Pubdate: Sun, 07 Apr 2002
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism)

U.S. DOUBTS EFFECTS OF COCA PLAN

Alternative Program Fails to Win Over Colombian Farmers

CAIRO, Colombia -- As the civil war in Colombia persists, U.S. officials 
have become increasingly pessimistic about whether a popular U.S.-sponsored 
program that pays farmers to uproot coca and replace it with legal crops 
will have any lasting success against the drug industry.

The alternative development program is the most socially oriented element 
of a $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package Congress approved almost two years 
ago with the goal of cutting Colombia's coca production in half by 2005. 
Although it is only a small fraction of a package tilted heavily toward 
military assistance, alternative development has long been seen as the most 
politically acceptable part of a U.S. anti-drug strategy frequently 
criticized as a war plan targeting Colombia's Marxist insurgency.

A number of U.S. officials are rethinking the program less than a year 
after it began here in southern Colombia's coca fields. Security concerns, 
unfavorable economics and a history of mistrust between the Colombian 
government and coca farmers who produce 90 percent of the cocaine arriving 
in the United States have complicated the program in ways that U.S. 
officials now believe could be insurmountable.

Following two critical recent reviews of the program, U.S. officials have 
decided to shift its focus from helping individual farmers to creating 
public works jobs in coca-growing regions, tailor development projects by 
community and begin development efforts in areas less fraught by civil war 
than this one 350 miles south of the capital, Bogota. Even so, U.S. 
officials acknowledge, funding the $42.5 million program beyond this year 
is in question.

Here in the southern province of Putumayo, the heart of Colombia's coca 
trade, only a tiny fraction of farmers who agreed to uproot their coca 
plants by the end of July have done so. That resistance, rooted mostly in a 
legacy of failed government promises in this remote patch of pasture and 
jungle, was reflected in a recent U.S. Embassy study that found that few of 
the 37,000 small-scale farmers who signed up for government aid last year 
in return for abandoning coca crops intend to comply.

Congressional auditors recently concluded that the program was failing, 
mostly because of a lack of security in coca-growing regions heavily 
contested by the two largest irregular armies in Colombia's nearly 
four-decade civil war. But farmers and town officials say the problems stem 
more from the long delays in deliveries of aid and a U.S.-backed herbicide 
spraying campaign that has at times targeted farmers who have agreed to 
pull up their coca voluntarily.

"Some of these people had started the process of pulling up their coca. 
They were getting ready with corn, yucca, and then the fumigation started," 
said Leandro Romo, the human rights ombudsman in the nearby town of La 
Hormiga, referring to spraying late last year. "We're not arguing with the 
goal, just the methods. This has been indiscriminate. And until now the 
farmers have received virtually nothing."

Alternative development in Colombia dates back more than a decade. The 
notion of helping coca farmers develop a legal economy through subsidies 
and technical assistance has been embraced by interests as diverse as 
European countries and Colombia's largest guerrilla insurgency. But it has 
never had much effect on a multibillion-dollar coca trade that pays 
peasants significantly more than they earn with legal crops.

Recently released figures compiled by the CIA showed that coca cultivation 
jumped 25 percent in 2001 to 419,000 acres.

U.S. officials blame the substitution program's problems on the 
government's inability to secure coca-growing regions. Those areas are 
fiercely contested by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC 
as the largest guerrilla insurgency is known, and the United Self-Defense 
Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary group that fights the guerrillas 
alongside Colombia's military.

Both groups profit enormously from coca cultivation by exacting "taxes" at 
various stages of the cocaine production process.

Earlier this year, a General Accounting Office audit recommended that 
Congress end funding for alternative development in Colombia until the 
government could provide security for alternative development officials 
working in southern war zones. Last year, four alternative development 
workers were kidnapped in Putumayo. Two were killed, and two are missing 
and presumed dead, although Colombian officials dispute whether they were 
killed because of their alternative development work.

About $4.4 million of the $42.5 million in U.S. aid set aside last year for 
alternative development programs was actually spent. The Colombian 
government intends to spend $40 million on alternative development in 
coca-growing regions this year, about 40 percent less than in 2001. Most of 
that money comes from European donors.

The plan in southern Colombia, where the bulk of U.S.-sponsored alternative 
projects are based, is to give farmers with less than seven acres of coca 
roughly $800 worth of seeds, fertilizer and animals to turn small land 
holdings into pig, cow or fish farms. Some 37,000 farmers with more than 
80,000 acres of coca agreed last summer to pull up the crops by the end of 
July 2002 in exchange for aid -- or risk being hit by aerial herbicide 
spraying. The Colombian government also pledged to build several major new 
highways to help farmers move legal crops and livestock to markets that 
today can take up to 10 hours to reach along dirt highways.

But only about 150 acres of coca had been pulled up voluntarily by the end 
of January, according to U.S. officials. "What happened was that the 
Colombian government kind of oversubscribed," said an official with the 
U.S. Agency for International Development. "Plante [the Colombian agency 
managing the program] didn't have the capacity."

Maria Ines Restrepo, the director of Plante, said the program was in part a 
victim of its own ambitious plans. In a recent interview, Restrepo said 
successful alternative development programs in Peru and Bolivia, which were 
carried out under far less complicated conditions, took years to show 
results. She suggested that "an overly ambitious timeline" was developed in 
Colombia to help secure U.S. aid.

"This was a political decision, not a technical one," said Restrepo, who 
says she believes the project is working.

But viewed from the small farms of Cairo, where almost every peasant family 
has at least several acres of coca alongside corn, yucca and plantain 
crops, alternative development appeared destined to fail from the start.

The small subsidies started arriving in late November, months after most 
farmers had signed contracts with the government. By then, most farmers had 
forgotten about their end of the agreement or had started planting coca 
again. When a small ceremony was held in La Hormiga to pass out the first 
batch of farm aid, a sense of too-little too-late pervaded the event.

"These villages still don't have much confidence in the government," said 
Alejandro Ardila, a 52-year-old farmer picking up an aid package. "Instead 
of the spraying they do, they should have been giving us credits. This may 
help our confidence a little, but not much."

The $800 assistance package amounts to a small fraction of what most 
farmers make in a single coca harvest. About two acres of coca will yield a 
kilogram of coca base worth about $800, and coca can be harvested as many 
four times a year.

"There is no way the farmers will comply because they cannot support a 
family on what the state gives them," said Carlos Palacios, the former 
development secretary for the county of La Hormiga that includes this 
village. "No one is going to comply."

Jaimec Aguirre Gomez, who like many Putumayo coca farmers arrived in the 
last decade from Colombia's declining coffee region, has a typical farm for 
these parts: Five rolling acres split evenly between coca and food crops to 
feed his wife and two sons. He left another four acres of coca to wither 
after a round of fumigation a year ago prompted him to sign up for the 
alternative development program.

In preparing for aid he hoped would help him start a pig farm, Aguirre 
invested $400 to build animal pens and plant crops that would provide 
animal feed. But in November, the day he received his first visit from 
government alternative development technicians, spray planes flew over his 
house and killed the beans and vines he had planted in preparation.

"This pretty much ended my confidence in the program," Aguirre said. "They 
told us they were going to organize credit, new markets, all of this. But 
now nothing."

Aguirre and others from Cairo have been receiving about $800 per kilo of 
coca base, which makes cocaine, from men who visit his farm. He does not 
ask who they are, but town officials said the men were from the 
paramilitary force that over the past year has driven guerrillas from coca 
fields near town centers and now act as the area's sole coca dealers.

"The plan here so far has been fumigation, nothing else," said Enrique, the 
regional paramilitary commander. "The government would have had a lot more 
success if they said, 'We as the state will buy all the legal crops you 
produce.' Now there is no market."

Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
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