BY NANCY SAN MARTIN

  Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos said Tuesday that the guerrilla mortar attack that killed 21 people on inauguration day would have caused much greater damage if 94 out of 98 homemade mortars had not misfired.

  As it was, the attack on Aug. 7, designed to disrupt the inaugural ceremony of President Alvaro Uribe, caused widespread mayhem. The subsequent discovery that 94 of the homemade mortars -- a weapon designed to hurl an explosive projectile over a distance -- had misfired underlines the increasingly violent intentions of the
  government's foes, Santos said.

  ''We are confronting a guerrilla that is going to do a lot of damage,'' Santos said in a meeting with Herald reporters and editors. ''I have no doubt that they want to take out this president . . . and take out high levels'' of the government.

  Santos also said authorities are detecting about 20 clandestine flights per week along Colombia's border with Venezuela in what they believe are drugs-for-arms
  exchanges. The mostly twin-engine aircrafts can be packed with as much as 1.5 tons of cocaine or 500 AK-47s, officials said.

  FLIGHTS TO RESUME

  Santos said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the guerrilla force blamed for the inaugural ceremony assault, is taking advantage of a suspension in the U.S. air interdiction program last year to step up cocaine flights.

  The flights were suspended when Peruvian Air Force pilots in neighboring Peru mistakenly shot down a small airplane carrying U.S. missionaries last year.

  White House drug czar John Walters, who accompanied Santos on his first official U.S. visit, said the Bush administration hopes to resume the flights by late fall.

  Santos said President Uribe, in office only three weeks, is committed to making a significant dent in the drug trade within the next four years. Santos said the new
  administration will attack the drug traffickers by introducing social, economic and security reforms into the coca-growing areas controlled by the FARC.

  Uribe, he said, is already enlarging the country's security force by inducting the first group of civilians, whose job it will be to guard dangerous highways. Eventually,
  Uribe hopes to create a force of one million civilian monitors.

  In addition to the civilian force, plans are under way to strengthen and double the size of the military and police force.

  ''Without security, the country will not be able to get out of this,'' Santos said.

  AIMS FOR REFORM

  Santos said the Uribe administration plans to take money now being ''badly spent, wasted and robbed'' out of the hands of corrupt politicians and invest it in education.

  The ultimate goal, he said, is to wipe out Colombia's reputation as the world's largest supplier of cocaine. An estimated 700 tons of cocaine leaves Colombia each year.

  Calling the United States a supportive ally, Santos said Colombia would like to have more aid for the drug war, in the form of training and help with telecommunications, weapons and intelligence.

  He said the government also intends to regain authority in areas that have been controlled by guerrillas and paramilitary forces. The effort will begin in two regions,
  though he declined to identify them.

  ''We'll fight our war,'' he said. ``But we need help.''

  BEYOND COLOMBIA

  Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the fight to combat drug trafficking must stretch beyond Colombia.

  Peru, which is seeing an increase in poppy cultivation, is particularly worrisome. Crop eradication programs that were postponed recently are scheduled to resume as early as next month.

  ''It's dangerous for Peru to start eroding and becoming a haven for drug trafficking,'' Walters said.

  Nils Ericsson, head of Peru's counter-drug agency, said the country remains committed to eradication, which, he said, is scheduled to resume Sept. 2.

  ''Peru's position is firmly to fight against narco-terrorisim,'' said Ericsson, who was also in Miami along with Santos, Walters and officials from 14 countries to participate in a counter-narcotics forum.