Pubdate: Sun, 21 Dec 2003
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2003 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)

IN COLOMBIA, COCA DECLINES BUT THE WAR DOES NOT

Fighting Spikes in Province Despite Anti-Drug Program

EL TIGRE, Colombia -- Jose Efrain Mora lived in a house on the steep bluffs 
above the River Guamuez for 30 years until the night last month when a 
stranger's hands shook him awake.

Members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, the 
country's largest guerrilla insurgency, ordered him to get up, and he 
quickly woke his wife and three children. Outside, more than a dozen men, 
working quietly in the darkness, laced dynamite to the 350-foot bridge 
spanning the wide river below their house.

The resulting explosion toppled the bridge from the bluffs, severing the 
economic lifeline that joined hundreds of farmers in southern Putumayo 
province with markets, food and families. The roof of Mora's home caved in. 
Heavy seasonal rains have since left the detritus of a humble life -- two 
children's backpacks, a lady's worn white pumps, a shabby purse -- swimming 
in pools of water in the ruined bedroom.

"They didn't want us dead, and in that sense I view them well," said Mora, 
a 48-year-old farmer. "But just look at my house. I had nothing else."

After more than a year of relative calm, Putumayo province is enduring a 
severe spike in violence, defying national trends.

The war is rising here despite a sharp decline in Putumayo's drug crops, 
reduced 93 percent after three years of intensive U.S.-financed aerial 
herbicide spraying.

Colombian and U.S. authorities have long said that coca production provides 
the motivation and financial fuel for the country's nearly four-decade 
civil war. But the continuing violence in a province that has been the 
chief venue of U.S. anti-drug assistance challenges that notion. It also 
shows the difference in the benchmarks for success, which the Bush 
administration measures as a swift reduction in drug crops and the 
Colombian government envisions as a lasting peace.

The FARC is an 18,000-member guerrilla group that promotes a Marxist 
solution to Colombia's economic imbalances. It has in the past six weeks 
attacked oil wells, roads and bridges, military posts and police stations 
across Putumayo. Fighting for Puerto Asis, the province's commercial 
capital 25 miles east of this river town, left at least 30 people dead in 
November. One was a 14-month-old boy killed by a bullet after it passed 
through his father's head. The death toll accounted for more than half the 
murders reported in first 10 months of the year.

The United States has delivered $2.4 billion in mostly military assistance 
to Colombia since 2000 in the hopes of crippling the drug trade. Colombian 
trafficking accounts for as much as 90 percent of the cocaine reaching U.S. 
shores and funds two irregular armed groups -- the FARC and a rival 
paramilitary force that works alongside the army against the FARC.

Coca, the key ingredient in cocaine, covered 163,000 acres of Putumayo in 
2000, when the U.S. Congress approved the first phase of the aid package 
known as Plan Colombia. By the end of July 2003, fewer than 12,000 acres 
remained. Nationwide coca cultivation has dropped from 403,000 acres to 
169,000 acres over that time, according to Colombian National Police figures.

But less coca has not translated into less violence, the long-term 
Colombian objective, in Putumayo. Neither a new economy nor a stronger 
local government has taken hold, as envisioned by the anti-drug plan, and 
the military is still struggling to keep down a potent guerrilla force.

Coca farmers who once expected sustained U.S. help to begin legal farms 
have instead moved into remote corners of the lightly governed region to 
replant illegal ones.

"It is very easy to see this rising violence as a fight over the illegal 
crops," said Simonetta Grassi, acting director of the U.N. Office on Drugs 
and Crime in Bogota, the capital, about 350 miles northeast of here. "We 
can't discard this. But at the same time, Putumayo is no longer the center 
of the drug trade, and there is likely more going on here."

Coca cultivation has increased in the Amazon River basin east of here, 
south along the Ecuadoran frontier, and west in bordering Nari=F1o 
province, which has replaced Putumayo as Colombia's biggest coca producer, 
according to national police figures.

Much of the expansion has been directed by the FARC, now trying to shore up 
support in southern Colombia, where it has long derived much of its money 
and recruits, as it loses ground in other regions. Meanwhile, it is 
stepping up its defense of what little coca remains: Guerrilla groundfire 
has struck 94 spray planes this year, more than twice as many as in 2002, 
and brought down four of them.

