MONTEVIDEO (IPS)—The "war on drugs’’ has replaced the counterinsurgency struggle as a pretext for U.S. intervention in South America, observers note. The borders between the two, however, are often blurry.

That argument was put forth by the International Observatory on Drugs, a non-governmental body based in France, which recently substantiated the allegation that Washington may prepare a direct military intervention in Colombia, or sponsor an action by troops from South American countries.

That view is also shared by the non-governmental human rights group, the Washington Office on Latin America, prominent U.S. thinkers like Noam Chomsky, and leftist political and social groupings in Latin America.

Senior government officials and military officers in the United States have publicly denied, on a number of occasions, that Washington is preparing or planning to sponsor an armed operation in Colombia or any other South American nation.

"There will be zero intervention, and that goes for any of the 32 countries in the American hemisphere," said Washington’s drug czar, retired General Barry McCaffrey.

But other U.S. officials have been more ambiguous. President Bill Clinton himself recently said that the decades-long conflict in Colombia was a "national security issue’’ for the United States.

"When a U.S. leader asserts something like this, it is because some level of intervention against the nation mentioned is being prepared, not necessarily with Washington at the head, but with it definitely behind the scenes,’’ said a high-level official in Brazil’s leftist Workers Party.

In South America, the strongest resistance to foreign intervention in Colombia under the pretext of fighting the drug trade and the expansion of violence would come from Brazil and Venezuela.

According to reports by the Buenos Aires dailies La Nacion and Clarin, Argentina would be at the forefront of a "multilateral initiative for peace," consisting of sending troops from South American countries to Colombia, to be joined later by U.S. forces.

The newspapers reported that Argentinean President Carlos Menem had been contacted by Washington regarding such an initiative. On July 26, President Menem said he was willing to send troops to Bogota if asked to do so by his counterpart in Colombia.

The Lima daily La Republica revealed the existence of a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency plan to intervene militarily in Colombia using Peruvian and Ecuadorean troops–news that was later picked up by the Spanish daily ABC.