Pubdate: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 1999 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://www10.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: Larry Rohter WITH U.S. TRAINING, COLOMBIA MELDS WAR ON REBELS AND DRUGS TRES ESQUINAS, Colombia -- This tangle of jungle and rivers is a front line in Colombia's war against the twin plagues of drugs and guerrillas, the place where the United States is betting that it can help the Colombian military finally gain the upper hand. Most of the cocaine exported from Colombia is grown in guerrilla-controlled territory around this isolated Colombian Air Force base. It is money from the coca grown here that supports the increasingly successful insurgents, who briefly this month advanced within 30 miles of the nation's capital. But now Colombian officials and the Americans who have long been urging them to be more aggressive against the rebels think they have found a weapon to turn the tide: a new Anti-Narcotics Battalion that is being trained and supplied by the United States for deployment here later this year. Its job is to weaken the guerrillas by depriving them of their drug riches, a job that Colombia's armed forces has proved unable to accomplish. "This is the army of the future in Colombia," the Defense Minister, Luis Fernando Ramirez, said Wednesday at the 1,000-man unit's main training center in Tolemaida, a town north of here. "This is only the beginning. This is the army we want, and we are going to continue training battalions like this all over Colombia until we have what we need." Two weeks ago, Ramirez, accompanied by Gen. Fernando Tapias, the commander in chief of the Colombian Armed Forces, flew to Washington to seek a substantial increase in American aid by asking for $500 million over the next two years. President Clinton responded by saying that the United States increasingly sees the anti-drug effort in Colombia as "in our national security interests to do what we can" to help the country win the battle. This year, Colombia is getting $289 million in such assistance, making it the third-largest recipient of American aid in the world. But some American officials argue that as much as $1 billion more may be needed just in the next year to strengthen Government forces in their counternarcotics efforts, which are more and more difficult to distinguish from the combat with the guerrillas. The Anti-Narcotics Battalion's mission will be to deny the country's main leftist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, its main source of income: the taxes collected on the coca leaves grown and processed in this area that have underwritten its recent military surge. Guerrilla groups now control or operate freely in nearly 40 percent of Colombian territory. "This is an emergency situation," Gen. Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, said during a visit here today, part of a three-day trip to assess the worsening situation in this country. The sense of urgency is driven, he said, by awareness that even "if we seize a drug plane out over the Caribbean, the guerrillas have already been paid," and have used the money to buy arms. "The only way to brake the dynamic of these groups and the violence that is produced in Colombia by narcotics trafficking is to attack their sources of financing," said General Tapias. "So long as we have not reduced the departure of cocaine by half, we will not be able to begin to weaken these groups." Ostensibly, all American military aid to Colombia is intended exclusively for use in anti-drug efforts, not in counterinsurgency campaigns. But recent events have eroded the line between those two concepts, as declarations by Colombian and American officials today made clear. "You've got 25,000 people out there with machine guns, mortars, rockets and land mines," said General McCaffrey, a former chief of United States military forces in Latin America. "We keep arguing over what is it you call them. I don't know what we ought to call them, but I know what they're doing: They are operating, they are massing, in forces of up to a couple of thousand people, and they are carrying out simultaneous attacks on 11 provinces on the same night." Colombia's poorly equipped and inadequately trained Armed Forces have in recent years adhered to a largely defensive strategy, letting the guerrillas come at them and leaving to the police the burden of trying to root out what are known here as "narco-guerrilla operations." The Anti-Narcotics Battalion is an effort to reverse the momentum and seize the initiative by putting soldiers and policemen together in a joint unit. "The task of this battalion is to confront the armed groups on land and water so that police will be able to move ahead in their work of fumigation and eradication" of coca fields protected by the guerrillas, General Tapias said. "At the moment, our airplanes and helicopters cannot do that, because they are shot down whenever they enter this region." American officials estimate that on average, between 100 and 150 American military personnel are in Colombia. General Tapias said that "less than a dozen" were involved in training the battalion at any one time and that their role "will definitely end" when the program is completed in October. The Americans involved in training the new battalion are from the Seventh Special Forces group, based in Fort Bragg, N.C., according to Colombian and American officials. They offer instruction in areas that include intelligence, communications, reconnaissance, riverine operations and mortar use, the officials said. Once operations begin in December, though, "We will not have a single American soldier here fighting at the side of Colombians," General Tapias said. "We have the experience, the trained army, and a population willing to help," he continued. "What we do not have, because of the economic crisis the country is experiencing right now, is the capacity to acquire the means of mobility and technical intelligence that we need." But human rights and advocacy groups say they are not yet persuaded by such assurances. They see the new American-supported force as a first step toward the sort of much deeper and direct United States involvement that occurred in Central America and Vietnam. "Our concern is that this battalion almost inevitably will become involved in counterinsurgency operations because of where it will be deployed and who is involved," said Winifred Tate, a Colombia analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America. "United States involvement is limited now to special forces training missions, but it is a very slippery slope from counternarcotics training to taking on an adviser's role." The base, which consists of a landing strip, barracks and communications center near the confluence of the Caqueta and Orteguaza rivers, has also been the subject of much speculation among Colombians, thanks largely to the decision of the United States Embassy in Bogota to declare it off-limits to Colombian and American reporters. As a consequence, fanciful tales of Green Berets in fierce combat with guerrillas have proliferated, raising suspicions about the stated purpose of the base and the battalion. Concerns have also been expressed in Colombia and abroad about human rights issues. Human rights groups have long complained about links between the Colombian Armed Forces and right-wing paramilitary groups that have massacred civilians, and it was partly in order to alleviate those preoccupations that a special vetting procedure was used in recruiting members of the battalion. In addition, the unit's curriculum includes a heavy dose of human rights training, including case studies in which soldiers are presented with battlefield situations and told how they should behave. After viewing several such presentations during his visit to the training center today, General McCaffrey described himself as encouraged by the battalion's fighting capacity and its willingness to abide by international law. While "there is always a question in the minds of people looking at this," if properly trained, "that's what these kids will tend to do in the field of operations," he said. "You get these 18-year-old soldiers, you give them these lessons, and I think it makes a difference." - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea