US offers $50 mln to Colombia

Colombia will receive 50 million US dollars from the US government to support the "institutional strengthening," government sources said on April 30.

The announcement was made after the US Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and the US South Command chief, Gen. James Hill, visited the South American nation.

According to the sources, the visiting officials announced the economic support and also voiced the support of the United States to the "peace policy" of the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's government.

Grossman and Hill expressed recognition over the advances reported in the anti-drug struggle and ratified the will to maintain the cooperation with Colombia, the sources were quoted bythe press as saying.

Colombia, the third largest recipient of US military assistanceafter Israel and Egypt over the past three years, has received more than 2 billion dollars in aid through Plan Colombia.

Colombia has been locked in a four-decade civil war, the longest in Latin America, in which government forces, leftist guerrillas and far-right paramilitaries fight one another. The conflicts kill more than 3,000 people every year.