SPECULATION RIFE ABOUT U.S. ROLE IN COLOMBIA

Talk Of Military Involvement To Fight Rebels Escalates

BOGOTA -- 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 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.

"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 a majority of Colombians surveyed would
favour 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 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 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 per cent of the world's cocaine, receives
$289 million in U.S. assistance annually 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.

"That help is concentrated only on drug trafficking," Colombian President
Andres 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.

WASHINGTON POST