Pubdate: Sun, 07 Apr 2002
Source: Indianapolis Star (IN)
Copyright: 2002 Indianapolis Newspapers Inc.
Contact:  http://www.starnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/210
Author: Scott Wilson, The Washington Post
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

U.S. SEES ALTERNATIVE-CROP PLAN FOR COLOMBIA ROOTED IN FAILURE

CAIRO, Colombia -- As the civil war in Colombia persists, U.S. officials 
have become more 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 program is the most socially oriented element of a $1.3 billion 
anti-drug aid package approved almost two years ago by Congress with the 
goal of cutting Colombia's coca production in half by 2005.

Although only a small fraction of an aid package tilted heavily toward 
military assistance, the alternative-development program has long been seen 
as the most politically acceptable part of a U.S. anti-drug strategy 
frequently criticized as a war plan targeting the country's Marxist insurgency.

But 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.

In light of two recent critical reviews, U.S. officials have decided to 
shift the program's focus from helping individual farmers to creating 
public-works jobs in coca-growing regions, tailor development projects by 
community and begin new 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 for the current $42.5 million 
program is in doubt.

Here in the province of Putumayo, the heart of Colombia's coca trade, only 
a few of farmers who agreed to uproot their coca plants by the end of July 
have done so.

That resistance, rooted mostly in 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.

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

Congressional auditors also 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.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager