WITH U.S. TRAINING, COLOMBIA MELDS WAR ON REBELS AND DRUGS

TRES ESQUINAS, Colombia -- This tangle of jungle and rivers is
a front line in Colombia's war against the twin plagues of drugs and
guerrillas, the place where the United States is betting that it can
help the Colombian military finally gain the upper hand.

Most of the cocaine exported from Colombia is grown in
guerrilla-controlled territory around this isolated Colombian Air
Force base. It is money from the coca grown here that supports the
increasingly successful insurgents, who briefly this month advanced
within 30 miles of the nation's capital.

But now Colombian officials and the Americans who have long been
urging them to be more aggressive against the rebels think they have
found a weapon to turn the tide: a new Anti-Narcotics Battalion that
is being trained and supplied by the United States for deployment here
later this year. Its job is to weaken the guerrillas by depriving them
of their drug riches, a job that Colombia's armed forces has proved
unable to accomplish.

"This is the army of the future in Colombia," the Defense Minister,
Luis Fernando Ramirez, said Wednesday at the 1,000-man unit's main
training center in Tolemaida, a town north of here. "This is only the
beginning. This is the army we want, and we are going to continue
training battalions like this all over Colombia until we have what we
need."

Two weeks ago, Ramirez, accompanied by Gen. Fernando Tapias, the
commander in chief of the Colombian Armed Forces, flew to Washington
to seek a substantial increase in American aid by asking for $500
million over the next two years.

President Clinton responded by saying that the United States
increasingly sees the anti-drug effort in Colombia as "in our national
security interests to do what we can" to help the country win the battle.

This year, Colombia is getting $289 million in such assistance, making
it the third-largest recipient of American aid in the world. But some
American officials argue that as much as $1 billion more may be needed
just in the next year to strengthen Government forces in their
counternarcotics efforts, which are more and more difficult to
distinguish from the combat with the guerrillas.

The Anti-Narcotics Battalion's mission will be to deny the country's
main leftist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, its main source of income: the taxes collected on
the coca leaves grown and processed in this area that have
underwritten its recent military surge. Guerrilla groups now control
or operate freely in nearly 40 percent of Colombian territory.

"This is an emergency situation," Gen. Barry McCaffrey, director of
the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, said during
a visit here today, part of a three-day trip to assess the worsening
situation in this country. The sense of urgency is driven, he said, by
awareness that even "if we seize a drug plane out over the Caribbean,
the guerrillas have already been paid," and have used the money to buy
arms.

"The only way to brake the dynamic of these groups and the violence
that is produced in Colombia by narcotics trafficking is to attack
their sources of financing," said General Tapias. "So long as we have
not reduced the departure of cocaine by half, we will not be able to
begin to weaken these groups."

Ostensibly, all American military aid to Colombia is intended
exclusively for use in anti-drug efforts, not in counterinsurgency
campaigns. But recent events have eroded the line between those two
concepts, as declarations by Colombian and American officials today
made clear.

"You've got 25,000 people out there with machine guns, mortars,
rockets and land mines," said General McCaffrey, a former chief of
United States military forces in Latin America. "We keep arguing over
what is it you call them. I don't know what we ought to call them, but
I know what they're doing: They are operating, they are massing, in
forces of up to a couple of thousand people, and they are carrying out
simultaneous attacks on 11 provinces on the same night."

Colombia's poorly equipped and inadequately trained Armed Forces have
in recent years adhered to a largely defensive strategy, letting the
guerrillas come at them and leaving to the police the burden of trying
to root out what are known here as "narco-guerrilla operations." The
Anti-Narcotics Battalion is an effort to reverse the momentum and
seize the initiative by putting soldiers and policemen together in a
joint unit.

"The task of this battalion is to confront the armed groups on land
and water so that police will be able to move ahead in their work of
fumigation and eradication" of coca fields protected by the
guerrillas, General Tapias said. "At the moment, our airplanes and
helicopters cannot do that, because they are shot down whenever they
enter this region."

American officials estimate that on average, between 100 and 150
American military personnel are in Colombia. General Tapias said that
"less than a dozen" were involved in training the battalion at any one
time and that their role "will definitely end" when the program is
completed in October.

The Americans involved in training the new battalion are from the
Seventh Special Forces group, based in Fort Bragg, N.C., according to
Colombian and American officials. They offer instruction in areas that
include intelligence, communications, reconnaissance, riverine
operations and mortar use, the officials said.

Once operations begin in December, though, "We will not have a single
American soldier here fighting at the side of Colombians," General
Tapias said.

"We have the experience, the trained army, and a population willing to
help," he continued. "What we do not have, because of the economic
crisis the country is experiencing right now, is the capacity to
acquire the means of mobility and technical intelligence that we need."

But human rights and advocacy groups say they are not yet persuaded by
such assurances. They see the new American-supported force as a first
step toward the sort of much deeper and direct United States
involvement that occurred in Central America and Vietnam.

"Our concern is that this battalion almost inevitably will become
involved in counterinsurgency operations because of where it will be
deployed and who is involved," said Winifred Tate, a Colombia analyst
at the Washington Office on Latin America. "United States involvement
is limited now to special forces training missions, but it is a very
slippery slope from counternarcotics training to taking on an
adviser's role."

The base, which consists of a landing strip, barracks and
communications center near the confluence of the Caqueta and Orteguaza
rivers, has also been the subject of much speculation among
Colombians, thanks largely to the decision of the United States
Embassy in Bogota to declare it off-limits to Colombian and American
reporters. As a consequence, fanciful tales of Green Berets in fierce
combat with guerrillas have proliferated, raising suspicions about the
stated purpose of the base and the battalion.

Concerns have also been expressed in Colombia and abroad about
human rights issues. Human rights groups have long complained about
links between the Colombian Armed Forces and right-wing paramilitary
groups that have massacred civilians, and it was partly in order to
alleviate those preoccupations that a special vetting procedure was
used in recruiting members of the battalion.

In addition, the unit's curriculum includes a heavy dose of human
rights training, including case studies in which soldiers are
presented with battlefield situations and told how they should behave.
After viewing several such presentations during his visit to the
training center today, General McCaffrey described himself as
encouraged by the battalion's fighting capacity and its willingness to
abide by international law.

While "there is always a question in the minds of people looking at
this," if properly trained, "that's what these kids will tend to do in
the field of operations," he said. "You get these 18-year-old
soldiers, you give them these lessons, and I think it makes a
difference."