S. Southern Command. "There is no Cuba in back of it; there
is no Soviet Union in back of it. It is this delicate merger of criminals,
narco-traffickers with insurgents."

After nearly a decade of trying with little success to give government
forces the edge in this confrontation, the White House and Congress are on
the verge of the biggest gamble yet: a $1.6 billion package over two years
that would beef up anti-drug training for the Colombian police and military
and provide better equipment for their forces, including more than five
dozen helicopters.

Critics in the United States and in the region worry that Washington is
embracing an unrealistic game plan. They say that Colombia lacks a concrete
strategy for quickly getting the job done, that attacking cocaine at the
source will be more difficult in Colombia than it was in neighboring
countries, and that ultimately U.S. military advisers will be drawn into
the broader war between the guerrillas and the government.

In the jungle and in the farming villages, the distinction that the
Pentagon and the State Department try to draw between arming an anti-drug
war and avoiding Colombia's long-running civil conflict is blurred. The
drug trade finances both the leftist insurgents and their rivals, the
paramilitary death squads, who operate with the tacit support of Colombian
army units.

"When people are shooting at you, it is hard to determine their immediate
affiliation," said William Ledwith, director of international operations
for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

"Does it really make a difference if you are attacked by the FARC, the ELN,
by paramilitaries or by a gang of narcotics traffickers wanting to defend
their laboratories?" he asked, using the acronyms for the guerrilla groups.
"To me, all the bullets are the same."

The rapid expansion of coca production in Colombia is in large part a
consequence of two developments. One is what is known as the "balloon
effect" -- the reappearance of a problem in a new place after it has been
squeezed out of another -- which followed successful U.S.-led campaigns
against coca growers in Peru and Bolivia.

Crucial mistake

The other, more recent development was a crucial miscalculation by Pastrana.

Elected on the promise of ending the debilitating war against the
guerrillas, he tried to lure them to the negotiating table in 1998 by
granting the leading guerrilla group control of a chunk of territory larger
than Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.

The guerrillas quickly turned it into an armed protectorate and a
coca-growing factory, and the peace talks have floundered.

The breakup of the powerful Medellin and Cali cartels -- the DEA once
called the latter "the most dangerous criminal group in history" --
initially was expected to cripple the Colombian drug business.

Their demise actually spurred coca cultivation in other, more remote
regions of the country and fostered unholy alliances between new drug gangs
on one side and the leftist guerrillas and paramilitary forces on the other.

Just five years ago, Putumayo and neighboring Caqueta province were perhaps
the poorest and most neglected areas of the country. Today, they have
become a paradise for coca growers, with more than 100,000 acres cultivated
under the protection of the largest rebel group, FARC.

Colombian trafficking groups not only have pushed aside Peru and Bolivia,
the traditional sources of raw coca leaf, they have moved aggressively into
the heroin business, replacing Southeast Asia and Afghanistan as the source
of most of the heroin seized in the United States.

For the Colombian military, that is a formidable challenge. Although the
national armed forces look strong on paper, with more than 100,000
soldiers, barely a third of them are ready for fighting.

Under a widely criticized law that reflects the class prejudice and
favoritism that run through Colombian society, high school graduates are
forbidden to participate in combat.

The Colombian 90th Marine Battalion, to which Arenas, 28, and his teen-age
troops belong, patrols more than 1,500 miles of waterways in a network of
four major rivers with barely 1,000 men and a handful of boats.

"For an area like this, a thousand men is nothing," Arenas said as his
gunboat, the Leticia, equipped with two cannons, two machine guns and a
pair of grenade launchers, chugged up the Putumayo River, only the sound of
its motors breaking the quiet. "Even though my guys are motivated, skilled
and happy to be here, they face a lot of limitations."

Turns of events

The situation in Colombia had been eroding throughout the 1990s. But in
1994, just as the FARC was beginning its big advance, the Clinton
administration's relations with the Colombian government went into a deep
freeze, after Washington received information that President-elect Ernesto
Samper had accepted $6 million in campaign contributions from drug cartels.

Normal ties resumed with the election of Pastrana in 1998. Yet it was not
until the FARC launched a nationwide offensive that brought it within
striking distance of Bogota last July that the real dimensions of the
crisis began registering in Washington.

Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the director of the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy and a former commander of U.S. military forces in Latin
America, was the first to visit, and he immediately began pushing President
Clinton for emergency aid.

That pressure, along with the major rebel action in July, convinced Clinton
of the seriousness of the situation in Colombia.

The biggest single item in the administration's proposed assistance
package, which has been approved by the House and is pending in the Senate,
is 63 helicopters, divided between 33 Hueys and 30 more modern Blackhawks
outfitted with night vision equipment and special armor. As the guerrillas
and traffickers are aware, once training programs for crews and the
construction of hangars are taken into account, the earliest date for
complete delivery of the U.S.-supplied equipment would be late next year.

