Pubdate: Sun, 31 Jan 1999
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 1999 Mercury Center
Website: http://www.sjmercury.com/
Contact:  Douglas Farah, Washington Post

ANTI-DRUG AID ENDANGERED

Colombian killings raise doubts about help for military

SAN PABLO, Colombia -- A spate of massacres by right-wing paramilitary
groups in Colombia has posed a new challenge to the Clinton
administration's policy of combating the country's rampant drug trade by
increasing aid to the Colombian police and military, officials say.

Despite concerns about human rights abuses, U.S. assistance to the
Colombian army and police has been growing rapidly, in large part to help
combat resurgent leftist guerrillas who protect drug traffickers. Colombia
supplies 80 percent of the world's cocaine supply and two-thirds of the
heroin consumed in the United States.

In recent weeks, however, right-wing paramilitary units that also rely on
drug trafficking to finance their operation have been on a rampage,
claiming responsibility for a dozen mass killings of suspected leftists
that left 137 people dead. In this sun-scorched riverside city, 40 armed
men embarked from canoes on the night of Jan. 8, pulled 15 people out of a
pool hall and two bars, and killed them in the street one block from a
police station.

The offensive has raised the question of whether the U.S.-funded military,
which has long been accused of supporting the paramilitary groups, is
willing to crack down on them and their drug networks. If not, senior U.S.
officials fear that the fragile bipartisan consensus in Washington to aid
the military and the police could rupture.

"The government of Colombia, the armed forces and the police need to go
after the paramilitaries and protect the innocent civilian population,"
U.S. Ambassador Curtis W. Kamman said.

Although most of the $289 million the Clinton administration has pledged to
Colombian anti-drug efforts this year is slated for counternarcotics
police, about $40 million will go to the armed forces. After years in which
the Colombian army received little or no U.S. aid because of its dismal
human rights record, the U.S. military is forging a closer relationship
with its Colombian counterpart out of concern that the Marxist guerrillas
pose a serious threat to the state -- and hence to efforts to stanch the
flow of drugs.

Last month the United States agreed to train and equip a 900-person
anti-drug battalion, and the first 200 troops will be trained by U.S.
Special Forces troops beginning in February, U.S. military officials said.

Although about 70 percent of the estimated 1,100 political assassinations
carried out in Colombia last year were attributed by Colombian and U.S.
human rights groups to right-wing paramilitary organizations, only recently
have senior Colombian military officials and U.S. officials begun to speak
of the paramilitary groups in the same harsh terms used for years to
condemn the Marxist insurgents.

Senior officials cautioned that eradicating the groups will not be easy.
The military is already outmatched by the guerrillas and has few resources
to open another front in the seemingly intractable war. 
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