ANTI-DRUG AID ENDANGERED

Colombian Killings Raise Doubts About Help For Military

SAN PABLO, Colombia - A spate of massacres by right-wing paramilitary
groups in Colombia has posed a new challenge to the Clinton
administration's policy of combating the country's rampant drug trade
by increasing aid to the Colombian police and military, officials say.

Despite concerns about human rights abuses, U.S. assistance to the
Colombian army and police has been growing rapidly, in large part to
help combat resurgent leftist guerrillas who protect drug traffickers.
Colombia supplies 80 percent of the world's cocaine supply and
two-thirds of the heroin consumed in the United States.

In recent weeks, however, right-wing paramilitary units that also rely
on drug trafficking to finance their operation have been on a rampage,
claiming responsibility for a dozen mass killings of suspected
leftists that left 137 people dead. In this sun-scorched riverside
city, 40 armed men embarked from canoes on the night of Jan. 8, pulled
15 people out of a pool hall and two bars, and killed them in the
street one block from a police station.

The offensive has raised the question of whether the U.S.-funded
military, which has long been accused of supporting the paramilitary
groups, is willing to crack down on them and their drug networks. If
not, senior U.S. officials fear that the fragile bipartisan consensus
in Washington to aid the military and the police could rupture.

``The government of Colombia, the armed forces and the police need to
go after the paramilitaries and protect the innocent civilian
population,'' U.S. Ambassador Curtis W. Kamman said.

Although most of the $289 million the Clinton administration has
pledged to Colombian anti-drug efforts this year is slated for
counternarcotics police, about $40 million will go to the armed
forces. After years in which the Colombian army received little or no
U.S. aid because of its dismal human rights record, the U.S. military
is forging a closer relationship with its Colombian counterpart out of
concern that the Marxist guerrillas pose a serious threat to the state
- -- and hence to efforts to stanch the flow of drugs.

Last month the United States agreed to train and equip a 900-person
anti-drug battalion, and the first 200 troops will be trained by U.S.
Special Forces troops beginning in February, U.S. military officials
said.

Although about 70 percent of the estimated 1,100 political
assassinations carried out in Colombia last year were attributed by
Colombian and U.S. human rights groups to right-wing paramilitary
organizations, only recently have senior Colombian military officials
and U.S. officials begun to speak of the paramilitary groups in the
same harsh terms used for years to condemn the Marxist insurgents.

Senior officials cautioned that eradicating the groups will not be
easy. The military is already outmatched by the guerrillas and has few
resources to open another front in the seemingly intractable war.