CLINTON SEES COLOMBIA AID SUPPORT

WASHINGTON--Acknowledging the threat guerrilla groups and drug
traffickers pose to the Colombian government, President Clinton today
predicted bipartisan congressional support for his $1.6 billion aid
package for Bogota.

"There's always a risk when you go out on a limb to try to save a
neighbor and help people to help themselves, that it won't work,"
Clinton said hours before a scheduled meeting with Colombian President
Andres Pastrana in the Oval Office. "I believe the risk in the
investment is something that we ought to do."

Clinton said Colombia's democracy is "under the greatest stress
perhaps in its history," and held out the struggle in that large South
American nation as an example regimes across the globe will face in
the 21st century.

"If you look at Colombia, that's in sort of the intersection of
narco-traffickers and the political rebels," he said, "you see a
picture of what you might see much more of in the 21st century world
... enemies of nation-states forming networks of support across
national borders and across otherwise discrete interests, like
narco-traffickers, organized criminals and political terrorists,
weapons dealers.

"One of the things that we have to do is to try to help them gain some
measure of control over their own country again," Clinton said.

Clinton's two-year, $1.6 billion aid package will provide training for
special counternarcotics battalions and 30 Black Hawk and 33 Huey
helicopters for counterdrug activities. Funds also will be used for
radar, aircraft and airfield upgrades, and improved intelligence gathering.

Several Latin American analysts have questioned whether the assistance
would worsen Colombia's civil war, in which leftist guerrillas have
been sparring with government soldiers for decades.

But the plan appears to have substantial congressional support,
especially among Republican lawmakers.

"I'm going to work to build a bipartisan consensus on this, to take
this out of politics, because I believe that this is not only
something we should do for our friend and neighbor in a country that
is either the production or transit point for about 80 percent of the
cocaine that gets dumped in this country, but also, if you will, a
test run for the kind of challenges that my successors and our people
will face in the years ahead," Clinton said.