Pubdate: Sun, 10 Dec 2000
Source: Salt Lake Tribune (UT)
Copyright: 2000 The Salt Lake Tribune
Contact:  143 S Main, Salt Lake City UT 84111
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Author: Jared Kotler, The Associated Press

COLOMBIAN ARMY SEEKS TO STAMP OUT COCAINE

LARANDIA ARMY BASE, Colombia -- Helicopters thunder past a reviewing stand 
and out over a river snaking through the world's cocaine heartland. Rows of 
grim-faced troops trained by U.S. Green Berets snap to attention.

Martial music plays, diplomas are presented and a Roman Catholic priest 
sprinkles holy water on the soldiers, the vanguard of a U.S-backed military 
push to wipe out cocaine.

Graduation day in the war on drugs.

The soldiers honored Friday at this sprawling army base in Colombia's 
rolling southern plains -- a 620-man battalion prepared by U.S. 
special-forces troops based at Fort Bragg, N.C. -- have their work cut out 
for them.

Under the offensive backed by a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package, the 
battalion will venture out any day now into jungles and Amazonian 
tributaries teeming with heavily armed guerrillas. Major operations are 
expected to get under way by January at the latest.

The 15,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, is 
deeply involved in the cocaine trade, yielding the rebels mounds of cash -- 
and making them a key target for U.S. and Colombian efforts to stamp out 
the narcotics industry.

The elite, U.S.-trained battalions, coordinating with police and 
prosecutors, aim to seize and destroy coca fields and laboratories, arrest 
suspects who give themselves up and attack anyone who fights back, whether 
they are insurgents or common criminals.

"The bottom line is this," said the commander of U.S. military operations 
in Latin America, Gen. Peter Pace, who attended the ceremony at Larandia, 
located about 235 miles southwest of Bogota. "If that person, male or 
female, is trafficking in drugs, regardless of what ideology they have, 
they are drug traffickers."

The battalion christened Friday is the second of three Colombian army units 
to be prepared.

A third battalion should be ready by the middle of next year, completing 
training of nearly 3,000 troops and service personnel under President 
Andres Pastrana's so-called Plan Colombia.

The specialized army battalions involve the Colombian military as never 
before in counter-drug operations. The U.S. training program brings the 
American military into a close partnership with Colombian forces long 
accused of human-rights abuses.

But officials are promising a clean operation, and no direct U.S. troop 
involvement in the fighting.

In addition to general soldiering skills such as marksmanship, Green Beret 
trainers said they are teaching the troops police-style tactics such as 
handcuffing suspects and bagging evidence.
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