Pubdate: Mon, 11 Mar 2002
Source: Orlando Sentinel (FL)
Copyright: 2002 Orlando Sentinel
Contact:  http://www.orlandosentinel.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/325
Author: Tim Collie,  Foreign Correspondent

GROWERS BEAR BRUNT OF PLAN COLOMBIA

Arriving in tandem and trailing a fine white mist on a clear morning, the 
crop-dusters and military helicopters made nearly a dozen swooping passes 
over Gilma Ortiz's small mountain of coca.

The Andean shrub -- whose oval leaves provide the raw ingredient for 
cocaine -- covers her 5-acre farm in neat rows running right to her porch 
and continuing up the slope behind her sagging wooden house.

During the next few weeks, the 3-foot-high shrubs will grow brittle from 
exposure to the chemical spray. The lime-green coca leaves will yellow and 
curl. The Ortiz family will lose a few hundred dollars and, for a while, a 
few less acres will be adding to the tons of cocaine produced by the 
southern Colombian state of Putumayo each year.

"What can you do?" said Ortiz, 48, as she surveyed plants stained and 
sticky with the herbicide glyphosate. "We'll either sell out and move on, 
or plant more. I just don't know right now."

The same dilemma confronts thousands of other poor farmers in this remote 
province on the front lines of the war on drugs in Latin America. For just 
more than a year, a U.S.-backed effort known as Plan Colombia has been 
attempting to drive campesinos away from the illicit crop through a 
pay-or-spray strategy -- offering substitute food, crops and tools for 
their agreements to rip up their coca plants.

Under the $7.5 billion Plan Colombia -- which includes $1.3 billion from 
the U.S. government -- each family is given 2 million pesos' (about $900) 
worth of goods after signing a contract agreeing to stop growing coca. 
Families can choose between cattle -- usually one or two head -- chickens, 
seeds and fertilizer. After receiving the assistance, they have six months 
to stop growing coca or risk being sprayed.

If farmers don't sign on to the plan, their fields are sprayed with 
chemicals containing the weedkiller Roundup. The fumigation has angered 
farmers here and prompted criticism from European allies. Meanwhile, 
Colombia and the United States have produced wildly different estimates of 
how much of the coca crop has been eradicated.

But simply letting coca grow in Putumayo may no longer be an alternative. 
If it has brought money to poor farmers, cocaine also has become the 
currency of Colombia's conflict. The coca leaf earns huge sums of money for 
rebel armies on both ends of the political spectrum.

That cash -- estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars each year for 
irregular armies totaling only 35,000 soldiers -- has skewed a decades-old 
war, allowing guerrillas to buy sophisticated arms while terrorizing small 
towns and rural states. In Putumayo alone, scores of local leaders, 
development workers and farmers have been kidnapped and killed because of 
the dangerous mix of politics, narcotics and crime.

Colombia says spraying is working, citing figures that show coca 
cultivation decreased last year for the first time on record. Between 
August 2000 and November 2001, acreage dropped 16.8 percent, from 403,487 
acres to 357,818, the country's Justice Ministry estimated. But their 
numbers also show that four-fifths of the acreage that was sprayed has been 
replanted with coca.

U.S. officials say Colombia's coca acreage has actually increased -- though 
at a slower rate than previous years -- even as trafficking organizations 
move back into previously cleared zones in Peru and Bolivia.

Caught in the middle are the peasant farmers of this lawless region, who 
say the spraying is sickening families and killing acres of crops such as 
rice, plantains and potatoes.

Many replant coca after the spraying. Others hack their way farther into 
the jungle to avoid the planes. What little has been paid in subsidies to 
replace their illicit crops is often late in arriving and isn't nearly 
enough to dismantle a coca-based economy that's as much a part of life here 
as tobacco in North Carolina or tourism in Florida.

"The coca produces jobs; it raises the standard of living," said Miguel 
Alirio Rosero, the mayor of Orito, a town of 45,000 people. "People can 
eat. They can buy land. They can educate their children. Even with coca, we 
have serious problems with poverty here.

"Now with the fumigation, we're seeing displaced people showing up in town 
looking for work and food," Rosero said. "This was a plan devised in Bogota 
and Washington, and I don't think they understand how fragile the system is 
here. Coca dominates everything."

And Putumayo dominates coca. This Massachusetts-sized state produces nearly 
half the coca grown in Colombia, which accounts for 80 percent of the 
world's supply of cocaine. Thus, on just 140,000 acres are concentrated the 
very roots of a multibillion-dollar global narcotics industry. Most of that 
is comprised of small family farms averaging about 5 acres.

"You can grow yuca, rice, something else here, but you're not able to sell 
it -- you're just going to have to eat it," said Ortiz, walking in bare 
feet among her damaged crops. "You smell that? I feel like I have a 
hangover from the fumigation, but I'm not sure if it's really the spray or 
all the money I'm going to lose."

The spraying, which began in December 2000, is just one element of Plan 
Colombia's three-pronged approach to drug eradication.

The Colombian government has put counternarcotics troops into the region's 
major towns to interdict shipments of coca paste and to destroy the 
laboratories that turn the leaves into paste. To help win over farmers, the 
government has also promised to develop roads, ports and other 
infrastructure to help farmers get their produce to better-paying markets.

