U.S. Anti-Drug Czar Says Colombia Regional Problem 

BRASILIA, Brazil -- U.S. anti-drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey said Monday there was no simple method to tackle Colombia's guerrillas and cocaine dealers, which he described as a problem for all its neighbors in South America.

``The solution is not a narrow one,'' McCaffrey told foreign correspondents in Brazil, where he kicked off a five-day tour of the region designed to rally Latin American leaders in the fight against narcotics.

``It is not simply to enhance aid to the police or the armed forces but ... it involves a broad-gauged approach of support for the judicial system, the economy,'' he said. ``This is not just a Colombian problem; this is a regional problem.''

McCaffrey, the White House's top anti-drug official, met with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and senior officials Monday to discuss increased cooperation and the growing threat from booming drug output in neighboring Colombia.

His five-day tour of South America will also take him to Bolivia, Peru and Argentina.

McCaffrey's talks are expected to focus on international efforts to tackle the civil conflict in Colombia, where Marxist guerrillas funded by the cocaine and heroin trade control more than 40 percent of the countryside.

U.S. figures show cocaine production in Colombia has doubled in the past four years and heroin output has risen 20 percent, threatening to reverse a 29 percent drop in cocaine production in the Andes during the same period.

The United States has been looking for new ways to stem the flow of drugs from South America since the closure of American bases in Panama, Colombia's neighbor, deprived it of a strategically located launch pad for U.S. counter-narcotics efforts.

``Now we have a huge problem,'' McCaffrey told the foreign correspondents. ``There has to be some sort of mechanism set up to regain what we had in Panama.''

McCaffrey recently suggested Colombia and other countries in the region might need $1 billion in emergency assistance, on top of the $287 million Colombia is receiving this year.

But he strenuously denied talk that the United States was mulling a major military intervention in Colombia to counter the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

``There is absolutely zero discussion in any way of U.S. direct involvement in the struggle,'' McCaffrey told a joint news conference with Brazil's top military adviser, Gen. Alberto Cardoso, earlier Monday.

Brazilian officials, traditionally sensitive to any foreign intervention in the strategically important Amazon region, reiterated that they were opposed to taking on any military role in Colombia.

Gen. Cardoso said Brazil and the United States were committed to exchanging intelligence as Brazil was increasingly being used as a transit route for smuggling cocaine from Peru, Colombia and Bolivia to Europe.

``A country which has borders like ours, with rivers running across them, with so many landing strips, and a territory that is hard to monitor and hard to control in its entirety, needs to have precise information about the movements of drug traffickers,'' he said.

During McCaffrey's visit to South America -- his second in two months -- he will visit eradication and alternative development sites in Bolivia, which the United States considers a model for the hemisphere.

Anti-drug efforts in Bolivia have led to a 22 percent net decline in coca production over the last two years, the U.S. government says.

In Peru, McCaffrey will sign a partnership to strengthen counter-drug efforts in the Andean nation, which has seen coca cultivation fall 56 percent over the past two years.