HELPING 'POOR COLOMBIA' SPECIAL CHALLENGE FOR U.S.,
CLINTON'S DRUG CZAR SAYS

BOGOTA, Colombia -- White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey, in the
world's leading cocaine-producing nation to promote a huge U.S. aid
package, said yesterday that Colombia's suffering has been ignored for
too long.

"The attention of the world has been carefully fixed on Kosovo and
Bosnia," he told a news conference after meeting with President Andres
Pastrana. "Here we are three hours flight from Miami."

McCaffrey's visit to the South American country comes as Congress
debates the Clinton administration's proposed $1.6 billion
counternarcotics package for Colombia and its Andean neighbors.

Cocaine and heroin production have soared in Colombia as leftist
rebels and right-wing paramilitary groups protect the trade in return
for huge payoffs from drug traffickers.

"Poor Colombia is facing as many as 25,000 heavily armed (members of)
narco-terrorist organizations," McCaffrey said, using the combined
figure for rebel and paramilitary fighters. "This is a special challenge."

New CIA estimates show a 20 percent increase in cocaine production and
a 23 percent rise in heroin production in Colombia last year. U.S.
officials say the South American country now supplies 90 percent of
the world's cocaine and the majority of the heroin sold in the United
States.

More than half of funds in the proposed U.S. aid package would finance
a Colombian military push into southern regions where drug crops are
expanding most rapidly under guerrilla protection.

Human rights groups and some liberal lawmakers say stepped up U.S.
military aid and training could undermine peace talks with rebels and
draw the United States into decades-old conflict that has claimed more
than 35,000 lives, most of them civilians.

In a report issued yesterday, the U.S.-based organization Human Rights
Watch presented new charges of army links to the paramilitary groups
who routinely kill villagers they suspect to be rebel
collaborators.

Citing still-confidential investigations by prosecutors, the rights
group charged the army set up a new paramilitary squad last year and
that three major brigades have ongoing ties to right-wing death squads.

McCaffrey, a retired general and highly decorated Vietnam war hero,
said complaints against the military have "dwindled to near zero.

Before returning to Washington today, McCaffrey plans to tour a
southern anti-narcotics base where a new, 950-man U.S.-trained army
battalion is based -- the first of three anti-drug units that would be
created with the aid package.

McCaffrey said the military component of the U.S. aid package was
necessary to clear a path through the rebels so that police can
fumigate illegal drug crops. But he stressed that one-fifth of the
funds support human rights and justice reforms, as well as providing
loans to help poor peasants grow legal crops instead of coca or opium
poppies.