COLOMBIA CANDIDATE: DRUG WAR FAILING

BOGOTA, Colombia ---- A leading Colombian presidential candidate says
drug trafficking is thriving despite U.S.-backed efforts to crush it,
and she called for an international drug summit to rethink failing
strategies.

"They're inadequate; drug trafficking keeps advancing, it keeps
financing our conflict and creating an economy which is very damaging
to democracy (and) its institutions," Noemi Sanin said in an
interview with The Associated Press.

Despite an inauspicious launch of her campaign on Oct. 30, in which
she fainted while delivering a speech in a sweltering meeting hall,
Sanin is running second in the polls. Liberal Party candidate Horacio
Serpa is running about 12 points ahead of Sanin -- an independent --
in the runup to the May 26 presidential elections.

Sanin, 52, has a reputation as a sophisticated politician, but one
unafraid to speak her mind.

As Colombia's foreign minister in the early 1990s, she once lashed
out at the U.S. State Department amid suggestions in Washington that
Colombia was coddling drug traffickers. She reminded U.S. officials
that the lives of hundreds of Colombians had been sacrificed in the
drug war. Sanin is equally blunt today in assessing results of the
war on drugs. "We're not winning the war against drug trafficking --
not even close," she told AP on Tuesday. "And we're losing many
battles." Echoing a call by President Andres Pastrana, whose term
expires in August and who is barred by law from seeking re-election,
Sanin said an international summit should be held to reassess
counterdrug strategy. The theme is urgent now for Colombia, because
leftist rebels who have been waging a 38-year civil war in Colombia
are financed by production of cocaine and heroin, Sanin noted.

"If we could cut the veins of their drug-trafficking financing, the
conflict would not be able to endure," she said.

More than 80 percent of the world's cocaine comes from Colombia,
despite years of U.S.-backed interdiction efforts and aerial
fumigation of the nation's coca plantations. Heroin production is
rising, and most heroin now consumed in the United States comes from
this South American country. Sanin labeled as "terrorists" Colombia's
three main illegal armed groups -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia and the National Liberation Army, both left-wing
insurgencies, and the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia. But she said that if elected president, she would be
willing to negotiate with all three.

"You negotiate with terrorists -- you don't negotiate with your own
friends," she said.

Pastrana's government has held peace talks for three years with the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, but they have produced few
results. He is opening talks with the National Liberation Army but
has ruled out negotiations for now with the right-wing paramilitary
group. If no candidate wins a first-round majority in the elections,
a second round will be held on June 16 among the two leading
candidates. If elected, Sanin would be Colombia's first woman
president.