U.S. CHARGES COLOMBIAN INSURGENTS WITH DRUG TRAFFICKING

A federal grand jury in the District has indicted three members of
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and four other
South Americans on charges of conspiring to import cocaine into the
United States, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said yesterday.

Ashcroft, who took the unusual step of holding a news conference to
announce the unsealing of the 11-day-old indictment, said it
demonstrated "more clearly than ever the evil interdependence between
the terrorists that threaten American lives" and drug trafficking.

The FARC, a leftist insurgency that has been fighting a civil war
against the Colombian government for nearly four decades, is listed
by the State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Along
with a similarly listed right-wing paramilitary organization, the
Colombian Self-Defense Forces, or AUC, it has sharply increased its
numbers and effectiveness in recent years through involvement in
Colombia's lucrative drug trade.

The indictment, resulting from an 18-month investigation by the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration and the Colombian military and
national police, marked the first U.S. charges to be brought against
FARC members. The guerrillas, Ashcroft said, were being charged "not
as revolutionaries or freedom fighters, but as drug traffickers." He
said the Justice Department would seek U.S. trials for the indictees,
all but one of whom remain at large, presumably in Colombia.

The indictment follows the launch this year of a White House campaign
to highlight ties between illegal drug use in this country and
international terrorism. It also comes as the Bush administration is
preparing to ask Congress to lift restrictions that bar direct U.S.
military assistance to Colombia's counter-insurgency war against the
FARC.

Asked whether the U.S. military could be used to try to apprehend the
indictees, Ashcroft said, "We will use every appropriate means at our
disposal, but I don't want to indicate in specific that we are going
to be involving the military at this time."

The two leading names on the indictment are Tomas Molina Caracas,
commander of the FARC's 16th Front in eastern Colombia near its
borders with Venezuela and Brazil, and Luis Fernando da Costa, an
alleged Brazilian arms smuggler and drug trafficker. Da Costa was
arrested in April during a Colombian army raid in the area of
Barrancominas, the center of Molina's operations. He was deported to
Brazil, where he is being held on murder and drug charges.

The other indictees include two other alleged FARC members, three
other Brazilians and a man of unknown nationality. Ashcroft and DEA
Director Asa Hutchinson, who appeared with him at yesterday's news
conference, provided few details of the charges. The indictment
speaks generally of undated meetings and shipments of cocaine, money
and arms involving the indictees between 1994 and the present.

According to last week's edition of Cambio, a respected Colombian
weekly magazine, the main witnesses in the case are an unnamed man
and woman, associates of da Costa who were detained at the time of
the Brazilian's arrest and were subsequently transferred to the
United States.

The names of Molina and da Costa surfaced two years ago amid
allegations that Vladimiro Montesinos, then head of Peruvian
intelligence, had arranged for at least 10,000 Soviet rifles
purchased for the Peruvian military to be delivered instead to the
FARC. The weapons were air-dropped over FARC territory controlled by
Molina.