COLOMBIAN REBELS SAY THEY MIGHT SWITCH, FIGHT COCA

SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia - Insurgents in Colombia say they
might be willing to switch sides in the drug war and actually work to
eradicate coca crops, even as one of their leaders yesterday lashed
out at U.S. counterdrug programs here.

A spokesman for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC),
Camilo Lopez, told Knight Ridder that insurgents could wipe out all
coca within four years.

Lopez said the insurgency has asked President Andres Pastrana to give
it direct control of one of Colombia's 1,072 townships - an area
equivalent to a large U.S. county - to demonstrate that rebels know
how to knock the wind out of the drug trade.

"We don't need coca crops to survive. We don't need a single peasant
farmer to grow coca," Lopez said.

Colombia has become the world's No. 1 producer of cocaine and a major
source of heroin to the United States. FARC rebels provide armed
protection to coca and poppy fields and narcotics-processing
laboratories. Many experts are skeptical that the rebels would give up
their ties to the flourishing drug trade despite recent
pronouncements.

U.S. aid to Colombia is soaring to meet the rising drug
threat.

Coca eradication was a subject of discussion when a midlevel State
Department envoy met with a FARC commander in San Jose, Costa Rica, in
December, U.S. diplomats say.

In a speech at a ceremony to launch highly touted peace talks here
yesterday, FARC rebel commander Joaquin Gomez decried rising U.S.
anti-drug assistance as a smoke screen for counterinsurgency efforts.

"U.S. leaders spend huge sums of money through the Colombian security
forces to harm civilians with bombings, strafings and indiscriminate
fumigation, wiping out fields and barnyard animals and leaving a good
part of the land sterile," he said.

Gomez cited what he said was the U.S. financing of a new
counternarcotics battalion in the town of Barranco Colorado, in
Guaviare state, whose true aim is "to maintain a cordon around the
FARC secretariat."

FARC spokesman Lopez said rebels would shoot at U.S. advisers as well
as Colombian police they might find in the battalion.

"If U.S. advisers come and they are in the battalion, we aren't going
to know who is (American) and who isn't during combat. We're not going
to ask for identity documents. . . . Whoever dies, dies," he said.

Pastrana has begun an investment program, called the Colombia Plan, to
seek foreign help for massive development in the eastern plains, where
most coca is grown.

Yesterday's ceremony in San Vicente del Caguan, a remote jungle town
in southern Colombia, marked the start of talks designed to establish
an agenda and locale for full-scale negotiations later this year. The
talks would be aimed at ending a war that has claimed tens of
thousands of lives, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and cost
the Colombian government at least $4 billion a year.

Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda, the longtime head of the FARC, had been
expected to participate but did not show up. It would have been the
first public appearance in decades by the 68-year-old guerrilla chief,
who has spent most of his life in hiding. His absence was apparently
due to threats from right-wing paramilitary death squads.

Marulanda's absence from the ceremony dampened a festive atmosphere in
the town. Pastrana returned to the capital, Bogota, immediately afterward.

After the ceremony, four government-appointed negotiators met with
rebel commanders in a church sacristy to discuss an agenda and
timetable for the talks.

Marulanda's conditions for peace include the dismantling of right-wing
paramilitary groups and the exchange of 252 jailed rebels for more
than 350 police and soldiers captured since 1996.

In the long term, he seeks wealth redistribution in a country where
the top 5 percent earn 30 times more than the bottom 5 percent.
Information from The Washington Post and The Associated Press is
included in this report.