Pubdate: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 2000 San Jose Mercury News Contact: 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, CA 95190 Fax: (408) 271-3792 Website: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Author: Kevin G. Hall, Mercury News Rio de Janeiro Bureau LATIN AMERICANS SKEPTICAL ON COLOMBIA ANTI-DRUG PLAN Defense Ministers Fear The Battle Against Traffickers May Spill Over MANAUS, Brazil -- U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen promised Latin American defense ministers Tuesday 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 that they would suffer escalating cross-border movements of Colombian drug traffickers and the guerrillas that thrive on protecting them. Speaking to a summit of 30 defense ministers from Western Hemisphere countries, Cohen stressed that Plan Colombia, a $7.5 billion international anti-drug effort that includes $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid to Colombia this year, is essentially a training and equipping mission. It is not, he insisted, the first stage of an eventual U.S. military intervention. ``Anything you read or hear to the contrary is false and fabricated. We want to be of assistance. We will work with Colombia. We hope others can help in their own individual ways,'' Cohen told his counterparts. Congressional limits restrict U.S. participation to 300 civilian and 500 military advisers in Colombia's anti-guerrilla effort. Advanced U.S. military choppers 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 Colombian units can bust up drug operations without U.S. troops getting sucked into an escalating civil war against rebels protecting Colombia's narcotics. But its neighbors say Colombian rebels already are trying to draw them into a widened conflict in an effort 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 a group of oil workers, including five Americans, is part of that campaign, Ecuadorian military officers said. They told the Mercury News Rio de Janeiro Bureau that intercepted radio communications indicated that the kidnappers are rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish acronym FARC. FARC is a 15,000-solider strong guerrilla movement that dominates guerrilla and paramilitary groups 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.'' Ecuador, already politically and economically unstable, is likeliest to suffer if the Colombian army moves against southern Colombia's `narco-guerrillas' and coca fields -- the raw material used to make cocaine. Ecuador fears refugees and guerrillas fleeing across the border to escape Colombian troops. They also fear a coca-production shift into Ecuador if suppression in Colombia works. On Colombia's eastern border, Venezuelan forces reportedly crossed into Colombia over the weekend in pursuit of suspected drug traffickers. Venezuela's leftist, authoritarian President Hugo Chavez has warned 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,'' said Venezuelan Defense Minister Gen. Ismael Eliezer Hurtado. He said he awaited a briefing today from his Colombian counterpart, Luis Ram(acu)rez Acuna. On Colombia's northwestern border, a group of Colombian insurgents stormed across the border into Panama's Darien region on Saturday, killing an 11-year-old girl and wounding nine civilians and three border police officers, 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, said Pablo Quintero Luna, chief of Panama's national security board, in an interview. Panama used the defense ministers' forum to voice its concern about spillover effects from Plan Colombia. In his address to defense ministers, Cohen acknowledged a risk of spillover effects. But they ``will only worsen if we do nothing,'' Cohen said. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake