OFFICIAL: DRUG WAR IN COLOMBIA SET TO INTENSIFY

MIAMI - The war against drug traffickers and their guerrilla allies in
Colombia will intensify under new President Alvaro Uribe with the full
backing of the U.S. government, the top U.S. drug official said on Tuesday.

"There's no question President Uribe was elected to bring greater security
to Colombia. A part of that is to cut off the drug trade, which is a source
for anti-democratic forces," John Walters, director of National Drug
Control Policy, said.

"We (the United States) have already committed historic levels of support
to Colombia and the effort in the hemisphere and we're going to continue
that," Walters told Reuters in an interview. "There is a consensus in
Colombia and the United States as never before."

Uribe, who took office on Aug. 7, has promised to double the number of
professional soldiers to 100,000 and add $1 billion to annual defense
spending of $3 billion to tackle guerrillas and far-right paramilitary outlaws.

Colombia is the third biggest recipient of U.S. aid, including the more
than $1.5 billion, most of it military assistance, to fund the anti-drug
Plan Colombia.

President Bush this month lifted restrictions on the Colombian military
using U.S.-supplied helicopters and U.S-trained units against the
guerrillas, saying the war against them and the drug lords was the same.

Critics of the policy say the United States could become stuck in a
quagmire in Colombia, where leftist guerrillas and rightist paramilitaries
with links to drugs are fighting a civil war that kills thousands every year.

"We're going to see an intensification, and an intensification of the
effectiveness of efforts," Walters said.

He said he believed the Uribe government understood that to combat the drug
trade, reforms in Colombian society, including in education and social
welfare as well as protecting human rights and economic development were
needed.

He also said drug buyers in the United States were "the single biggest
funder of anti-democratic forces in the hemisphere" and U.S. law
enforcement would focus of reducing domestic demand.

Walters was in Miami for a conference of officials from the Americas. He
said increased security measures at sea and air ports and along borders
since the attacks of Sept. 11 had restricted the smuggling of drugs into
the United States.

"They've reported drugs backing up in Mexico as a result of tighter border
security. Cocaine purity in the United States dropped 11 percent in one
year ... we have sporadic information, especially in Mexico, that major
organizations are having trouble with cash flow. Colombians are no longer
delivering drugs and waiting for the cash to come to them, they want cash
on the nail," he said.

He also said U.S. drug fighters were troubled by the situation in Peru,
where guerrillas and drug gangs are resurgent in some areas. After
substantial reductions in coca production, authorities can no longer carry
out alternative development programs in some areas because of poor
security, he said. Besides trying to get farmers back into coca production,
guerrillas were trying to get them to cultivate poppies for heroin production.

"It would be terrible to lose the progress that has been made in Peru
because we can't work together to provide security to use the alternative
development money that's already queued up," he said. Some $40 million
dollars in aid was held up.

U.S. officials hoped to restart in the fall the CIA programs that had
blocked the traffickers' "air bridge" between Peru and Colombia, he said.
The program was suspended in 2001 after the Peruvian air force shot down a
plane carrying U.S. missionaries.