Pubdate: Sun, 10 Dec 2000
Source: Seattle Times (WA)
Copyright: 2000 The Seattle Times Company
Contact:  P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111
Fax: (206) 382-6760
Website: http://www.seattletimes.com/
Author: Jared Kotler, The Associated Press

GRADUATION DAY IN THE DRUG WAR

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.

It's 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, 
about 235 miles southwest of Bogot. "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 and ferried into battle on dozens of U.S.-donated combat 
helicopters.

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 against civilians in fighting the rebels.

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 that could be used in trials.

Human-rights instruction and "target discrimination" are also being 
emphasized, to prevent unarmed civilians from getting killed in raids on 
drug laboratories or coca fields.

In Putumayo province, the first state to be targeted in the offensive, tens 
of thousands of farmers and coca harvesters live among the rebels, drug 
traffickers and right-wing paramilitary units trying to muscle in on the 
FARC's drug profits.

"We've learned that within the drug labs you'll have family members, you'll 
have wives, you'll have children, you'll have livestock," the senior 
American instructor at Larandia said, speaking to reporters on condition of 
anonymity. "The soldiers are trained not to initiate with lethal fire."

Guerrillas have declared the roughly 300 U.S. armed-forces personnel 
working in Colombia as military targets, although none are known to have 
been attacked. The Green Berets at Larandia work under tight security and 
say they cannot leave the base or participate in operations.

Human-rights monitors remain skeptical of the program. Peace activists say 
a military push into the FARC's main southern stronghold could trigger 
heavy fighting and derail peace talks to end the 36-year war. Negotiations 
are headquartered just a three-hour drive from Larandia.

The guerrillas view the U.S. assistance as counterinsurgency aid being 
provided under a thin drug-fighting guise. American officials maintain the 
purpose is strictly to stem the export of an estimated 520 tons of cocaine 
a year from Colombia - the world's main producer of the drug.

But they, too, increasingly recognize that these two wars are becoming 
impossible to separate.

"I don't try to make a distinction like that," said Gen. Pace, a veteran of 
the Vietnam War and of the U.S. military mission in Somalia. "It is clearly 
true that many of the guerrillas, if not all, traffic in drugs, so trying 
to define that line is very difficult."
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens