U.S. STEPS UP DRUG WAR IN COLOMBIA

CARLISLE, Pa. - The United States is due to begin training
two new Colombian army anti-drug battalions next spring in a move
political analysts said on Saturday could give Washington a more
direct role in the long-running war against drugs and Marxist rebels.

Gen. Keith Huber, operations director of the U.S. Army's Miami-based
Southern Command, said on Friday that each of the elite units would
comprise some 950 men -- similar to the Colombian army's first
anti-drug battalion set up earlier this year with U.S. know-how at an
estimated cost of some $70 million.

Plans to create the units were outlined months ago but Huber gave the
first firm timetable. He said all three units, together with a joint
U.S.-Colombian military intelligence center would be based in southern
Colombia, a region rife with illegal drug plantations and a stronghold
of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's
largest surviving 1960s rebel army.

Despite some $289 million in U.S. aid last fiscal year, cocaine and
heroin production has spiraled in Colombia. Human rights groups and
some political analysts argue Washington is looking to reverse that
setback by setting up the battalions that will be subject to heavy
U.S. influence and thereby give the Pentagon a much greater say in how
Colombia's three-decade-old war is fought.

``We have been told to get prepared to train (two new anti-drug
battalions) and that will begin next spring. There is no funding as
yet,'' Huber, who served as a Special Forces adviser during the civil
war in El Salvador in the 1980s, told reporters on the sidelines of a
two-day conference about Colombia at the U.S. Army War College in
Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

``This is a war, a conflict that we must win collectively. (Drugs) is
a chemical and a weapon of mass destruction that kills our children
one at a time,'' he added.

Officials in Washington and Bogota accuse Colombia's 20,000 guerrillas
of fueling a two-fold increase in cocaine production and a 20 percent
rise in heroin output over the last four years. They say the rebels
earn some $600 million a year in drug profits to bankroll an uprising
that has claimed more than 35,000 lives in just 10 years -- a charge
the guerrillas deny.

``The enemy in Colombia is a business enterprise and if you want to
look at how to defeat that you must look at how they grow (the drugs)
process it and transport it,'' Huber said.

Despite on-going wrangles in the U.S. Congress that have blocked a
planned $1.5 billion, three-year aid package to Colombia, the creation
of the new units seems unlikely to be delayed. The necessary funding
could be drawn from U.S. Department of Defense coffers with little or
no accountability to Congress.

Rights groups see the creation of the battalions as the start of a
much more significant U.S. role in Colombia. Washington already has
some 220 U.S. personnel, including soldiers and advisers, in Colombia
at any one time.

``This represents a quantitative and a qualitative shift. This creates
from scratch U.S.-trained units and they (the United States) will be
maintaining contacts through the joint intelligence command,'' said
George Vickers, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin
America (WOLA), who also attended the conference.

``It's a mechanism that could give Southern Command not necessarily a
determining role but certainly a strong influence over what will be
done,'' he said.

Gen. Ernesto Gilibert, sub-director of Colombia's National Police,
however, believed the issue was simply one of the army giving greater
operational support to the police, which until now has taken a lead
role in drug interdiction efforts.

But many political analysts continue to warn that under the pretext of
fighting drugs Washington will be sucked into the quagmire of
Colombia's guerrilla war.

``Some people are making the same mistakes they made with Vietnam in
1963,'' said Cynthia Watson, associate dean of the National War
College in Washington, D.C. ``Colombia is not the first place where
the potential for mission creep is great.''