OFFICIALS TRY TO CRACK COCA RING IN COLOMBIA

LA GABARRA, Colombia - The rusted gates to the cemetery were locked,
so Sister Sofia entered by crouching carefully between two strands of
barbed wire, making sure she didn't snag her white cotton habit.

As she straightened herself, the 31-year-old nun looked around the
knee-high grass. Her large, brown eyes fixed on four fresh mounds of
reddish soil.

``These are the ones we buried, and this is where we put them,'' she
said in a calm, soft voice.

On another small hill, three naked branches were planted upright in
the soil.

``This is a married couple here,'' the nun said, her voice quivering
slightly. ``One stick is for the husband, the other for the wife. The
third is for the baby she was carrying. She was six months pregnant.''

When she took her vows to become a Franciscan nun 12 years ago, Sister
Sofia expected to be a teacher, helping to sharpen the minds of
Colombian children. But much of her work over the past year has been
with bodies, not souls.

Almost daily, she retrieves corpses from the banks of the Catatumbo
River or from the muddy road that leads into this remote northern
village near the Venezuelan border. When she buries them, only rarely
is she aware of who they were or how they got caught up in the
constant violence that pervades these jungle hills.

Like most everyone else in La Gabarra, Sister Sofia's life is
dominated by Colombia's brutally entwined conflicts - the booming
trade in cocaine and heroin and the 40-year civil war that is largely
financed by drug money.

Years of government neglect and chronic poverty have turned rural
areas like these into fertile ground for producing much of the cocaine
and heroin that is sold in the United States. It also makes these
residents more vulnerable to the unwanted attention of leftist
guerrillas or right-wing paramilitary groups fighting for control of
the lucrative bounty from coca fields.

To help restore peace to places like La Gabarra, Colombian President
Andres Pastrana and the Clinton administration are lobbying the United
States Congress for $1.6 billion in aid - most of it in military
equipment and additional training - to stop Colombia's drug supply and
to strengthen South America's longest-running democracy.

But it won't be easy. Despite two decades of antidrug interdiction by
U.S. and Colombian authorities, Colombia's drug business is booming.
U.S. drug officials say Colombia produced 520 metric tons of cocaine
last year, more than triple the original estimate of 1998's harvest.

In Bogota and Washington, D.C., the generals fighting the drug war say
they need U.S.-made Blackhawk helicopters, better surveillance
technology, and more American-trained units who can swoop into places
like La Gabarra and eradicate its coca fields. But their strategy
focuses primarily on left-wing guerrillas - not the right-wing
paramilitaries who control and tax the open and flourishing drug trade
in towns like La Gabarra.

Supporters of the Clinton administration plan say the Colombians need
the hardware and expertise if they are to find and eliminate drug
fields and break up the cartels that transport 85 percent of the
cocaine into the United States and a growing amount of heroin.

``I would prefer to see less consumption in the United States or in
Europe, rather than to have more helicopters,'' said Rosso Jose
Serrano Cadena, Colombia's national police chief, who oversees most of
the country's antidrug efforts. ``But we have an obligation to do all
we can with the best equipment and personnel we can get.''

The strategy is to push primarily into the south of the country, prime
coca-growing territory controlled by the 15,000-member Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, the largest insurgent group, also known as
the FARC. Planners expect a minimum of 10,000 people will be driven
from their homes by the new operation, if it is approved.

For 20 years, U.S. advisers have helped the Colombian police and
military identify fields and laboratories where harvested plants are
processed into drugs. Then crop-dusting planes, provided by an
American subcontractor, fumigate the fields. Days later, a special
team of government engineers and scientists is flown in, flanked by
armed troops, to inspect poisoned fields.

Colombia last year received about $300 million in anti-drug funding
from the United States, and American authorities are present in almost
every aspect of the country's anti-narcotics operations. At any one
time there are roughly 200 to 300 U.S. personnel in Colombia,
according to one senior official. They include military trainers, as
well as agents from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Justice
Department, Treasury Department, National Security Agency and the CIA.

By contrast, the United States is currently providing $5 million for
crop substitution and other social and economic projects administered
by the Agency for International Development.

Critics of the current strategy say that more money should go toward
programs that foster rural economic development, a better court system
and basic government services. Fumigation, they add, only worsens a
bad situation for many peasant farmers who resort to growing coca and
poppy - the flowering plant used for heroin - either for economic
survival or because they have been coerced by a rebel group.

``All fumigation does is displace poor people who are already living
under extremely difficult conditions,'' said Ricardo Vargas, director
of the Colombian office of Accion Andina, an umbrella group of
anti-drug activists in the Andean region. ``Once their field is lost,
they'll simply find another place to try again.''

Month by month, more of them are coming to La Gabarra.

