RADAR GAP HELPS COLOMBIA DRUG TRADE

Closed Base Opens Window Of Opportunity

NEIVA, Colombia -- Drug-laden aircraft have had a field day sneaking out of
Colombia over the Pacific Ocean since the United States closed a major
airbase in Panama last year, ending constant radar surveillance of western
Colombia, the defense minister said Friday.

Although a temporary gap in coverage was expected when U.S. flights out of
Panama came to an end, Colombian authorities seem alarmed by the extent of
the problem. An unfortunate ''window of opportunity'' has been thrown open
for the drug trade, Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez said.

That window is supposed to close once the U.S. military can improve a base
in Manta, Ecuador, to handle heavy, radar-bearing aircraft to cruise the
Pacific coast, U.S. officials say. But improvements at the base will take
many months, and work hasn't even yet begun.

Ramirez said the lack of radar coverage in western Colombia is only one of
several challenges facing authorities as they mount a campaign against the
drug trade and the leftist guerrillas who protect it.

Rebels, distressed at the growing air power of Colombia's security forces,
have taken to firing anti-tank missiles at low-flying military aircraft, he
said.

In the past month, guerrillas in southeast Colombia have shot at aircraft
eight times with the missiles, known as RPG-7s, he said. None were hit.

Ramirez also predicted that angry coca farmers may soon launch marches to
protest aggressive coca eradication efforts, as they did in mid-1996, when
violent protests forced a temporary halt to aerial spraying.

Ramirez offered an impromptu evaluation of Colombia's counter-drug efforts
during visits to an airbase in this city, 140 miles southwest of Bogota, and
to a 7,500-foot-high, sheer Andean slope containing poppy, a wine-red flower
that produces a latex gum used in making heroin.

Less Coverage

Referring to radar coverage of Colombia's skies, Ramirez said
counter-narcotics efforts have suffered since the closing last May of Howard
Air Base in Panama, which the Pentagon used to deploy sophisticated radar
aircraft to crisscross the skies of Colombia and fill in gaps from radar
stations on the ground.

In testimony before Congress last year, Ana Maria Salazar, the Pentagon's
deputy assistant secretary for drug enforcement policy, acknowledged that
there would be an initial ''degradation'' of antidrug operations because of
the shutdown of Howard. But the discovery that drug traffickers are taking
advantage of the radar gaps and will apparently continue to fly unchecked
for a prolonged period has troubled the Colombian government.

''We have seen a rise in air traffic going west, and basically while no
airbase exists in Manta to obtain more information, the Pacific is totally
uncovered by radar,'' Ramirez said, noting that cocaine-laden airplanes fly
out over the Pacific before heading to Mexico and the western United States.

The U.S. military has won agreement from Ecuador to lengthen and fortify the
Manta base to handle the radar-heavy aircraft -- such as the P-3 Orion and
the AWACs -- but improvements to the airstrip have not yet started.

''If an AWACs landed twice there now, it would rip up the whole runway,''
said one U.S. official, noting the heaviness of the aircraft.

Ecuador's elected president, Jamil Mahuad, was toppled in a military-backed
overthrow Jan. 21, and his successor, former Vice President Gustavo Noboa,
is still organizing his government.

Sophisticated U.S. planes continue to monitor Colombian skies but with less
frequency than before, Ramirez said, and deploying from a greater distance.

''They can't react as fast. They left from Panama before and could get here
quickly. Now they come from Miami,'' he said.

In addition to radar at civilian airports in large cities, Colombia hosts
three U.S.-owned ground-based radar stations in Leticia on the Amazon River,
San Jose del Guaviare and in Marandua in far eastern Vichada state.

'No-Man's Land'

Ramirez described the three radar bases in eastern Colombia as offering
''very limited coverage'' with a radius of less than 200 miles, leaving
''very ample swaths of territory . . . that is no-man's land, that is not
watched.''

A spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees U.S.
military operations in Latin America, would not confirm the radius of the
ground-based radar, saying it was classified information. The spokesman had
no comment on the reported gaps in radar coverage.

Colombia is staggering under a huge increase in domestic coca production,
and is the focus of renewed attention from Washington. Last month, President
Clinton urged Congress to approve an extraordinary two-year plan for $1.3
billion in counter-drug assistance to Colombia.

''We must stand by democracies -- like Colombia, fighting narco-traffickers
for its people's lives, and our children's lives,'' Clinton said in his
State of the Union address Jan. 27.

CIA Director George Tenet told a Senate Intelligence panel Wednesday that
due to better coca varieties and more efficient processing, Colombia
produces ''more than two and a half times'' the cocaine that was previously
estimated.

While Ramirez lamented the lack of radar coverage in Colombia, both he and
National Police Chief Rosso Jose Serrano praised recent donations of three
U.S. Blackhawk helicopters to Colombia.

As dozens of journalists clung to a sheer Andean slope, and sharpshooters
stood guard around Serrano and Ramirez, crop-dusting planes swooped into a
ravine and sprayed a poppy field with herbicide.

As the crop-dusters made multiple passes, the three Blackhawk helicopters
buzzed in the distance, occasionally spraying gunfire into the ravine banks.
The Blackhawks were donated Nov. 1, but officially inaugurated on Friday.

Serrano said the Blackhawks, equipped with up to .50-caliber machine guns,
will make drug traffickers ''tremble with fear'' if they try to shoot at the
fumigation planes in the future.

Last year, police aircraft took fire 35 times from presumed leftist rebels
guarding poppy and coca fields, although no pilots were wounded, said a U.S.
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.