Pubdate: Tue, 22 May 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service

PASTRANA TAKES TO THE ROAD TO SELL THE SOFTER SIDE OF PLAN COLOMBIA

VILLA GARZON, Colombia -- Almost the entire town turned out in the morning 
humidity, gathering under palms in the central square to see a president of 
their country for the first time. Some chanted angrily. Others cheered the 
sheer oddity of a motorcade roaring along their pocked streets.

"Never before in this town has there been an event of this magnitude and 
importance," said Milton Rojas, mayor of this collection of tile-roofed 
shops, dirt roads and tin-sided houses in Putumayo province, 300 miles 
south of the capital, Bogota. "We are not alone in this great struggle."

The struggle against coca, which fills Putumayo's lush canyons and plains, 
has been hampered for years by the government's financial neglect. In place 
of government help, residents created an economy based on the ready market 
for coca, turning the province into the world's cocaine heartland and a 
booming financial concern for the armed groups of the left and right that 
control many of its towns and villages.

On Thursday, President Andres Pastrana, cabinet ministers and top generals 
spent an hour here to inaugurate several long-awaited social programs 
designed to rid the province of coca, the raw material for cocaine, by 
helping farmers grow legitimate crops. Handing out government checks to at 
least a dozen poor families, Pastrana announced the impending distribution 
of $60.9 million for regional roads, schools, health clinics and aqueducts.

"Today Plan Colombia is a reality," the president said during a second stop 
in nearby Mocoa, Putumayo's capital. "We are here to show the presence of 
the government . . . to show that we want what you all want -- a Putumayo 
without coca, a Colombia without coca."

His gesture came at a time of increasing criticism that the U.S.-backed 
military part of his strategy, which has attracted the most attention so 
far, has outpaced the part designed to promote social improvement for the 
region's farmers.

The money announced during the two-day trip is part of Colombia's own 
contribution to the $7.5 billion Plan Colombia, as Pastrana's anti-drug 
strategy is known. It marks the start of what is scheduled to be the 
biggest social investment in the country's history. In Pastrana's vision, 
about 80 percent of the overall anti-drug strategy will be spent on 
improving the lives of Colombian farmers in programs managed largely by 
local governments and nonprofit organizations.

The United States, after lengthy congressional debate over whether more 
resources should be devoted to strengthening Colombia's social fabric or 
its military clout, is contributing $1.3 billion, mostly in the form of 
military transport helicopters, later this year. The plan's European 
patrons settled on the opposite tack, and have criticized Pastrana for 
concentrating first on the military and an aerial herbicide-spraying strategy.

Groups of protesters marred many of the president's stops, mostly teachers 
opposing a measure that might cut education and public health funding to 
the provinces. Such a move typified for them Pastrana's priorities. They 
waved signs showing a Colombian flag being subsumed by the Stars and 
Stripes. "Plan Colombia's achievements," the sign announced. "Pastrana 
subservient to the gringos," another group chanted over a loudspeaker.

"This will only be negative for us," said Alicia Moscera, a teacher in 
Villa Garzon, referring to Plan Colombia. "These promises of highways and 
money for health are a big lie. It will never happen."

While the U.S. military aid has come to define the program, Pastrana 
describes the larger investment in schools, legal crops and other programs 
as the key to the strategy's lasting success by imposing a new civic order 
on a place with a weak government and a tradition of frontier violence.

Putumayo accounts for the majority of Colombia's coca, which makes up about 
90 percent of the world supply, and over the years its economy has become 
almost entirely reliant on the trade. In turn, Colombia's leftist 
guerrillas and rightist paramilitary groups that profit from serving as 
intermediaries in and protectors of the drug industry have turned the 
province into one of the country's most violent.

Much of their military operations nationwide are financed by money made 
from Putumayo's drug trade. But the Colombian armed forces -- the chief 
recipients of the U.S. aid package -- have done little to drive the 
guerrillas and paramilitary units out of areas where the social development 
programs are expected to take place.

"Today, Putumayo is poorer and more violent -- with more widows and 
orphans," said Gov. Ivan Gerardo Guerrero, who along with five other 
southern governors has been a vocal critic of Plan Colombia's aerial 
spraying and military components. But, he said, "This [social aid] returns 
something we have recently lost -- our human values."

Overall, the scope of the coca industry is still emerging. A U.N. study 
released last week shows that there was perhaps 17 percent more coca in 
Colombia than thought before the herbicide spraying campaign began in 
December. But the report, which relied on aerial surveillance photos, also 
indicates that new coca was being planted at a slower rate over the past year.

Since it began, Plan Colombia's aerial spraying has wiped out what the 
government says is 60,000 acres of coca in the south, or about 6 percent of 
the country's total. By reducing supply, it has driven up the price by 
roughly 30 percent and coaxed new farmers into the business while prompting 
others who lost crops to preserve coca seedlings and wait for a safer time 
to replant.

The social development portion of the plan was supposed to arrive far 
sooner to help soften the blow of the lost coca crop and prevent the 
emergence of new growers. Subsidies to encourage farmers to pull up coca 
that were scheduled to begin at the beginning of the year have yet to 
arrive in many areas. The amount of the promised subsidies, supported in 
part by $81 million in U.S. aid, has shrunk by more than half.

On the surface, the illegal economy appears to be thriving in urban 
centers. In Puerto Asis, shops are filled with digital cameras, Swiss Army 
knives and other items unaffordable in most other towns its size. A new 
dance club, its facade a huge Georgian-style colonnade, is under construction.

But the countryside has been ravaged, especially western Putumayo, where 
the spraying and violence between the strengthening armed groups has left 
whole towns feeling abandoned. Many farmers remain reluctant to uproot coca 
before the government delivers on its promised subsidies. They point to a 
record of broken promises by Bogota, including a half-built hearts-of-palm 
factory on Pastrana's tour, and the violent pressures applied by armed 
groups to keep producing the lucrative crop.

"We believe the word of the people," Pastrana said, referring to pacts 
signed by thousands of Putumayo farmers to uproot coca crops within a year 
in exchange for a small subsidy and exemption from the spraying. "I hope 
that the people of Putumayo believe in the word of the government."

Jose Julian Meneses, a 24-year-old coca farmer from the town of Orito, 
arrived in Villa Garzon the night before Pastrana's visit. He made the 
seven-hour drive to hear the president's plan for improving a dilapidated 
regional road network that makes delivering legal crops to market almost 
impossibly time-consuming and expensive.

Pastrana's pledge to improve several key highways, which the president said 
would bring Putumayo into the regional economy, was greeted with cheers. 
But Meneses said much of what else he saw, including the monthly subsidies 
to poor families that amounted to roughly $40 each, would not be enough to 
encourage the kind of fundamental change Pastrana is seeking.

"In terms of the infrastructure, they make a lot of sense, and we need the 
roads more than anything," Meneses said. "But the money these families are 
receiving is barely enough to cover the cost of the bus ticket in to pick 
it up."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D