Armed forces chief says U.S. help vital to halting drug trade

 BY TIM JOHNSON

 BOGOTA, Colombia -- If Washington opens the spigot to vast new military
 assistance, Colombia's huge narcotics industry can be wiped out, the nation's
 military commander asserted Saturday.

 ``If the United States wants to end the drug trade in Colombia, it could do so in
 two to three years,'' said Gen. Fernando Tapias, the armed forces commander.

 Tapias and Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez leave for Washington today
 to appeal for U.S. military assistance to protect a government rocked by leftist
 and rightist private armies. News reports say Colombia may seek as much as
 $1.5 billion over several years.

 Tapias showed some bitterness that past U.S. aid largely bypassed the army and
 went to Colombia's national police, whose commander, Gen. Rosso Jose
 Serrano, is credited with bringing down the Medellin and Cali cartels in the early
 and middle 1990s.

 Serrano is expected to retire within months, and military officials are eager for
 U.S. assistance to flow to the armed forces.

 After the fall of the major drug cartels, the cocaine and heroin trades split into the
 hands of about 130 trafficking organizations, with 25 or 30 groups getting a
 majority of the business, intelligences sources say.

 Despite vast U.S. aid to the police over the past four to five years, Tapias said the
 amount of coca cultivated in Colombia has more than doubled, to more than
 250,000 acres today.

 NEW TACTICS

 ``We must look for a new formula,'' he said.

 Washington granted Colombia $289 million in aid this year, making it the
 third-largest recipient of U.S. aid, after Israel and Egypt. Most of the money is
 going to police efforts to eradicate coca with aerial spraying.

 Tapias didn't spell out his wish list, but said the military currently is not in a
 condition to defeat outlaw armed groups that receive huge profits from the
 narcotics industry.

 ``Help us with the technology that you have,'' he said to U.S. reporters.
 ``Unfortunately, as an underdeveloped country, we haven't had access to the
 technology that would allow us to be more effective in this struggle.''

 Both the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a leftist rebel group
 with about 18,000 combatants, and right-wing paramilitary armies with 5,000 or so
 fighters have muscled into the narcotics trade, offering armed protection of coca
 fields, laboratories and smuggling routes, experts say.

 While soldiers climb hills to communicate by two-way radio, he said, guerrillas
 wield high-tech satellite telephones.

 Unless Colombia can smash the drug trade, President Andres Pastrana's efforts
 for a peace settlement with the 35-year-old FARC will not bear fruit, Tapias said.

 ``The peace process in Colombia will never work as long as we have these
 groups, filthy rich from drug trafficking, that are able to buy all the weapons that
 they want on the black market,'' he said.

 NO U.S. TROOPS

 But he denied that he would ask U.S. officials in Washington to get directly
 involved in fighting rebels.

 ``I am very clear on this,'' Tapias said. ``We are going to ask them to help us wipe
 out the drug trade. By abolishing the drug trade, basically the guerrillas and the
 illegal self-defense forces and other groups will be extinguished by their own
 weakness. I don't know a single Colombian who voluntarily gives money to the
 guerrillas or the self-defense forces. Everyone is intimidated into doing so. Most of
 their income is from drug trafficking.''

 Tapias lashed out at both the FARC and the paramilitary groups for targeting
 unarmed civilians in the conflict. In the first eight months of the year, guerrillas
 killed 594 civilians, and paramilitary forces killed 505 people, he said.

 ``This is a real massacre, just butchery,'' Tapias said. ``Both groups are
 systematically trying to murder defenseless civilians.''