Pubdate: Thu, 14 Sep 2000
Source: Press Democrat, The (CA)
Copyright: 2000 The Press Democrat
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Author: Margarita Martinez, Associated Press Writer

U.S.-COLOMBIAN DRUG FIGHT UNDERWAY

TUMACO, Colombia -- Arriving aboard a U.S.-made combat helicopter, the head of Colombia's
national police and the top U.S. drug official in the country watched as
heavily armed officers torched a drug lab and dumped coca leaves into a
river.

Other helicopters swept back and forth overhead, keeping an eye out for
gunmen, and police stood guard over four people they caught at the site _
allegedly workers at the drug lab.

The daylong operation Tuesday underscored Washington's deepening
involvement in the drug war in this South American nation. The offensive is
to get fully under way when 60 additional combat helicopters arrive from
the United States next year and U.S. special forces troops finish training
two Colombian army battalions.

About 75 rifle-toting Colombian police officers swept through a section of
jungle in southwest Colombia on Tuesday as part of "Operation Mangrove."
Police say 26 drug labs and 12,500 acres of cocaine-producing crops have
been destroyed by aerial fumigation in the monthlong regional operation.

Nationwide, 91,400 acres have been sprayed this year, police said.

"We're fumigating all over the country, so the drug traffickers know there
is no safe place for them," national police chief Gen. Luis Gilibert told
journalists during Tuesday's mission.

Gilibert and Leo Arreguin, chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration in Colombia, watched as a plane swooped down and dumped a
load of herbicide on a coca plantation.

Three combat Black Hawk helicopters flew overhead, ready to fire back at
rebels who have been protecting drug crops and earning millions of dollars
a week by taxing drug producers. There was no resistance to the raid, which
was observed by about 30 journalists flown in from the capital, Bogota, 370
miles to the northeast.

Later, anti-narcotics police clad in combat fatigues found three bags
bulging with coca leaf, from which cocaine is made, in a canoe. They dumped
the contents into a river.

The officers then torched a rudimentary coca-processing lab and arrested
three boys and a man who allegedly had picked the coca crop and worked in
the lab.

The growing joint U.S.-Colombian effort, which will be financed by $1.3
billion from Washington, is expected to level off coca production by the
end of 2001 and bring a "dramatic reduction" a year later, the State
Department said last week.

For now, though, the early operations have barely dented overall drug
production in Colombia, which supplies more than 80 percent of the world's
cocaine.

According to the DEA, there were almost 300,000 acres of coca in Colombia
at the end of last year. Evidence suggests there will be an increase this
year over the estimated 520 metric tons of cocaine that Colombia produced
in 1999, Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House drug control office,
said last week.

The anti-drug effort has won support in Washington, but local coca farmers
often feel abandoned by Colombia's government and say the crop is the only
one from which they can turn a profit. Many locals also fear the widespread
fumigation will cause irreversible ecological damage.

The U.S. State Department says the herbicide, called glyphosate, is only
being sprayed on illicit drug crops and that it causes no long-lasting
damage.

But a DEA agent said drug producers often replant the hardy coca bushes in
the same area after the herbicide washes away. Half the sprayed areas are
replanted with coca, said the agent, who did not want to give his name.
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