Sitting a few miles from the Venezuelan border in an oil-rich swath in
the state of Norte de Santander, there are only two ways to get here:
by canoe along the Catatumbo River, or a spine-shaking 10-hour drive -
most of it over rocks, mud and thick clay - from the city of Cucuta.

The area was once a hub for banana and mango farmers. But over the
last five years, it has become the center of one of the country's
fastest-growing coca-producing regions.

On weekends, La Gabarra's population swells from 2,000 people to
nearly 10,000. Young males, wearing knee-high black rubber boots,
descend from coca fields in the surrounding hills and arrive in one of
the dozens of canoes that taxi them along the Catatumbo River.

They come to the village to party - two days of heavy beer drinking,
games of pool and two nights with some of La Gabarra's 500
prostitutes. In one weekend, a worker can easily spend most of his
week's salary, about $250.

Back on the coca farms, the workers perform backbreaking and often
noxious tasks. Those who pick the leaves are known as ``scrapers,''
for the way they harvest the leaves off plants with their bare hands.
Meanwhile, ``chemists'' assigned to the rustic processing labs are
exposed to large quantities of cement dust, gasoline fumes and
sulfuric acid that are used to make the cocaine base.

``Nobody around here consumes cocaine, probably because everyone knows
the kind of things that go into it,'' said one 20-year-old farm worker
who goes by the nickname ``Diablo.''

Fumigation and other government-sponsored eradication programs haven't
begun here yet, although Colombian and American officials say this
area will be targeted under the new aid plan.

One of the first challenges for authorities will be to update the
government's outdated estimates for the amount of coca grown here.
Officially, the La Gabarra region contains about 8,000 acres of coca.
Most residents and farmers, however, say the figure is closer to 50,000.

Another reason these programs haven't arrived yet is that La Gabarra
remains a volatile zone in the civil war.

For years, Marxist guerrillas controlled La Gabarra as if it were an
independent state, dictating who entered and exited the area, painting
Che Guevara graffiti on walls and creating a tax system that allowed
them to collect a portion of all the coca that was grown and processed
on nearby farms.

But paramilitary squads launched a surprise attack last May, pushing
the guerrillas they didn't kill deep into the jungle or up the
Catatumbo into Venezuela. Then they killed or evicted farmers and
residents suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers.

That's when Sister Sofia began collecting bodies, about 50 of them
from that attack. Three months later, the paramilitaries swept through
the town again, looking for guerrilla infiltrators and killing another
30 residents. They currently are in control of the La Gabarra region,
but the guerrillas still operate in the countryside.

Because of protests by human rights groups over the August massacre,
the Pastrana government sent in 500 soldiers and a unit of the
National Police. The troops remained until late January, leaving
behind 80 police officers who patrol La Gabarra's unpaved streets
twice a day.

There is no mayor here, no school system, banks or courts. The top
government official is Marceliano Castiblanco, the 32-year-old police
captain who sometimes performs civil marriages. But his main concern
is looking out for his officers, who have bunkered themselves in
foxholes and behind sandbags outside a storefront next to Holy Trinity
Church, a block from the convent where Sister Sofia and five other
nuns live.

Despite the police presence, paramilitary troops dressed in civilian
clothes walk confidently through the village, the butts of their 9 mm
pistols jutting from their baggy jeans. Nearly everyone knows where
they live.

By themselves, the police can do little to stop them, since they
provide the only protection against the guerrillas who lurk nearby,
waiting for their chance to reclaim the area.

``We're either waiting for the next guerrilla attack or for the next
(paramilitary) massacre,'' said one officer who requested anonymity.
``There is tension here all day and all night.''

By seizing La Gabarra, the paramilitaries also have taken control of
the area's lucrative cocaine industry, which centers around an outdoor
market that operates every weekend at a bend in the Catatumbo.

Canoes filled with large white bags arrive from the local coca farms.
The bags, which contain coca paste, are sold to drug cartel buyers,
who form one long and orderly line.

Before each sale, a spoonful of paste is held over a burner and melted
to check for its purity. Every transaction is recorded in a spiral
notebook and conducted under the watchful eyes of armed paramilitary
troops, who take a percentage from each sale.

This type of tax system was begun by the FARC to help fund its
operations and has been duplicated by nearly every rebel group.
Experts say these taxes now account for up to 50 percent of all
guerrilla and paramilitary funds and offer strong proof that
Colombia's civil war and its war on drugs have become one and the same.

The system also shows how the country's narcotrafficking industry has
evolved over the last two decades. When the government first began its
joint eradication operations with the United States in the early
1980s, marijuana was the main target. But in the mid-1980s, as
American forces were successfully eliminating coca crops in Peru and
Bolivia, the plants were brought to Colombia.

