BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) -- Marxist rebels on Sunday offered to help
                  curb drug production in a sprawling jungle region of southern Colombia if
                  government troops pull out of the area.

                  Rebel commander Raul Reyes, a senior member of the Revolutionary
                  Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), outlined the deal -- similar to one the
                  government rejected earlier this year -- in a speech to mark the relaunch of
                  slow-moving peace talks.

                  U.S. and Colombian officials have blamed the FARC for fuelling a twofold
                  increase in cocaine production and a 20 percent rise in heroin output over
                  the last four years.

                  They claim the guerrillas earn up to $600 million per year in profits from the
                  drug trade to finance their long-running uprising that has claimed more than
                  35,000 lives in just the last 10 years.

                  The U.S. Congress is currently considering a huge boost in aid of some $1.5
                  billion over the next three years to help Bogota fight the "narco-guerrillas."

                  Colombia, which now gets about $280 million per year from Washington,
                  already is the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt.

                  Reyes said the FARC, Latin America's largest surviving 1960s rebel force,
                  was ready to set up a pilot programme to persuade peasant farmers to
                  switch from drug crops to legal produce in the municipality of Cartagena del
                  Chaira.

                  The municipality, which covers some 5,000 square miles (13,000 square
                  km), is rife with plantations of coca leaf -- the raw material for cocaine --
                  and drug-refining laboratories. The area is a long-standing FARC stronghold
                  but some 1,000 troops are also based in the area.

                  "We call for the demilitarization of Cartagena del Chaira to undertake a
                  programme of crop substitution to show ... that this problem does not
                  require police treatment but a social and economic treatment," Reyes said.

                  He was speaking at a ceremony in La Uribe, a mountain town at the heart of
                  a Switzerland-sized region that President Andres Pastrana cleared of
                  government troops as a forum for talks.

                  Cartagena del Chaira is adjacent to that zone but not included in it. If
                  security forces did withdraw from there as well, it would leave the FARC
                  with a self-ruling enclave stretching from almost the southern border with
                  Ecuador to within a few hours of Bogota.

                  In rejecting the rebels' earlier crop substitution plan, Bogota said it was
                  unprepared to pull security forces out of an area even broader than that
                  covered by demilitarized zone.

                  The military accuses the FARC of using the zone as the centre of a
                  drugs-for-arms smuggling racket and a launch pad for attacks elsewhere in
                  the country.

                  The United States has said it will support crop substitution programmes run
                  by the Colombian government but has ruled out aid for those areas mostly
                  under guerrilla control.

                  Last week, the government launched a $6.1 million plan, funded by the
                  United Nations, to give some 800 families small herds of cattle in return for
                  abandoning coca leaf production.

                  Until now, the government's U.S.-backed drug war has concentrated on
                  destroying drug plantations by spraying herbicide from the air.

                  Despite those efforts, U.S. officials believe the area under drug cultivation
                  has spiraled to some 196,000 acres (79,000 hectares) as of last year.

                     Copyright 1999 Reuters.