U.S. DRUG CZAR SEES LITTLE SUCCESS SO FAR

SANTA MARTA, Colombia - After flying over blackened coca fields,
White House drug czar John Walters conceded that seizing cocaine,
destroying coca crops and locking up drug traffickers in Colombia has
had little impact on the flow of cocaine on U.S. streets.

But in an interview with the Associated Press, Walters nevertheless
insisted that Washington must stay the course with so-called Plan
Colombia, a $3.3 billion, five-year program mainly to train, equip and
provide intelligence to Colombian forces spearheading the war on drugs.

``We have a history in the United States of not following through on
programs like this,'' Walters said late Wednesday at an anti-narcotics
police base near this coastal city.

Thursday in Mexico City, he said drug raids and eradication efforts in
Latin America would probably reduce cocaine supplies in U.S. cities
within a year and would eventually force the purity of drugs on the
streets to drop.

In Colombia, a renegade right-wing militia said Thursday that it was
prepared to enter a government-secured zone and eventually disarm,
bowing to an ultimatum delivered by President Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

The Self-Defense Forces of Casanare, known as the ACC, has been
involved in heavy fighting with a rival outlawed paramilitary group in
the eastern Casanare region. The fighting has killed dozens of people
and forced hundreds from their homes in the past month.

Paramilitary forces were created in the 1980s by landowners to battle
Marxist rebels. But they quickly became a powerful cocaine-trafficking
enterprise responsible for countless massacres and other atrocities.