U.S. ENVOY SEES NO RISK OF U.S. QUAGMIRE IN COLOMBIA

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) A huge boost in U.S. military aid to fight
Colombia's drug-financed rebels won't draw the United States into a
''terrible quagmire,'' President Clinton's top envoy to the South
American country insisted.

Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, in Bogota to discuss a $1.6
billion anti-narcotics package currently before the U.S. Congress,
said Monday that Washington's role will be limited to providing
equipment and training for Colombia's army.

''The United States has no intention of sending troops to Colombia to
fight,'' the envoy heading a high-level delegation said after meeting
with President Andres Pastrana.

Pickering is a former ambassador to El Salvador, where a limited U.S.
presence ballooned into a major involvement in the country's brutal
civil war during the 1980s.

Seeing parallels to that era and even to Vietnam, U.S. human rights
organizations and some Democratic lawmakers oppose the Colombia aid
plan. They say it will inflame a nearly 36-year conflict and could
draw the United States into the fighting.

About three-fourths of the aid package would pay for 63 attack
helicopters and training for two new army counter-drug battalions. The
units will be tasked with retaking rebel-held southern jungles where
cocaine production is rapidly expanding.

While dismissing the ''terrible quagmire issue,'' Pickering recognized
that leftist rebel units involved in the drug trade would be
legitimate ''objectives'' of Colombian troops receiving U.S. assistance.

''If the guerrillas would get out of the drug trade, they would have
nothing to fear from the United States,'' the envoy added.

New intelligence estimates provided to The Associated Press on Monday
show that cocaine production increased by 20 percent last year in
Colombia already the world's principal supplier.

Land used for coca, the crop used to make cocaine, totaled 465 square
miles up from 393 square miles in 1998, the figures show.

Coca cultivation, meanwhile, is dropping in neighboring South American
countries whose political environments are not as fertile to drug
trafficking as Colombia's.

Drug traffickers began moving their planting operations into Colombia
in the mid-1990s, taking advantage of the lawlessness.

Leftist rebels and their rightist paramilitary foes control nearly
half of the Colombian countryside, and both make huge profits by
taxing peasant growers and protecting drug laboratories and
clandestine airstrips.

From 1998 to 1999, the new CIA estimates show, acreage devoted to coca
bush dropped from 197 square miles to 150 square miles in Peru and
from 147 square miles to 85 square miles in Bolivia.

Overall, cocaine production in the Andean region was down 7
percent.

But Colombia's coca crop is expanding most rapidly in the southern
Putumayo state, where the U.S.-trained army battalions will provide
ground and air protection while crop-dusting planes spray deadly
herbicides on the crops.

Armed resistance is expected from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia the 15,000-strong rebel group that dominates the region.

Colombia's defense minister says he also expects violent protests from
tens of thousands of peasants who depend on coca production for their
livelihood.

Pastrana has said his government expects thousands of those peasants
to be displaced once the cocaine fields are eradicated.

The proposed U.S. aid package includes $176 million for resettling
uprooted peasants and helping them find a legal way to make a living.

Nearly 2 million Colombians have already fled their homes during the
past decade to escape fighting between rebels, paramilitary groups and
the armed forces.

Several international humanitarian organizations, including Catholic
Relief Services and the U.S. Committee for Refugees, are urging
Congress to devote a higher share of the U.S. aid package to
assistance for those already displaced by the fighting.