Regional Outlook : Drugs, Terror--A Union in Blood : In Peru and Colombia, traffickers and guerrillas have joined in an unholy marriage of convenience. For those fighting cocaine, it’s a lethal mixture.

Unhappy and unstable marriages between drug traffickers and terrorists are washing South American cocaine trails with blood.

In Peru, fanatical Maoist guerrillas have built alliances with peasant growers of coca, the source of cocaine, and with the trafficker organizations. In neighboring Colombia, at different times and in different places, both leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads have established opportunistic and lethal links with drug lords.

The combined narco-guerrilla challenge to government authority makes it doubly difficult for security forces to fight drug trafficking in South America’s two most violent countries, which together supply most of the world’s cocaine.

The United States, responding in part to this deadly mix of political and criminal interests, has resolved to commit more than $110 million in military aid this year as part of its anti-cocaine program in South America.

Some analysts wonder whether the emphasis on military and police efforts in Peru--rather than on aid for economic development--risks embroiling the United States in another nation’s complex and largely home-grown conflict. But others see little choice but to face these risks as the cost of waging the war on drugs.

In April, the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas staged a night raid on Santa Lucia, the main police base for Peruvian-American anti-drug units in the Upper Huallaga River valley. It was the first direct attack by the guerrillas against the anti-narcotics program in Peru.

Two U.S.-owned helicopters took off and strafed the guerrilla positions across the river with M-60 machine-gun fire, and thousands of rounds were exchanged. The rebels fired at least 11 rocket-propelled grenades, although none reached their targets: the fleet of helicopters used to attack cocaine labs.

There were no known casualties, but the shoot-out was evidence of the perils of murky and fluid narco-terrorist alliances in the cocaine war.

Ties between traffickers and leftist guerrillas also have added to the complexity of drug-related violence in Colombia, the home of powerful traffickers who dominate international cocaine trade.

In rural areas of Colombia in the 1980s, leftist guerrillas helped the infamous Medellin Cartel of traffickers to guard clandestine laboratories and coca plantations. U.S. and Colombian officials contend that the April 19 Movement, a guerrilla army known as M-19, staged its invasion of Colombia’s Supreme Court headquarters in 1985 in cooperation with the cartel, destroying documents in drug trafficking cases.

But the Medellin-based drug lords also have helped conservative ranchers finance and direct scores of anti-leftist death squads called “paramilitaries” that have killed hundreds of people in rural Colombia. Many of the victims have been peasants, laborers and political activists accused of collaborating with guerrillas. But the paramilitaries have also been blamed for many other killings.

In addition to collaborating with terrorists of the left and right, Colombian traffickers have hired and trained their own squads of sicarios, hired killers who terrorize society with bombings and assassinations. Victims of this “narco-terrorism” have included presidential candidates, high government officials, judges, police officers, journalists and hundreds of ordinary Colombians.

The wanton campaign of killing has a quasi-political purpose: to intimidate government opponents of narcotics trafficking and to cow the Colombian public into acceptance of coexistence with drug traffickers.

A lethal example this month: Car bombs exploded in front of two shopping centers in the northern suburbs of Bogota, killing 17 people, and the same day a third bomb exploded in the city of Cali, home of a rival drug cartel, killing 10 more people.

In both Peru and Colombia, expanded U.S. military involvement could offer ammunition for the narco-terrorist alliances in their attempts to portray themselves as anti-imperialists.

“The announcement that the Marines or the Green Berets are going to come has stimulated the population with the theme of anti-imperialism,” said Justo Silva, manager of a Peruvian farmers’ cooperative whose members grow coca. “Now it is not Sendero against the government; now it is Sendero against the Yankees and the world.”

As part of its anti-narcotics program for the drug-producing countries, the United States has offered to provide $35.9 million in equipment and training to the Peruvian army to combat the guerrillas in the valley. The United States insists that only a handful of U.S. Special Forces trainers will be involved, and no combat troops.

Peruvian experts acknowledge the dangerous implications of the symbiosis between guerrillas and traffickers. They question, however, whether the limited available resources should go into bullets and aircraft instead of development projects that would give farmers the financial independence to divorce both the guerrillas and the narcos.

That, in turn, might deny the guerrillas the popular support they have enjoyed and make it easier for the army to defeat a ruthless foe whose 10-year war has cost more than 18,000 lives.

As coca production surged in the 1980s and peasants poured into the valley, Sendero Luminoso guerrillas moved in to take up the role of defender of the campesinos --both from exploitation by the traffickers and from the teams of U.S.-backed police who swooped down in helicopters and chopped down fields of coca bushes.

The guerrillas charge the peasants a “tax” for their services and also charge the traffickers between $10,000 and $20,000 per clandestine flight for protection at the illegal landing strips that dot the valley.

But a sustained fall in coca prices since last September has dealt a bitter blow to Sendero, since the movement’s professed ability to defend the growers’ interests has proven hollow. That has prompted the guerrillas to adopt a far more brutal approach, Peruvian and U.S. officials say.

A senior embassy official said that Sendero has killed hundreds of Asheninka Indians in the Junin district, an emerging coca area, and has destroyed numerous bridges in the Upper Huallaga, depriving residents of roads to get legitimate products to market.

“Sendero Luminoso has suffered a serious political defeat by failing to impose prices for coca leaf,” said Iban de Rementeria, former chief of a United Nations development project in the valley. “This is a terrible loss of political power. If Sendero continues its current strategy of red terror, it will end in failure.”