That gave rise to the notorious cartels like those in Cali and
Medellin, and to drug lords like Pablo Escobar, who were known for
their violence, kidnappings and the cold-blooded efficiency with which
they ran their operations.

One by one, authorities dismantled the cartels, culminating with
Escobar's death in a gun battle with police at one of his hideouts in
1993.

But in breaking up the cartels' vertically-integrated businesses, the
government also opened the way for hundreds of smaller organizations
to step in and take over different pieces of the drug-trafficking
operation. It also allowed insurgent leaders - many of whom had
previously fought against cartels like Escobar's - to pick up where
the drug lords left off.

Standing in the middle of his 40-acre coca field outside La Gabarra,
Luis, a 57-year-old farmer, isn't sure who he'd rather sell to.

When the guerrillas controlled the area, he could count on getting
about $1,500 for each kilo of cocaine paste he sold at market, even
after the rebels collected their tax. It was just enough to pay his 60
farm workers and to feed his family of six. Now, under the
paramilitary system, he gets roughly $900.

But even worse, Luis said, is the anxiety - fear that the
paramilitaries will order them off their land or raise the tax, fear
that guerrillas will return and take revenge on him for paying the
paramilitaries. And the new fear: that fumigation and rapid
intervention by U.S.-trained forces will dramatically escalate the
violence in the region.

Like Sister Sofia, Luis is doing something he'd rather not do. For a
moment, it's enough to make him reconsider coca farming.

``I know that growing coca is bad, and it causes problems not just
here but all around the world,'' said Luis, a former carpenter. ``I'd
much rather grow fruit. But if I can't make money, then we die. And
I'd rather die producing something than die starving.''

Sister Sofia's mother has been so worried about the danger around her
daughter that she once called the mother superior, begging that Sister
Sofia be reassigned to a safer place. The daughter refused.

Soon, however, she will be reassigned, perhaps to a quiet girls school
like the one in Bogota where she used to teach. Maybe then, after
three years in La Gabarra, she can start to heal, can start to forget
the endless war that drugs have brought to this remote village.

``I know this has had an effect on me psychologically and
spiritually,'' she said while walking along the dirt road from the
cemetery back to the town square. ``I've had to deal with a lot, and
it's taken some enthusiasm out of me. But I know it's the same for
everyone else who lives here.''

So what to do next? Congress has begun hearings on the Clinton
plan.

The administration and the Republican congressional leadership both
are pushing for a deal soon, an uneasy alliance but one that enhances
chances of passage.

Yet, there are no guarantees on the outcome, expected in the next six
weeks.

Foremost among the supporters of the plan is Barry McCaffrey, the U.S.
drug czar.

McCaffrey, 57, the youngest four-star general in U.S. history, a man
who served four tours of combat duty, has seized the lead role in
selling the administration plan.

His idea is to give the Colombian military enough airlift capability
to support three U.S.-trained anti-drug battalions in a push into the
heartland of drug cultivation, the guerrilla-controlled Putamayo and
Caqueta regions south of Bogota.

``What I would suggest,'' he said, his right arm pumping to make the
point, ``is these people are three hours flight away from us. There
are a bunch of them. They are important to our economy. They're a
democracy. My purpose is to reduce the drug threat to the American
people. But I would also argue that we would enhance the chance of
peace in doing this Colombia package.''

Among opponents in Congress is Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass. He has
assumed the role of the anti-McCaffrey, organizing Democrats and
moderate Republicans who oppose a military solution.

His idea is to send a blitz of diplomats to push the peace process
between the government and the guerrillas, put more money toward new
crops and a better judicial system, and spend much more anti-drug
money on treatment of addicts at home.

Before his election to Congress, Delahunt was a county prosecutor for
21 years. He helped send hundreds, if not thousands, of people to jail
on drug charges.

``After 21 years of seeing people destroy themselves and destroy those
around them, it really makes this more personal for me,'' he said.
``I've seen the abuser, I've seen families, I've seen friends, I've
seen victims of the abusers. It's such a human story, not just about
dollars and cents.''

He has traveled to Colombia several times, including one risky visit
deep into FARC territory.

For Delahunt, the trips convinced him that the solution in the drug
war didn't rest solely with a military push. The country was too big,
he believed, and the guerrillas too well-financed and equipped as a
result of the taxes they levy on the drug trade.

On his latest trip last month, Delahunt asked a Colombian military
leader about the guerrillas.

``The FARC have borrowed many techniques from the Viet Cong,'' the
commander said. ``They have paths just like the Ho Chi Minh Trail. You
can't find them in the jungle.''

The comparison chilled Delahunt. ``We've got to be real careful and
real thoughtful here.''