Nevertheless, the prospect that U.S. aid might soon begin flowing clearly
excites the weary soldiers here. "Tell them we need air support, like the
police get for their operations," said Lt. Gustavo Lievano, the marine
unit's second-in-command. "How much more money are they going to give us to
buy intelligence from informants?" a grizzled sergeant wanted to know.

For some in Washington, the prospect of increased U.S. involvement in
Colombia is viewed much more warily.

"Before we quadruple our military aid and embark on an open-ended, costly
commitment, the Colombian government needs to come up with a workable
strategy," argues Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

"And our own administration needs to explain in detail what its goals are,
what it expects to achieve at what cost over what period of time, and what
the risks are, both to the thousands of Colombian civilians who will be
caught in the middle when the war intensifies and to our own military
advisers there.

"The Colombian government wants a blank check. That is not going to happen."

How Colombians feel

On the Colombian side, a recent poll shows that a majority of Colombians
favor U.S. intervention. "Pastrana has shown that he doesn't know how to
deal with this situation," said Diego Bedoya Hurtado, a Bogota accountant.
"Only the Americans are going to be able to get us out of this mess."

Coca growing in Peru and Bolivia has been cut by more than half following
increased cooperation between their governments and the United States.
Successful crop-substitution programs are one reason, but Peruvian
President Alberto Fujimori's policy of shooting down any drug plane flying
over Peruvian territory has been a huge deterrent, as have stepped-up
eradication efforts.

Thus the bulk of coca production has shifted to Colombia, where most of the
processing and marketing operations already were located. Feeling
relatively safe on their native soil, the coca-growing syndicates have
invested heavily in developing new, more potent strains, some of which can
be harvested in as few as 60 days.

Smaller, more vulnerable trafficking groups have gravitated toward
insurgent-dominated areas like this one, paying a tax on their drug income
to the guerrillas in return for protection from the Colombian government's
anti-drug campaign.

In 1996, a U.S. intelligence summary concluded that, although guerrilla
units were selling protection "in virtually all departments where
traffickers operate," only a few "probably are involved more directly in
localized, small-scale drug cultivation and processing."

That has changed dramatically over the past 18 months, after the Colombian
government gave a chunk of territory to the FARC. That step in late 1998
was intended as a gesture of good faith to lure the rebels into peace
negotiations.

FARC leaders quickly converted their area, bitterly referred to by locals
as "Farclandia," into a major cocaine production center, complete with
airstrips for exporting the product. Now, the second largest left-wing
guerrilla group, the Army of National Liberation, known by the Spanish
acronym ELN, wants its own demilitarized zone.

In recent interviews in Caqueta, the province adjoining the FARC haven,
peasants -- none of whom were willing to be identified -- also complained
of being ordered by FARC commanders to grow coca. Other peasant farmers in
the same region who were already cultivating coca say they are now forced
to sell to a guerrilla-controlled monopoly at a price that is about half
what their crop would have fetched on the open market a year ago.

The paramilitary death squads controlled by Carlos Castano and closely
allied with elements of the Colombian Armed Forces have acted no
differently. These paramilitary troops originally were protected by law,
defending businesses and landholders from leftists guerrillas, and aiming
their assaults at civilians they suspected of aiding the rebels.

The paramilitary units lost their legal status more than a decade ago and
moved heavily into the drug trade. Three years ago, the DEA described
Castano "as a major narcotics trafficker in his own right," and in a
startling interview on Colombian television on March 1, the paramilitary
chieftain acknowledged that the bulk of his group's funds now come from drugs.

Situation worsens for public

As the conflict deepens, the situation for ordinary Colombians has grown
worse. At least 35,000 people have been killed over the past decade, and
more than 1.5 million people, most of them peasants, have been forced to
leave their homes.

"First the paramilitaries came and told us to leave or they would kill us,
and then when we were resettled, the guerrillas came and at gunpoint forced
two of my sons to join them," said Javier Gonzalez, a refugee from Cordoba
province in the northwest. "For the past three years, we have been sent
from one place to the next but, everywhere we go, we are mistreated and
abused."

In addition, at least 2 percent of Colombia's 40 million people, some
800,000 mostly middle-class people, have left the country since 1996, most
of them for the United States. Investors are also fleeing in the face of
extortion demands by guerrilla and paramilitary groups, and unemployment is
at a record rate of one worker in five after a recession that shrank the
economy by more than 5 percent last year.

