COLOMBIA GOVERNMENT BRACES FOR PROTEST AGAINST DRUG ERADICATION PLAN

NEIVA, Colombia (AP) The government is bracing from protests when
U.S.-trained troops push into a southern region this year to wipe out
Colombia's largest concentration of cocaine-producing plants, the defense
minister said Friday.

''It's predictable that there's going to be violence and marches,'' the
official, Luis Fernando Ramirez, told U.S. reporters during a trip
highlighting drug eradication efforts.

Spearheaded by a new 950-man narcotics battalion, the government intends to
move shortly into Putumayo State, where authorities estimate about a third
of Colombia's coca crop is grown.

Although U.S. officials don't expect to release 1999 figures until later
this month, they say Colombia's illicit coca crop increased dramatically
over the past year.

One reason is the increasing involvement of leftist rebels who tax and
regulate the drug trade in their vast areas of control. Guerrillas
regularly fire on herbicide-spraying planes in defense of peasants' coca
plots and fields of heroin-producing opium poppies.

On Friday, Ramirez and police director Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano proudly
displayed three new Blackhawk helicopters donated by Washington to help
eradication efforts. Colombia supplies 80 percent of the world's cocaine
and is a growing heroin producer.

They flew journalists to an opium plot in a steep Andean valley near this
southwestern city, depositing the reporters on a 7,500-foot hillside.

As heavily armed police commandos scanned ridges for rebels, a TurboThrush
crop-duster dive-bombed the plot. The reporters and their hosts were
covered in a drizzle of the herbicide glyphosate.

Congress is expected to debate this month a proposed $1.6 billion aid
package for Colombia that would pay for two more battalions, dozens of
attack helicopters and funds for weaning peasants off illegal crops.

Ramirez would not specify a timetable for the army's southern thrust.

President Andres Pastrana's government cannot proceed, he said, without a
comprehensive strategy for dealing with the tens of thousands of peasants
living in the state who depend on coca income to feed their families.

Without providing alternatives, the potential exists for unrest far worse
than 1996 riots by tens of thousands coca growers in adjacent Caqueta State
in which at least six people were killed protesting aerial eradication.

The strategy for aggressive aerial fumigation of coca plots in Putumayo is
expected to include alternative crop programs.

Human rights and U.S. church groups insist that the U.S. aid package will
fuel human rights abuses in the areas where the counterdrug battalions operate.