CANAL CHANGE CUTS ANTIDRUG EFFORT

Surveillance has ended because the base will be given to Panama.
Operations are to be restored at other sites.

WASHINGTON - The administration said yesterday that antidrug efforts in
Latin America had been weakened by the ending of surveillance flights from
a U.S. base in the Canal Zone that is being transferred to Panama.

State and Defense Department officials said that they planned to restore
full operations within two years by building up three smaller staging
centers in the region, but lawmakers at a House hearing said that the
administration had handled the changeover badly.

"I am deeply alarmed by the administration's disjointed and halfhearted
response to the impending withdrawal of U.S. forces from Panama," Rep.
Benjamin A. Gilman (R., N.Y.), chairman of the House International
Relations Committee, said.

Howard Air Base in the Canal Zone, which ended flights Saturday, was "the
crown jewel in our fight against drugs," Gilman said at a hearing of a
Government Reform subcommittee overseeing drug policy.

Ana Maria Salazar, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary for
drug-enforcement policy, acknowledged that "we are going to have a
degradation."

She estimated that surveillance coverage of the Caribbean region was only
half of what it was two years ago.

Salazar said that the United States had been flying 2,000 counterdrug
missions a year out of Howard.

She said that operations should be up to 85 percent next year as a result
of new interim agreements with Ecuador and the islands of Aruba and Curacao
for use of airfields there. The government is looking for an additional
"forward operating location" in the region that would boost surveillance to
110 percent of the 1997 level by 2001, she said.

The United States is scheduled to turn the canal over to the Panamanian
government on Dec. 31 under the terms of the treaty negotiated by the
Carter administration in 1977. Panama is to take over five U.S. military
bases, 70,000 acres, and the waterway, which handles 14,000 ships a year.

Peter Romero, acting assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere
affairs, told the House panel that the administration tried for six years
to work out a deal with Panama that would allow antidrug activities to
continue.

A tentative agreement was reached in early 1998 to set up a
counternarcotics center at Howard giving the U.S. military access to the
base for 12 more years, but the Panamanian government refused to sign it,
and negotiations were cut off in September.