Weekly Report - 23 March 2004

President Alvaro Uribe has embarked upon a four-day visit to Washington with the purpose of lobbying the Bush administration and just about everyone who might be able to influence it, on the need to extend the Plan Colombia anti-drugs programme for a further four years (it was launched in 2000 by Uribe's predecessor, Andrés Pastrana). The US has contributed about US$2bn to what was originally envisaged as a US$7.5bn initiative. Initially designed purely as an anti-drugs venture (with some grey areas) it was later extended to include aid for counterinsurgency purposes. One headache will be explaining the recent apparent rebound of the Farc guerrillas.