COLUMBIAN JUNGLE BASE IS FOCUS OF U.S. ANTI-DRUG AID

TRES ESQUINAS, Colombia--This base in the lush South American jungle
is ground zero for President Clinton's emergency proposal to help fund
a massive expansion of Colombia's anti-narcotics operation.

"This is an island in a sea of guerrillas and narco-traffickers," U.S.
Army Lt. Col. Jan P. Ithier said as he toured the base--where U.S.
special forces troops train and monitor the performance of Colombian
soldiers--with an American delegation last week.

U.S. and Colombian authorities are now engaged in an elaborate round
of salesmanship to promote the $1.6-billion aid package, which Clinton
announced last month, to skeptics in both Washington and Bogota, the
Colombian capital, who charge that heaps of new money and old aircraft
will do little to ease an intractable problem.

Moreover, some fear that despite the United States' insistence that
its soldiers aren't "advising" the Colombians, only training them,
Washington could get sucked into another nation's civil war.

Billed as a way to reduce the drug production of a country that
supplies 80% of the world's cocaine, the aid package could turn out to
be merely "a smoke screen" for fueling Colombia's 40-year battle
against leftist guerrillas, said Winifred Tate, a Colombia specialist
at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit research group.

"This isn't good drug policy, and it isn't good human rights policy. I
think this is going to make everything much worse," she said. While
the Colombian army's role in human rights abuses has diminished in the
past five years, there is increasing evidence of ties between the
military and right-wing private armies that now commit the bulk of
violations against civilians.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana is preaching a very different
message in Washington this week in meetings with Clinton,
congressional leaders and others.

At a speech Wednesday before the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Pastrana
said the U.S. can't afford to turn its back on the problem of rampant
drug production in Colombia. In U.S. cities and the Colombian
countryside alike, he said, "the stakes are too high."

U.S. Army Secretary Louis Caldera and Tom Umberg, the deputy of White
House drug czar Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, visited Colombia last week to
determine how the money--if approved by Congress--would be spent.

Although the Tres Esquinas base is generally off-limits to the media,
U.S. officials invited a Los Angeles Times reporter to accompany them
on their visit.

Members of the delegation stressed that Colombia has become the
glaring weak spot in the U.S. war on drugs. Although recent increases
have made Colombia the No. 3 recipient of U.S. aid--last year,
Washington provided $289 million in anti-narcotics assistance--the
country's production of cocaine and heroin has risen sharply in the
last few years.

New CIA estimates scheduled for release soon are expected to show that
cocaine production is 300% higher than current estimates, officials
say.

The U.S. delegation's trip was aimed chiefly at verifying Colombia's
progress in reining in drug traffickers. But U.S. officials also faced
skeptical questioning from Colombian military officers and media in
Bogota.

Why, one officer asked Caldera, doesn't the United States move more
aggressively against Colombia's guerrillas by exposing them for "what
they really are"--terrorists?

A local reporter suggested that the United States is filling the aid
package with beat-up old Huey helicopters and "just giving whatever
you don't want to Colombia."

And another reporter wanted to know what assurances the United States
had that Colombia's military and its police force, institutions prone
to corruption in the past, would use the new infusion of aid for
fighting drugs. Caldera appeared unfazed. "We trust the Colombian
leadership," he said.

The 60-plus helicopters the Clinton administration wants to give
Colombia for anti-narcotics operations include both new and used
aircraft, all in fine working order, Caldera said.

"We don't consider these helicopters to be scraps," he
added.

As for the guerrillas who control large swaths of Colombia's southern
region, Caldera said that the United States wants to pursue anyone
supporting the country's drug trade. With increasing frequency, he
said, that includes the guerrillas, who have financed their attacks on
government forces by extracting millions in "protection money" from
traffickers.

The guerrillas, he said, "made a deal with the devil to run drugs in
order to generate resources. . . . Once we control drug trafficking,
we're going to control violence in this country."

Aiding Pastrana's administration in the fight against traffickers is
"one of the most important things we're doing here in our own
hemisphere," Caldera said in an interview.

If the United States does nothing to help Colombia wage war against
drug producers and traffickers, Caldera said, "you will have a much
worse problem five years and 10 years from now."

Behind-the-scenes differences remain between the U.S. officials and
their Colombian counterparts.

U.S. officials, for example, argued that the Colombian police--who,
unlike the military, are not known for human rights abuses--must more
actively aid the army in anti-narcotics operations, including
intelligence gathering and lab work.

During the delegation's visit to the Tres Esquinas military base,
where Colombia's first anti-narcotics battalion began operations just
last month, U.S. officials were irked to see little sign of a police
presence. "Get them down here!" one U.S. official bluntly told the
national police chief after touring the base. At the same time, U.S.
officials said the Colombians have improved operations at the base,
about 300 miles south of Bogota.

The base is still primitive by U.S. standards, with most of the
Colombian soldiers sleeping outdoors on makeshift cots. But an
operations center once run from an oversized tent is now in a new
warehouse. An underground bunker was built, and a barbed-wire fence is
going up on the perimeter, just a few miles from a town that is
controlled by the country's oldest and largest rebel group, known as
the FARC.

U.S. observers also said that Colombia's soldiers seem to have shed
their ragtag image and assumed a crisper professionalism. They also
said the military appears to be placing a higher premium on human rights.

Further progress in human rights "is necessary and achievable . . . if
every single soldier, down to the lowest-ranking private, appreciates
that due process and respect for human rights are fundamental to the
military's larger mission," Caldera told Colombian officers.