U.S. and Colombian authorities Friday downplayed the possibility that Wellstone and U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson, who accompanied the Minnesota Democrat, were the intended targets of the bomb. Their visit marked the first time a U.S. lawmaker or ambassador had come to the deadliest town in all the Americas - a sweltering cluster of cinderblock homes on the banks of the muddy Magdalena River.

There was heavy security for the U.S. officials during their three-hour visit Thursday. But Barrancabermeja's 195,000 residents have no such protection: this year alone, 470 of them have been slain in politically motivated attacks, human rights workers say. Massacres are commonplace, and the killers are rarely caught.

Wellstone said he made the perilous journey to show support for the human rights activists, who face immense risk.

``I don't know whether I was targeted, but I certainly know that the human rights activists are targeted,'' Wellstone told an airport news conference on his return to Minneapolis on Friday.

For Wellstone, a former civil rights activist and college professor, his two-day visit to Colombia also was aimed at making a stand against Plan Colombia, a drug-eradication effort being funded by $1.3 billion from Washington. Under the plan, dozens of U.S.-donated combat helicopters will ferry U.S.-trained Colombian troops into cocaine-producing plantations to seize them from insurgents.

But while the military is being strengthened, Wellstone says there is no firm plan to provide coca farmers with alternative livelihoods. He fears they will then be driven into the ranks of leftist guerrillas or the rival right-wing paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC.

Moreover, Wellstone is concerned that President Clinton authorized delivery of the aid even though the Colombian government has not met all the human rights conditions set by Congress. Among outstanding concerns is that the Colombian military has not severed its links to the AUC. The paramilitaries, responsible for numerous massacres of suspected guerrilla sympathizers, remain allied with the army in the field in anti-guerrilla operations. Many AUC gunmen are former government soldiers.

``If we continue to waive the (human rights) provisions of the aid package, then the message we are sending to the paramilitaries and the military is that human rights is not important to us,'' Wellstone told The Associated Press as he flew to Barrancabermeja.

Wellstone said he asked President Andres Pastrana on Wednesday for the government to bring paramilitary leaders to trial and protect human rights workers. Human rights workers whom Wellstone met with said the AUC was responsible for most of the killings in Barrancabermeja, 155 miles north of the capital, Bogota.

There were questions, meanwhile, about who was the intended target of the bomb, and its location. Barrancabermeja's police commander said the bomb was found on the road from the airport to the city. However, local journalists who witnessed the device being dismantled said it was found in a neighborhood far from the highway. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the two reports.

The White House said it did not view Wellstone and Patterson as targets and State Department officials said it wasn't unusual for such devices to be found in Barrancabermeja. Colombian police said first that it appeared to be an assassination attempt, and then later said it did not. Police said a man they arrested in connection with the case, whom they identified as a member of the rebel National Liberation Army, was not telling them who the intended target was. Many residents of Barrancabermeja knew of the planned visit by the U.S. delegation. But security forces had kept confidential plans to transfer the party from the airport to the town by helicopter.

Earlier Thursday, Wellstone and Patterson flew aboard a Black Hawk combat helicopter to observe a raid by heavily armed Colombian national police on a plantation near the village of Taraza, 220 miles northwest of Bogota.

Huddled on the mountainside, 32 coca harvesters - itinerant workers who pull the leaves off the bushes and work in a rudimentary processing lab for $4 to $5 per day - watched as police torched the lab. It was quickly enveloped in flames, sending a plume of black smoke over the jungle-covered mountains and a blast of intense heat that could be felt 100 yards away.

Jorge Perez, a 24-year-old father of two, took a deep drag off his cigarette and shook his head.

``Now we'll be without work,'' Perez said. ``Working the coca fields is the only way to make money around here.''

Copyright © 2000 The Associated Press

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