COLOMBIA'S WAR ON DRUGS GOES AIRBORNE

U.S. Aid To Improve Firepower

NEIVA, Colombia -- Taking a cue from neighboring Peru, Colombia says
it will force down -- or shoot down -- more aircraft suspected of
carrying narcotics.

The air force has already intercepted 36 suspicious airplanes in the
past two years, shooting six out of the sky and destroying the rest
after they landed, Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez said. The
pace will now quicken, he added.

Colombia is gaining more air power -- including helicopter gunships --
that Ramirez said will help it fight drug smugglers and leftist guerrillas.

"Air strength will mark the difference in the war against both [drug
traffickers and rebels] in the future," Ramirez said.

For decades, the air mobility of Colombia's 110,000-member police and
146,000-member armed forces has been severely deficient.

Colombia is 54 times bigger than El Salvador in territory, but it has
never had the 110 or so helicopters that the Salvadoran military had
during that country's civil war in the late 1980s.

The lack of air mobility meant that isolated columns of Colombian
soldiers could be overrun by guerrilla columns, something that
happened repeatedly from 1996 to 1998. A lack of helicopters made it
hard for reinforcements to arrive at combat sites in time.

Currently, the armed forces have around 90 helicopters. Until four
years ago, lack of spare parts permitted only 35 percent of the fleet
to be airworthy at any given time, military officers said, far lower
than world military standards.

When a system of obligatory public war bonds was imposed in 1996, some
proceeds were used by the air force to improve the airworthiness of
the fleet to around 65 percent, said Maj. Gen. Henry Medina Uribe,
head of the War College, although that rate has fallen slightly.

The number of helicopters may soon soar. A $1.6 billion U.S. aid
package that President Clinton seeks for Colombia would provide the
nation with 30 Black Hawk helicopters and 33 UH-1N choppers, known as
Super Hueys. The helicopters would be lightly armed, serving mainly to
transport counternarcotics battalions, authorities say.

IMPROVING POWER

Even so, Colombia is improving its ability to cast a hail of
high-caliber lead on guerrillas from the air.

The air force now has four operational Black Hawk helicopters
outfitted as gunships, and five more being equipped with the same
high-caliber machine guns and small rockets, Ramirez said.

"Undoubtedly, the balance is changing," said Medina, of the War
College. "And it will change more if the 30 Black Hawks and the UH-1Ns
arrive as part of the aid package . . . It is not the definitive
solution but it is positive."

Other experts noted that insurgents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia (FARC) are already reacting, using primitive anti-aircraft
tactics.

"They shoot up a `curtain of lead,' " Medina said. Instead of firing
directly at oncoming helicopters, "they throw up a curtain that the
helicopter must pass through." One helicopter was recently hit 27
times but kept flying.

Beneficiaries of largess by the U.S. Congress, Colombia's national
police have a fleet of at least 47 helicopters, three of them Black
Hawks bristling with machine guns that were inaugurated at a base at
Neiva last week.

The armed helicopters protect crop dusters as they spray herbicide on
coca and poppy fields, which are often guarded by well-armed FARC rebels.

AIR INTERDICTION

While aerial eradication remains a pillar of both U.S. and Colombian
counternarcotics policy, officials say a more aggressive shoot-down
policy against suspicious aircraft could diminish the threat that coca
farmers may rise up in anger at their destroyed crops.

"I think that the policy of air interdiction is the most efficient by
far," said Ramirez, the defense minister.

Farmers may be able to grow coca, and traffickers may be able to
process it into cocaine, he said, but if smugglers can't get it out of
the country, coca prices will plummet.

That's what happened in Peru, when that nation's air force began to
use U.S. electronic intelligence to identify drug-laden aircraft in
1991. By mid-1998, Peru had shot down or destroyed on the ground 98
aircraft.

"The air bridge between Peru and Colombia has been destroyed," Ana
Maria Salazar, deputy assistant secretary of defense for drug
enforcement policy, said in late November. "Instead of 1,000 flights a
year, we're down to 150. Minimal."

With U.S. assistance, Peru and Colombia both devised procedures to
prevent the downing of innocent civilian aircraft -- and subsequent
legal risks.

DRAMATIC IMPACT

Before actually firing on a suspicious aircraft, a senior U.S.
official said, "You radio, you wave, you waggle your wings and you
shoot across the bow." He added that the shoot-down policy has a
dramatic impact. "If pilots think they are going to die, they don't
want to fly."

While Colombian officials say they are eager to attack more planes,
they are hobbled by a dramatic decrease in the U.S. surveillance
flights over Peru, Bolivia and Colombia that provide data to help
track suspicious aircraft.

The number of Pentagon flight hours logged over the three countries
fell 48 percent -- from 2,092 to 1,090 -- between fiscal years 1998
and 1999, a U.S. General Accounting Office official, Jess T. Ford,
told a House panel Jan. 27. Ford indicated that requests from the
Miami-based U.S. Southern Command to the Pentagon for surveillance
flights over Central, South America and the Caribbean were satisfied
only 43 percent of the time in 1999.