A recent poll shows Colombians worry most not about the drug trade but
about the violence that increasingly pervades their daily lives. Colombia's
murder rate is 10 times that of the United States, and its kidnapping rate
is the highest in the world, thanks in large part to spectacular mass
abductions like the ELN's raid on a Roman Catholic church service in Cali
last year that resulted in more than 150 hostages.

"It feels like we are besieged, with an enemy just outside the castle walls
waiting to pluck anyone who comes into their grasp," a doctor who lives in
Cali said recently. "There is no longer anywhere you can go where you are
safe."

Clinton's dilemma

For the Clinton administration, the unraveling of the situation in Colombia
has created an uncomfortable dilemma. While the United States is determined
to diminish the flow of cocaine and heroin into U.S. cities, especially
with an election looming, it does not want to be pulled into what could
only be a long, bloody and expensive campaign in Latin America's longest
running guerrilla war.

"The situation on the ground in Colombia is increasingly complicated, but
our policy is very straightforward," Brian Sheridan, the deputy secretary
of defense for strategic operations and low intensity conflict, said
recently in testimony to a congressional panel. "We are working with the
Colombian government on counter-narcotics programs. We are not in the
counterinsurgency business."

For Colombian military officers in the field, there is no such distinction.
"To me, they are one and the same thing," Arenas said, clearly puzzled that
anyone would suggest there is any difference between drug traffickers and
guerrillas.

And while the Clinton Administration is talking only of a two-year program,
focused on the delivery of helicopters and a training program for pilots,
top Colombian military officials lay out a six-year campaign.

They envision being able to break the FARC's control of coca-growing areas
in the south in two years, after which the Colombian armed forces would
focus on the Guaviare region in the country's heartland for two years and
then on northern areas dominated by paramilitary groups.

U.S. officials argue that the only way the government can regain control of
Putumayo and Caqueta provinces is through a coordinated effort in which the
armed forces clean out guerrilla concentrations and are followed by police
units that fumigate coca fields by air.

Very little in the recent battlefield record of the Colombian army and air
force inspires confidence in that kind of plan. In fact, throughout the
1990s the United States funneled most of its aid and training to the
Colombian National Police because U.S. officials regarded the armed forces
as a bloated, corrupt and largely defensive body.

The U.S. approach is also likely to exacerbate a long-standing debate about
the most effective way to reduce drug cultivation. While aerial spraying is
traditionally favored by the United States, many in Colombia argue that
crop-substitution programs similar to those that proved successful in
Bolivia and Peru are more effective ways to wean peasant farmers from drug
crops.

The aid package now before the U.S. Congress includes a hefty increase in
financing for such "alternative development" programs, from $5 million to
$115 million. But the experience of the National Plan for Alternative
Development, the Colombian government's crop-substitution agency, makes
clear that coordinating aerial spraying and crop substitution programs
requires a precision that has thus far eluded U.S. and Colombian experts.

Unholy ties seen

Human rights groups see another, equally troubling problem in the White
House aid package. They point to a long history of cooperation between some
Colombian military units and Castano's right-wing death squads, or
paramilitaries.

According to the Colombian prosecutor's office, the death squads killed
nearly 1,000 people in more than 125 massacres in 1999. Recent reports by
Human Rights Watch and the United Nations and investigations by Colombian
prosecutors have singled out specific Colombian military units and
commanders as having provided support to the death squads or to have failed
to heed calls for help from villages under attack.

To curb such abuses, Congress in 1997 passed the Leahy Amendment, which
prohibits the United States from providing assistance to any Colombian
military unit that violates the human rights of Colombian citizens in its
operations.

As a result, some Colombian battalions have been disqualified from
receiving U.S. aid, new units have been formed and instruction in human
rights has become a required part of Colombian military training. Yet
critics of the Clinton administration's aid package insist not only that
those restrictions be strengthened, but that new oversight mechanisms be
included.

Even without the aid package, the United States' commitment in Colombia is
already growing. The Colombian battalions patrol the rivers of southern
Colombia in U.S.-made Pirana vessels, and last year a Riverine War School
opened in Puerto Leguizamo with some classes taught by visiting U.S.
instructors.

All told, U.S. aid to Colombia has grown by 3,500 percent since 1993,
according to McCaffrey. That makes Colombia the largest recipient of U.S.
aid outside the Middle East, even without the additional equipment and
training programs under discussion.

Washington clearly hopes that such a sizable one-time injection of new aid
will prove sufficient for the Colombian government to regain the upper hand.

Fernando Cepeda Ulloa, a former minister of the interior and ambassador to
the United States, was speaking for many Colombians, and some Americans,
when he recently suggested that a pair of fundamental questions remain.

"Is the elimination of narcotics trafficking the key to achieving peace, or
is the achievement of peace necessary to the elimination of narcotics?" he
asked. "That is a dilemma that has to be analyzed and contemplated."