COLOMBIA ABUZZ WITH TALK OF INTERVENTION

BOGOTA, Colombia--Emblazoned across a recent cover of the weekly magazine
Cambio was the headline "Intervention." Its red, white and blue letters were
set against the background of a large photograph showing a U.S. fighter
pilot in his cockpit and at the ready.

"Never has there been so much talk about a United States military
intervention in Colombia," a note on the cover read. "How close is this
possibility?"

From newsrooms in Bogota and other regional capitals to towns and rebel
camps in the Colombian jungle, speculation is rife about the possibility of
a direct U.S. military role in Colombia's escalating conflict with leftist
insurgents. The conjecture has flared up recently despite a series of
statements from the Clinton administration and Colombian President Andres
Pastrana that the United States plans nothing beyond its long-standing--and
growing--anti-narcotics assistance.

"It is totally false, totally crazy, totally in my view irrelevant to the
situation," Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering said during a recent
visit to Bogota. "What we are able to do is provide training and equipment
so that Colombia is able to confront its own problems."

Nevertheless, recent polls show that a majority of Colombians surveyed would
favor involvement of U.S. forces in the 36-year civil war, which has killed
at least 35,000 people and displaced several million others from their homes
and livelihoods. The feeling is that people are willing to try anything to
end the bloodshed. And although such involvement seems out of the question
now, Colombians remember U.S. intervention in Panama, Haiti and Grenada, as
well as Washington's role in the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran civil wars.

Speculation also has been encouraged during the past month by a burst of
reports concerning the U.S. military presence already here.

An American De Havilland RC-7 military reconnaissance plane crashed in
southern Colombia on July 23, killing the crew of five Americans and two
Colombians, and the United States began training Colombia's first special
anti-narcotics battalion.

Then came the back-to-back visits by Pickering, the highest ranking U.S.
diplomat to visit Colombia in nearly a decade, and Barry R. McCaffrey, the
Clinton administration's drug policy director. Both arrived as the media
were reporting that Washington was losing patience with Colombia's faltering
peace process.

Colombia, which produces about 80 percent of the word's cocaine, receives
$289 million in annual U.S. assistance to fight the drug trade, making it
the third-largest recipient of American security aid after Israel and Egypt.
The United States has about 240 military personnel in Colombia at any time,
none engaged in combat, according to U.S. officials.

"That help is concentrated only on drug trafficking," Pastrana recently
said. "As long as I am president of Colombia, there will be no foreign
intervention in this country."

Questions among Colombians about a possible intervention have arisen with
particular intensity in recent months, because the line has faded between
Colombia's thriving narcotics trade and the nation's largest rebel group,
the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which earns tens
of millions of dollars protecting illicit crops. Faced with what in effect
has become a single war, American military authorities fighting cocaine
smuggling have started sharing intelligence about the rebels with Colombia's
armed forces even if the information is not directly related to narcotics.

"The fundamental question is how do you beat drugs without beating the
guerrillas and vice versa," said Sergio Uribe, a political analyst and drug
consultant.

In that light, the Clarin newspaper in Argentina and ABC in Spain published
stories last month about a supposed plan by the United States to launch a
large-scale military campaign against the rebels, with participation of
troops and equipment from neighboring Peru and Ecuador. The governments of
Peru and Ecuador denied the reports, while McCaffrey and Pickering went out
of their way to dispel ideas that an intervention of any sort was planned.