THOUSANDS DISPLACED BY DRUG WAR

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - Thousands of people have been uprooted by a
U.S.-backed aerial offensive to wipe out drug crops, but fears of a massive
refugee crisis have not materialized, a top U.N. refugee official said
Wednesday.

"The fumigation has not displaced the numbers of people expected," Leila
Lima, of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told a gathering of
reporters in Bogota.

Lima said the number of displaced people could increase, however, if
Washington's drug war intensifies as planned next year.

When the aerial spraying campaign began a year ago in southern Putumayo
province, Colombia's cocaine heartland bordering Ecuador, officials here
and in Washington said they were bracing for an exodus of tens of thousands
of people.

Peasant coca farmers and migrant farmhands who pick the plant used to make
cocaine were expected to flee in large numbers across the border or to
other Colombian regions as their livelihoods were destroyed.

According to Lima, estimates show as many as 15,000 people fled the remote
state since late last year. But, she said, about 12,000 of them left only
briefly, and not because of fumigation, but in flight from a prolonged
guerrilla blockade.

The blockade was launched by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, purportedly to protest the aerial offensive, part of a
$1.3 billion U.S. aid package. The rebel group and a rival right-wing
paramilitary militia active in Putumayo finance themselves through taxes
and a protection racket on the cocaine trade.

Washington is providing troop training, intelligence, helicopters and
fumigation aircraft to help Colombia destroy coca plantations and
clandestine jungle drug laboratories in the area. The so-called "push in to
southern Colombia" is expected to intensify this year with the arrival of
more aircraft from the United States.