U.S., Colombia to discuss drug plan Los Angeles Times TRES ESQUINAS, Colombia - This base in the lush South American jungle is ground zero in President Clinton's emergency proposal to help fund a massive expansion of Colombia's anti-narcotics operation. "This is an island in a sea of guerrillas and narco-traffickers," U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jan Ithier said as he toured the base - where U.S. special forces troops train and monitor the performance of Colombian soldiers - with an American delegation last week. U.S. and Colombian authorities are now engaged in an elaborate round of salesmanship trying to sell the $1.6 billion aid package Clinton announced last month to skeptics in both Washington and Bogota who charge that heaps of new money and old aircraft will do little to ease an intractable problem. Moreover, some fear that despite the United States' insistence that its soldiers aren't "advising" the Colombians, only training them, Washington may get sucked into another nation's civil war. Billed as a way to reduce the drug production of a country that supplies 80 percent of the world's cocaine, the aid package may turn out to be merely "a smoke screen" for fueling Colombia's 40-year battle against leftist guerrillas, said Winifred Tate, a Colombian specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit research group. "This isn't good drug policy, and it isn't good human rights policy. I think this is going to make everything much worse," she said. Originally on page 9A in the 1-27-2000 issue of the Daily.