Pubdate: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 Source: Inquirer (PA) Copyright: 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. Contact: 400 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19101 Website: http://www.phillynews.com/inq/ Forum: http://interactive.phillynews.com/talk-show/ Author: Kevin G. Hall, Knight Ridder News Service COLOMBIA'S NEIGHBORS FEAR WIDENING OF DRUG WAR They were told that a U.S. role would be limited and that the conflict would not become another Vietnam. MANAUS, Brazil - U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen promised Latin American defense ministers yesterday that Colombia's expanding drug war would not prove to be another quagmire like Vietnam. But in interviews, defense leaders from countries bordering Colombia said they feared they would suffer escalating cross-border movements of Colombian drug traffickers and the guerrillas that thrive on protecting them. Speaking to a quarterly summit of 30 defense ministers from Western Hemisphere countries, Cohen stressed that Plan Colombia, a $7.5 billion international antidrug effort that includes $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid to Colombia, was essentially a training and equipping mission. It is not, he insisted, the first stage of a U.S. military intervention. "Anything you read or hear to the contrary is false and fabricated," Cohen told his counterparts. "We want to be of assistance. We will work with Colombia. We hope others can help in their own individual ways." Congressional restrictions limit U.S. participation to 300 civilian and 500 military advisers in Colombia's antiguerrilla effort. Advanced U.S. military helicopters are being given as part of the Plan Colombia package to airlift troops into remote areas to pounce on drug labs and disrupt drug traffickers. The Clinton administration insists that Colombian units can break up drug operations without U.S. troops getting sucked into an escalating civil war against rebels protecting Colombia's drug trade. But the country's neighbors say the rebels already are trying to draw them into a widened conflict to weaken regional support for Plan Colombia. The intervention is the biggest U.S. involvement in the region since the Central American conflicts of the early 1980s. The kidnapping last week in eastern Ecuador of 10 workers at oil fields, including five Americans, is part of that campaign, Ecuadoran military officers said. They said intercepted radio communications indicated that the kidnappers were rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The FARC is the largest rebel group in Colombia. "I don't have information as to who is responsible, whether it's FARC or someone else. That will not alter Plan Colombia," Cohen told a news conference. "Plan Colombia is designed to deal with narco-trafficking and other elements that are trying to basically take democracy away from the people of Colombia." On Colombia's eastern border, Venezuelan forces reportedly crossed into Colombia over the weekend in pursuit of suspected drug traffickers. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has warned that the U.S. presence in Colombia could follow the pattern of Vietnam and escalate into a regional armed conflict. "Worries remain in the countries that are neighbors of Colombia," Venezuelan Defense Minister Gen. Ismael Eliezer Hurtado said yesterday. He said he awaited a briefing today from his Colombian counterpart, Luis Ramirez Acuna. On Colombia's northwestern border, a group of Colombian insurgents stormed into Panama's Darien region on Saturday, killing an 11-year-old girl and wounding nine civilians and three border policemen, according to Panamanian officials. "This makes us think that, in some form, they want to provoke Panama or push Panama into the [conflict] that Colombia is experiencing now," Pablo Quintero Luna, chief of Panama's national security board, said in an interview. In his address to defense ministers, Cohen acknowledged a risk of spillover effects. But they "will only worsen if we do nothing," he said. He likened drug trafficking to cancer. "If you let the cancer go untreated, if you think that your country will be safe if it just stays over in Colombia and can never touch us, you - and we - - are mistaken," Cohen said. - --- MAP posted-by: Eric Ernst