SOME 300 US TROOPS OPERATING IN COLOMBIA: NEWSWEEK

WASHINGTON -- The United States has some 300 personnel stationed in
Colombia, of which 200 are soldiers and about 100 are anti-narcotics and
Central Intelligence Agency agents, Newsweek reports in its current issue,
due out Monday.

The US presence was highlighted when a US RC-7 plane crashed last week with
five American soldiers aboard.

The plane was supposed to be conducting an anti-narcotics patrol. In fact,
all the US personnel in Colombia are supposed to be there to help fight the
illegal drug trade.

But the plane was packed with sophisticated intelligence equipment.

"This had to do with surveillance," Newsweek quotes one source familiar
with the flight's mission as saying. "We're not supposed to be monitoring
guerrillas, but that's what they were doing," he said.

Colombia's rebel groups have long used drug trafficking to help finance
their operations, and the war against drugs has thus "become a war against
them too," Newsweek says.

US military aid of 250 million dollars annually to Colombia makes the Latin
American nation the world's third-largest recipient of US military aid,
after Egypt and Israel.

The White House drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, visited Colombia last
week and proposed doubling the country's allocation of US aid.

The United States is set to send six Black Hawk attack helicopters to
Colombia, and US Special Forces are in the process of training a special,
980-man Colombian anti-narcotics force -- which could also be used to fight
the Marxist rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The increased US presence worries one congressional staffer, whom Newsweek
quotes as saying "What you have here is a 1964 model of Vietnam."