De Rementeria said Sendero recently has taken to killing peasants who sell at prices below those set by the rebels. At least 20 farmers have been murdered in recent months in such cases, he said.

The Peruvian army, which is responsible for fighting Sendero, refuses to get involved in the coca war for fear of alienating residents, whose support is considered essential in the struggle against the guerrillas. Peruvian and U.S. drug agents answer that by not attacking the traffickers, the army is allowing a major source of guerrilla support and income to thrive.

Last September, the police abandoned their policy of eradicating farmers’ coca fields, acknowledging that the program was a great recruitment tool for the guerrillas. Instead, the police shifted to attacking the traffickers themselves, apparently contributing to the recent decline in peasant support for the guerrillas.

Sendero Luminoso has a force of 300 to 500 guerrillas operating near the Santa Lucia police base in the Upper Huallaga Valley--perhaps one-tenth of its nationwide armed force, according to U.S. and Peruvian officials.

When the base opened in September, the newly arrived U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents were welcomed by the sight of dozens of dismembered bodies floating past the base in the Huallaga River. The bodies were interpreted as a narco-guerrilla warning to the police.

A U.S. diplomatic source cited evidence that Sendero is now bringing reinforcements to the valley from other regions “because there is so much money at stake. They tax the growers, the flights, the middlemen. There are lots of ways to make money. I think the money has been corrupting.”

In Colombia, the drug barons are seeking to portray themselves as a nationalist force opposing American intervention, especially extradition of Colombians wanted in the United States on trafficking charges.

But contradictions and shifts between left and right in the Medellin Cartel’s association with terrorists indicate that the traffickers are essentially non-ideological and act out of self-interest.

That makes it hard to predict what narco-terrorist relations might emerge in the future. Indeed, in the past it has often been unclear what groups are responsible for acts of terrorism in Colombia.

Police blamed Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin Cartel, for the April assassination of M-19 presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro Leongomez, who had recently led his guerrilla movement from the battlefield into the political arena. A communique from the cartel denied the accusation, claiming to have “the best relations with the comrades of the M-19.”

The tone of recent cartel communiques has been interpreted as an attempt to lend the traffickers a political coloration with the hope of inducing the government to negotiate with them as it has with leftist guerrillas.

One of the earliest signs of ties between the Medellin Cartel and leftist rebels appeared in 1984, when anti-narcotics police raided a complex of jungle cocaine factories and reported that they were fired on by guerrillas. Near one of the laboratories was a base camp of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and officials concluded that the guerrillas had provided security services for the drug laboratories.

Elsewhere in Colombia, FARC guerrillas have worked closely with peasant farmers cultivating coca. Inevitably, the rebels have had frequent contact with coca buyers from trafficking organizations.

The contacts have not always been friendly. In the remote Guaviare River area of eastern Colombia, the FARC and traffickers fought a bloody turf war in the late 1980s.

The cartel and guerrillas also have clashed in the Upper Magdalena River valley and other cattle-raising areas of the country where increasingly wealthy traffickers bought numerous ranches in the middle 1980s. Like other ranchers, they were alarmed by guerrilla killings, kidnapings and extortions in the countryside.

So the traffickers began pumping money into “self-defense” or “paramilitary” groups that had been formed by ranchers with Colombian army help to fight the guerrillas. Many of the groups became death squads, killing suspected guerrilla collaborators, other leftists and labor activists. Traffickers are said to have used the death squads for their own private vendettas as well.

The paramilitaries became notorious in 1988 for a series of brutal massacres, in which the victims sometimes numbered in the dozens. Since early 1989, government security forces have dismantled several paramilitary groups, but others have continued to operate.

Colombia’s widespread violence has included the assassination of hundreds of members and sympathizers of the Patriotic Union, a political party formed by former FARC guerrillas and the Colombian Communist Party. Authorities suspect cartel involvement in many of those slayings.

Police blamed cartel leader Escobar for the March assassination of Bernardo Jaramillo, the Patriotic Union’s candidate for presidential elections scheduled for next Sunday. Traffickers denied any involvement.

Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a top leader of the Medellin Cartel killed by security forces in a December ambush, was reputed to be the most ruthless narco-terrorist. Authorities said he was the main cartel link to many paramilitary death squads, but they say some paramilitaries still have ties to Escobar.

One of the most notorious death squad leaders is Fidel Castano, known as Rambo. Castano, a fugitive, is said to have sworn vengeance against the FARC after guerrillas killed his father.

“Castano has a pathological hate for anyone on the left, Communists or Socialists,” said Carlos Lemos, who was Colombia’s minister of government until recently.

Lemos said Castano, who apparently controls several paramilitary groups, has had “very strong commercial ties” to the Medellin Cartel, including links with Rodriguez Gacha and Escobar.

In Escobar’s apparent attempt to identify the cartel with leftist guerrillas, the traffickers’ relations with anti-leftist paramilitaries stand out as a contradiction. But logic has been a frequent victim in Colombia’s confusing welter of narco-terrorism.

“It’s just a chaotic situation, and it could develop in all sorts of directions,” said a U.S. official in Colombia. In the future as in the past, the drug lords are likely to collaborate with terrorists of the right or the left whenever it suits their purposes.

“They are all outlaws.”