Pubdate: Sun, 21 Jul 2002
Source: Oklahoman, The (OK)
Copyright: 2002 The Oklahoma Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.oklahoman.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/318
Author:  Susannah A. Nesmith, Associated Press

COCAINE CAMPAIGN MILDLY AFFECTING OUTPUT

LA HORMIGA, Colombia -- The cocaine trade that brought prosperity to this 
remote frontier town is proving as tough to wipe out as the hardy coca bush 
that produces the drug. In the year and a half since the United States 
began funneling $1.7 billion to Plan Colombia, an anti-drug offensive, the 
program has succeeded in shifting some of the business out of La Hormiga, 
once the center of the country's cocaine heartland. And traffickers still 
working here have been forced deeper underground.

But the blitz has not stemmed the flow of drugs to the United States. The 
White House estimates the number of acres planted in coca has actually 
increased since the program began.

State Department officials say it's too soon to judge Plan Colombia and 
insist that in the next year or so they will turn the tide on drug 
production here.

Crop-dusting planes, protected by U.S.-supplied helicopters and 
U.S.-trained troops, have sprayed the coca fields around La Hormiga with 
herbicide twice since the U.S. aid began, and the region will be sprayed 
again this month, President Andres Pastrana has announced. The troops have 
also targeted labs that convert coca into cocaine and have raided the 
traffickers who move the drugs out of the region and out of the country.

Mariela, a 32-year-old mother of three, still tends her family's coca 
fields a few miles outside La Hormiga, even though they were sprayed.

The hardest-hit field is now choked with weeds. The coca plants all 
withered and died a few days after the chemicals rained down. But several 
plots escaped the worst. There, plants have resprouted, spindly and anemic, 
but still producing the valuable leaves.

"With this little bit, we'll maintain the family," she said. "But if they 
fumigate again, the plants won't recover. I don't know what we'll do." 
Maiela and other poor farmers say no other crop can earn enough to provide 
for their families.

In a raised wooden shelter, the family lab is stocked with the gasoline 
necessary to turn coca leaves into paste, the first step in making cocaine. 
Outside, the sun beats down on children running through the coca field that 
the family has carved out of the jungle.

Mariela's neighbors cleared more jungle after the fumigations and planted 
more coca. The plants are now waist-high and almost ready to harvest.

But fearing more aerial spraying, many coca growers have left. A shopkeeper 
in La Hormiga who sells pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer estimated 70 
percent of his business had disappeared since the spraying started and 
people began leaving town.

But despite the spraying in parts of southern Colombia, the country's total 
coca crop actually increased last year by 82,992 acres, according to the 
White House. The Colombian government disputes that estimate, claiming the 
number of coca acreage has declined slightly.

In the United States, the price of cocaine, almost all of which is produced 
in Colombia, hasn't changed, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says, 
indicating no change in supply.

"There is nothing they can point to in terms of actually fighting drugs," 
said Adam Isacson at the Center for International Policy, an advocacy group 
in Washington. "All they can point to is increased fumigations and more 
raids on drug labs."

When Plan Colombia was in the planning stages, Randy Beers, the State 
Department's top counter-drug official, said coca production was expected 
to level off by the end of 2001, followed by a "dramatic reduction" a year 
later.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota agree the results are slower in 
coming, but insist the program is going to work once all the planned U.S. 
equipment arrives and spraying can be conducted across the entire country.

An embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the operation 
already has 12 crop-spraying aircraft, enough to eradicate the coca as 
quickly as it is replanted, and eight more aircraft would be delivered by 
next April.

Plan Colombia is intended to slow the flow of drugs from Colombia, and 
remove a source of revenue for leftist rebels and their right-wing 
paramilitary foes, both of whom "tax" cocaine production.

The Bush administration is now asking Congress to shift the priority for 
U.S. aid away from a strict drug fight and toward helping Colombia's 
military battle the rebels and paramilitaries. Both are on the State 
Department's list of international terrorist groups, and since Sept. 11, 
Washington has put increased emphasis on defeating them.

For the U.S.-trained Colombian soldiers, the first year of Plan Colombia, 
2001, was easy. That was before the processing labs were moved deeper into 
the jungle and the traffickers found new ways to move their product out of 
the country, rank-and-file soldiers say.

On a recent Sunday, an army unit manned a roadblock in Puerto Asis, a river 
port four hours from La Hormiga. The post was near a dock which the 
soldiers suspect is used by traffickers to move cocaine.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Ariel