WASHINGTON -- Stepping up its drug war in Latin America, the United States is arming Colombia's military and police to fight a war against leftist insurgents who also are involved in narcotics.
The Clinton administration is donating helicopters, observation planes, patrol boats and other military gear to Colombia, one of the hemisphere's most violent countries and the source of 80 percent of the cocaine in the United States.
The U.S. equipment is part of a $112 million package of anti-drug aid for Latin America that was announced last month.
Under law, this equipment is to be used only for the drug war, but U.S. officials acknowledge that they can do little to prevent the supplies from being used also to fight insurgents.
And at the same time, the United States is selling Colombia 12 Blackhawk helicopters, equipped with machine guns, with the explicit understanding that they will be used both against leftist insurgents and drug traffickers.
The issue of increased military aid for Colombia has not surfaced in the presidential race.
Indeed, it is a point of rare agreement between the White House and many congressional Republicans at a time when Bob Dole has accused the White House of retreating from the drug war even as teen-age drug use has doubled.
But human rights groups say they fear that the United States risks becoming embroiled in a "dirty war" conducted by Colombian forces with a deplorable record of murder and torture.
And some in Congress, citing Colombia's human rights record, are demanding that the State Department closely watch how the U.S. military equipment is being used.
"We oppose providing additional aid to the Colombian military for the purposes of fighting Colombian guerrillas -- whatever their ties to drug trafficking -- absent improvement in the military's human rights record," said Jamie Fellner, associate counsel of Human Rights Watch. "We risk getting pulled into an extremely abusive dirty war."
To hear President Clinton's drug policy czar, retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, and House Republicans, the U.S. support is a cost-effective way of helping front-line warriors in the struggle to keep cocaine out of the United States.
"Essentially, we use 3 percent of federal drug moneys -- or less -- to take away about one-third of the cocaine," McCaffrey said in an interview this week.
The Colombian armed forces and police, McCaffrey contended, have made "enormous improvements" in their human rights record in the past two years. The State Department human rights report for 1995, however, concluded that both the Colombian army and the police "were responsible for widespread human rights abuse."
'Fighting for us'
Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman, the New York Republican who is the driving force in Congress behind the increased aid, said in opening a hearing last month: "These people that are dying down there in those coca fields in Colombia, fighting the drug cartel and the communist guerrillas that are protecting the drug cartel, are fighting for us and our kids."
For nearly a decade, Colombia has been under U.S. pressure to eradicate its coca crop and combat the powerful drug lords who rake in billions of dollars in profits from the drug trade.
Bogota's anti-drug campaign has uprooted the leadership of the two largest cocaine cartels. But in a measure of the drug trade's remarkable resilience, the government's drive has failed to produce any lasting reduction in the the quantity or quality of drugs reaching the United States.
Since March 1, Colombia has been listed by Washington as a country which has failed to cooperate in the drug war. Other countries on the list include Syria, Iran and Nigeria.
In Colombia, the United States has been dealing with the police and military leadership, which, U.S. officials say, share America's goal of defeating the drug traffickers. At the same time, U.S. officials are trying to ostracize Colombia's president, Ernesto Samper, because of evidence that his election campaign was bankrolled by drug lords. Many Colombian legislators are also reputed to be in the traffickers' pocket.
Until recently, the United States kept its anti-drug campaign strictly independent of Colombia's war against insurgencies. That war has led human rights groups to rank Colombia's army as highly abusive.
"We thought it was important not to mix counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics," said John Walters, a top drug official in the Bush administration. U.S. officials, he said, feared losing control over how U.S. aid was used, given that Bogota "would be inclined to go after guerrillas more aggressively than drug traffickers in some areas."
Policy shift
But a guerrilla offensive launched in August has shifted Colombia's attention away from the drug cartels and toward "narco-guerrillas" -- the insurgents who protect or profit from drug trafficking. And U.S. policy has followed suit.