But it's an open question whether that can be accomplished with the 
government fighting a four-front civil war that has escalated in the past 
month. With much of the countryside out of government control, the 
often-brutal bands of guerillas and paramilitaries are the main arbiters of 
the coca trade. Chief among them is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of 
Colombia, or FARC, a 17,000-man Marxist guerrilla army that makes up to 
$500 million a year with "taxes" on all aspects of the narcotics business.

Until the Colombian government can mount education, welfare and other 
development projects, experts say, the country's peasant farmers will spurn 
lesser-paying crops such as rice, potatoes and coffee to grow coca and 
opium poppies, the raw material for heroin.

Putumayo is Exhibit A in this argument. Coca has less than two decades' 
history in the region but now dwarfs all other crop production.

Beginning in the 1980s, when the Colombian drug cartels began their climb 
to power, peasants first came here as pickers, known as raspachins. After 
earning enough money to buy land, they began to raise coca.

"I moved here because the money was just so bad where I'm from," said Jairo 
Munoz Parro, a former coffee picker who came to Putumayo three years ago 
and acquired bit by bit an 8-acre spread next to Ortiz's farm.

His house lacks electricity and running water, and his daughter walks 30 
minutes to school each day. But it's a better life than he had before, he says.

"I was thinking of growing yuca before they sprayed, but you know, you have 
to go find a loan for that, and it's not easy to get one," said Parro, 
whose farm was also sprayed. Loans from other farmers, guerrillas or 
paramilitaries are easy to get for coca, but the plants are so plentiful 
that they're essentially free.

In the early 1990s, when eradication programs and a fungus crippled coca 
production in Bolivia and Peru, the cartels moved production to Colombia. 
With the downfall of the Medellin and Cali cartels, the drug trade was 
atomized into dozens of small groups that formed links with rebel and 
paramilitary armies.

The result is a classic agriculture industry composed of itinerant 
laborers, small-time farmers, drug labs and cocinas, or kitchens, that 
refine the coca paste before it's shipped to the United States.

"The people who move to Putumayo move there for one reason and one reason 
only: to grow coca," said Gabriel Marcella, an expert on Colombia at the 
U.S. Army War College. "The notion that these are some type of yeoman 
Jeffersonian citizen-farmers is ridiculous. The task for the government is 
to develop the rest of the country, as well as build up the army, to the 
point where there are alternatives to coca."

Colombian and U.S. officials concede that is not happening. Despite 
government statistics that suggest coca production has been curtailed 
during the past year, authorities acknowledge that as fast as the fields 
are fumigated, farmers quickly cut the coca shrubs down to the roots to 
stave off the herbicide's effects. Fields of seedlings, often covered by 
plastic tarps to protect them from the herbicide, are easy to spot 
throughout Putumayo.

"That is why it is necessary to spray and to continue to spray in order to 
make clear that the government's policy is that coca cultivation is 
unacceptable," said Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for 
international narcotics and law-enforcement affairs.

But a recent report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm 
of Congress, concluded that the United States should stop funding 
alternative crops until they can show results. The report says that the 
rebels control much of the coca-growing area, hampering government aid. It 
also suggested that the poor conditions and lack of development in Putumayo 
and other regions offer few realistic alternatives to coca.

Farmers here agree, pointing to previous schemes that were crippled by 
waste and fraud. Many referred to a defunct farm-support agency that bought 
up the area's rice production only to let it rot because it had no means to 
ship it out of the province.

A recurring complaint is the failure of the central government to share 
resources with poor states such as Putumayo.

"The real problem here is trade -- we simply lack the means to move produce 
out of the region because we don't have good roads, highways, places to 
store and ship produce," said Julio Tito Becerra, head of a farmers' group, 
who grows coca on his 60-acre farm.

Even with the aid, there is little economic incentive to plant other crops. 
After paying for fertilizer and farmhands, a farmer with 5 acres of coca 
can make a profit of about $600 a harvest, or with four harvests a year, 
$2,400, said Hernando Londono, a former picker who now farms more than 800 
acres of land. He's lucky if he can earn half that amount by growing rice.

And the coca farmer doesn't have to worry about transportation costs. With 
coca, the buyer comes right to the door, be it a rebel soldier or a 
drug-cartel middleman.

Even so, about 35,000 families have signed contracts, agreeing to destroy 
91,000 acres of coca, but only a fraction of that number has received 
assistance. Farmers say they haven't received any money, but the spraying 
has already commenced.

At Cana Brava, near Puerto Asis, Juan Nicolas Raba complains that the 
crop-dusters destroyed his yuca and plantains along with a nearby field of 
coca. Like many here, Raba appeared to be confused about the contract he 
signed to eradicate coca. He thought he could continue growing it for a 
year before any spraying commenced.

"They're spraying house, animals, people -- things that are nowhere near 
the coca," said Raba. "All for what -- so the United States doesn't get 
cocaine? Nobody uses cocaine here -- they can't afford it.

"Where are the roads, the schools, the things we need? All we get in return 
are some chickens and a cow," he laughed, shaking his head. "The last time 
the government handed out chickens we had all of these eggs and no one to 
sell them to. We all sat around eating eggs for a month."

Tim Collie is a reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune 
Publishing newspaper.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom