On Friday, Congress passed the aid package to help Colombia fight drug traffickers and their guerrilla allies. The U.S. aid is a contribution to Colombia's $7.5 billion total development plan. The House approved a $1.7 billion version last March, and the Senate approved a package with less money last month, attaching tougher human rights conditions. The lion's share of the aid will be for Blackhawk and Huey helicopters and training of two Colombian anti-narcotics battalions that will operate in southern Colombia, a drug-producing area largely protected by guerrillas from the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). The aid also includes $200 million for nonmilitary social and human rights programs.

The Clinton administration first asked for emergency aid to Colombia last February, and Pastrana banked heavily on getting the aid sometime this year. But the aid is not expected to arrive in Colombia until the last year of Pastrana's term in office. The delay has cost Pastrana heavily. He had managed to keep unity in the country by waving the millions of dollars the U.S. package would bring, but as the months have passed, his leadership has weakened considerably. The fact that the aid package, which is known in Colombia as Plan Colombia, was not debated nationally, has added to the perception that the initiative was written by the U.S. and not by the Pastrana government.

Just as Washington congratulates itself for supporting Latin America's oldest democracy and making an investment in the fight against drugs, Colombians are questioning the strategy the anti-narcotics package will finance. Groups that are traditionally against military aid, such as human rights organizations and trade unions, view the package as a direct threat to the incipient peace process with leftist guerrillas. And even those who support U.S. military aid are criticizing the package. They fear that some of the plan's anti-drug techniques, such as fumigation of coca plantations, will only turn the affected coca growers into full supporters of the leftist guerrillas.

Colombians with sophisticated knowledge of the drug war and the insurgency accept that the U.S. is more comfortable fighting a drug war than helping a government besieged by well-armed leftist guerrillas. But they worry that the new U.S. initiative will end up as muddled as the U.S. anti-drug mission of the early 1990s, when Colombians fought against the Medellin and Cali drug cartels.

The plan to use fumigation as a main weapon is a major controversy in Colombia. Under the aid package, planes will spray hundreds of hectares of coca plantations in southern Colombia with glysophate, a herbicide known in the U.S. as Roundup. In order to avoid the FARC guerrillas who patrol the coca plantations, the planes will spray from higher than normal, increasing the danger that the herbicide could fall on local inhabitants. U.S. officials maintain that the herbicide is safe to humans.

"I support the concept of U.S. aid in global terms," said Enrique Santos Calderon, a respected analyst and editor in chief of the daily El Tiempo. "We need a more professional army, we need the helicopters; we need the aid with human rights conditions, so the army can fight off the guerrillas and the paramilitary groups. But I am worried to see we are too focused on fumigation. After so many years of fighting drugs, it becomes a charade that Washington wants to keep using methods that have failed," he said.

Despite five years of fumigation programs in Colombia, drug production has increased by 20 percent. "It is a balloon effect," Calderon said. "I press here and the coca growers are displaced there," he said.

Calderon is among many Colombians who feel that Washington's emphasis on seeing the war in Colombia through the narcotics prism -- and believing that only police work and fumigation will weaken leftist guerrillas and make the Colombian army more professional -- has the potential of creating more chaos in Colombia.

"I understand that Washington has to say they are not going to chase guerrillas. That they will only attack guerrillas if they attack the fumigating planes. But for Colombians fumigation is a problem, it affects our ecosystem and it could unravel other elements in the civil war. The fumigation part is the Achilles' heel of the Plan Colombia," he said.

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