US UPS ANTE ON COLOMBIA'S DRUGS

Congress could vote on a $1.6 billion
package that is expected to be approved as early as this week.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA-By post-cold-war logic, Colombia's guerrilla war should
have ended some time in the nineties, as other ideological conflicts in
Latin America did. Colombia's war has not merely dragged on; it has
intensified. The reason?

In recent years, the country's insurgent parties have built up a sizable war
chest via close association with cocaine and heroin traffickers. Through
"taxation" of drug production and charging for crop protection and other
services, Colombia's guerrillas - and increasingly the much-feared
paramilitary groups - have built up an annual income estimated at $500
million. With this backdrop of a drug-fueled war, the US is proposing a $1.6
billion aid package for Colombia - aimed primarily at eradicating drug
crops, but many observers worry cash will be used against guerrillas. In
Colombia, most people take it as a given that warfare and narcotics
production are closely intertwined, and that until the two are uncoupled a
conflict with terrible civilian costs is likely to continue.

Recognizing the close link between drugs and combat, critics say the
increased US role in antinarcotics operations in Colombia risks putting the
US on the road to another Vietnam. And to fanning the flames of war.

"If the guerrillas' expectation is that [the stepped-up aid] means more
military action against them - and that is what they have said - then they
will certainly intensify their own military potential and action," says
Alvaro Calderon, an international-relations specialist at Bogota's Jorge
Todeo Lozano University.

But Washington discounts those fears. "We would still have no more military
personnel than we had in 1999, or for that matter in '98, '97, or '96," says
a senior US Embassy official in Bogota. The "ground rules" forbidding any US
personnel from going on operations with the Colombian military also would
not change. "That means military, DEA, anybody here is working in a liaison
capacity.

That's very different from the 'next Vietnam.' "

However, US officials acknowledge that the Colombia question is not black
and white.

American assistance, they say, could be funneled into antiguerrilla
operations to the extent that the rebels maintain their ties to the drug
trade.

For the Colombian government, the US money is a keystone of President Andres
Pastrana's $7 billion "Plan Colombia" (about half of which is funded by
Bogota itself). The peace initiative highlights military muscle-building and
rural development as the means to forcing rebel armies to negotiate a
settlement in the country's 40-year civil conflict.

The US aid package, largely designed to train and equip the Colombian
military to strike the country's soaring cocaine crop, was approved by the
House Appropriations Committee on Thursday. It could reach a full House vote
as early as this week, and is expected to pass despite opposition from
fiscal conservatives. Critics in Colombia fear the immediate risk is an
intensification of the war - especially with the plan's military aid coming
from the US. Others say the social and rural-development aspects are so far
only laudable ideas without concrete projects, and are thus a recipe for
corruption. On the other hand, officials present the US package as a
challenge to Colombia's rebels, especially to the largest organization, the
Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), to prove their stated desire to
disengage from supporting the drug trade.

"If the FARC is serious about getting away from the narcotics business, then
the alternative development in this plan should be of interest to them,"
says one US official. "If the guerrillas [so] choose, they don't have to
continue to protect the narcos, [but] if they do ... this [aid] will be used
against them."

About three-fourths of the US money is earmarked for the Colombian
military - new high-tech helicopters, training of additional antinarcotics
battalions - but it also includes $90 million for alternative development
programs to wean farmers from coca.

The US warning echoes the position of President Pastrana, who walks a thin
line, pushing both a more capable war-fighting military and peace
negotiations set to resume again April 9. Yet while it doesn't satisfy the
surprisingly numerous Colombians who openly wish for a direct US military
intervention, it also alarms those who fear an intensification of fighting.
International human rights groups led by Human Rights Watch in Washington
are also lobbying Congress, focusing on the Colombian Army's poor past human
rights record and evidence that it has tolerated paramilitary groups.
Bogota's daily El Espectador in February published a four-page investigation
of the 1997 massacre of 49 people in Mapiripan, Colombia, at the hands of
paramilitary soldiers.

It found that the massacre was planned by a Colombian Army colonel who was
receiving training from American Green Berets. US officials say they
recognize the human rights issue's gravity, but insist the Army's commitment
to cleaning up past performance changed after Pastrana took office 18 months
ago. "We are able to work with the armed forces because they now have a ...
commitment at the top to put an end to human rights abuses," says the
embassy official.

What is encouraging, according to Colombian drug policy expert Sergio Uribe,
is that the FARC appears to recognize that its pact with the drug trade is
zapping its political legitimacy.

"They need a peace settlement that gets them away from the drug trade," says
Mr. Uribe. And they know it."