COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT PUSHING FOR AID

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- President Andres Pastrana wants U.S.
taxpayers to spend tens of millions of dollars to wean Colombian
farmers away from growing illicit drug crops by promoting the raising
of cattle, coffee and cotton instead.

Though the bulk of the proposed $1.6 billion U.S. aid plan to fight
drugs in Colombia will be used for destroying coca crops and battling
the leftist rebels who protect them, Colombia will spend a fifth of it
on alternative development and other social programs, Pastrana told
The Associated Press in an interview on Thursday.

Despite his embrace of the U.S. aid package, currently awaiting U.S.
congressional approval, Pastrana insisted he would not allow American
troops to become directly involved in Colmbia's nearly four-decade-old
civil conflict.

More than 100 U.S. military personnel are in Colombia at any one time,
and five were killed in the July crash of an Army RC-7 spy plane in
Putumayo, apparently due to pilot error. Green Berets and Navy Seals
periodically train troops and the Pentagon has helped Colombia's
military improve its intelligence-gathering and combat ability.

``We will never accept the presence of foreign troops in combat,'' he
said.

The U.S. money will underwrite a push by a U.S.-trained
counternarcotics battalion into the guerrilla-dominated southern state
of Putumayo.

Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez said last week that he expects
violent protests by coca growers in Putumayo, where coca cultivation
has exploded by some 300 percent in the past two years and now makes
up one-third of the country's crop.

Pastrana wants U.S. taxpayers to help fund alternative development for
peasant farmers displaced by the eradication campaign.

``There's a very grave social problem and for that reason we've said
we can't look at the problem only as one of fumigation and
eradication,'' Pastrana said. ``We've got to give these people a hand.''

Aggravating a civil conflict that claims 3,000 lives a year and the
pervasively corrupting influence of drug trafficking, Colombia is in
the throes of its worst recession since the 1930s.

Guerrilla attacks occur almost daily. This week, a rebel blockade kept
the highway that links Bogota with the country's second-largest city,
Medellin, closed for four days.

Pastrana nevertheless held out an olive branch to the country's
largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or
FARC, with which he is engaged in peace talks.

He said he would not extradite to the United States a regional
commander accused of murdering three U.S. activists last March.

``This is a crime that will be tried in Colombia,'' Pastrana stressed
during the 45-minute interview in his office in the presidential
palace before heading off for provincial cities where he has proposed
tax-free enterprise zones.

The killing of the activists, kidnapped while visiting an indigenous
group, prompted U.S. diplomats to break off exploratory contacts with
the FARC to discuss possible guerrilla cooperation in weaning farmers
off drug crops.

Colombian prosecutors have filed murder charges against the guerrilla
commander, German Briceno, who remains at large. On Thursday,
prosecutors subpoened Briceno's brother, Jorge, the FARC's No. 2
leader and also a fugitive, to testify in the case.

After taking office in August 1998, Pastrana bet his presidency on
making peace with the FARC. He demilitarized a huge swath of southern
Colombia 15 months ago -- virtually ceding it to the rebels -- as a
condition for talks that have so far proceeded at a glacial pace.

He acknowledged Thursday the rebels' deep involvement in the drug
business but added ``we have no clear evidence that the FARC is a
cartel ... We know it lives off drugs. But we also know that behind it
is a political life of 40 years of insurgency that can't simply be
cast aside.''

Pastrana, 45, said he was optimistic about FARC negotiators' trip to
Europe this month. So far, they've met with Swedish and Norwegian
business and union leaders and say they're hoping for an audience with
Pope John Paul II.

``I think this is the first big step in this entire process of
negotiation,'' he said.

The U.S. drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, told reporters in Mexico
Wednesday that about two-thirds of FARC units ``are engaged in some
way in drug-related criminal activity'' and that the FARC's primary
task in Putumayo ``is to protect coca-growing fields, lab's production
and the movement of cocaine.''

Pastrana said 79 percent of the U.S. aid would help Colombia's
military and police battle drugs in the world's No. 1
cocaine-producing nation. That money would go to buying 63
helicopters, training and equipping two additional 950-man
counternarcotics battalions and upgrading radar that detects drug flights.

Critics of the aid plan, which the U.S. Congress is to begin debating
next week, say Pastrana's alternative development plans are
ill-conceived and still in the draft stage. They predict a bloody
backlash against the push into Putumayo that will only increase FARC
support.