"It's a last stand," said Col. Carlos Malaver, director of planning and 
strategy of Colombia's National Police anti-narcotics division. "Once we 
get rid of all the coca, which we will, they must find new places to go. 
They'll have to move farther away from their markets and their territory, 
so there is resistance."

After the family coca plot south of here was sprayed earlier this year, 
Buenaventura Calvache, 22, moved east down the Putumayo River to begin 
again behind a protective guerrilla perimeter. Colombian police have 
detected 1,400 acres of new coca in La Paya, a national park in eastern 
Putumayo province not far from Puerto Ospina, where Calvache and his 
brother-in-law carved out 22 acres from the jungle to start fresh.

The guerrillas provide protection and in return are the only ones allowed 
to buy the coca after it has undergone its first stage of processing, 
Calvache said. They are paying $820 for every 2.2 pounds of unprocessed 
cocaine, known as base, the going rate in areas the FARC controls nationwide.

"Coca still pays," said Calvache, a rare high school graduate among coca 
farmers. "Even if it didn't, people are not used to working in anything 
else. Almost all of the crops are in the east now, and every day there are 
new ones."

The intensity of the spraying effort has made farming coca more expensive, 
U.S. officials say, offering new hope for U.S. development programs that 
have invested $45 million in Putumayo since the start of Plan Colombia. 
Most dramatically, they say, coca now ranks ninth on the list of crops that 
offer the best return per acre, trailing the tropical flower heliconia, 
vanilla and black pepper.

"We're still investing a considerable amount of funds, and we think that 
alternative development is more viable than maybe we even gave it credit 
for a year or so ago," said Mike Deal, director of the U.S. Agency for 
International Development in Colombia. He added, however, that "security is 
still a major impediment and a major cost of doing business."

"Given the overall financing of Plan Colombia, I don't think we can sustain 
that heavy an investment in Putumayo," Deal said. "I think we can improve 
our overall success by focusing on more secure areas with better market 
access."

Last week, an anti-narcotics battalion comprising 400 police officers and 
army troops arrived a few miles west of here to begin yanking out the 
remaining coca crops by hand and arresting, for the first time, the 
small-time landlords and leaf pickers who represent the lowest rung of the 
drug trade.

As soldiers searched a plank-board shack by the roadside, seizing such 
dual-use items as gasoline and vats used to process coca, a group of troops 
hacked away at the shoulder-high plants behind the house, stacking them and 
setting them ablaze.

"Spraying doesn't kill all of this," said the police lieutenant in charge. 
"So we'll do the rest by machete."

The FARC is waging its own offensive, sending in a mobile column and an 
additional front of several hundred troops. In the past two months, 
guerrillas have burned oil wells near the Ecuadoran border, shelled the 
military base on the outskirts of Puerto Asis, and blown up homes used by 
the army and paramilitary troops.

The United Nations shuttered its relief agencies earlier this month because 
of the violence.

Puerto Asis, a billiards-and-beer town where the guerrillas were pushed out 
five years ago by paramilitary forces, has been hardest hit. The November 
murders -- all of the victims were young men except for the toddler -- made 
the homicide rate for the month 23 times that of the annual rate in Washington.

The spike runs counter to an overall improving human rights picture under 
President Alvaro Uribe that shows, in figures disputed by human rights 
groups, a decline in murders, kidnappings, guerrilla attacks and civilians 
forced from homes by war. Police officials say the paramilitary group in 
Puerto Asis might have been using a 17-year-old FARC deserter to point out 
alleged guerrillas and their collaborators, many newly arrived. Most of the 
dead have been found in a river with three bullet wounds along the head and 
neck.

"The FARC aspires to take back all of this," said Maj. Miguel Fernando Roa 
Ramirez, the Puerto Asis police chief, who is so short of resources that he 
has not had enough gasoline to run patrols since late November.

Though he lost his house, Mora has a new job, part of a cottage industry 
that has sprung up around the broken bridge. He dispatches taxis to points 
west for passengers who can no longer cross the bridge. Other jobless young 
men receive $5 a day carrying propane gas tanks, jugs of gasoline and 
lengths of lumber from one truck over the river to another.

"I want them to yank it all out," said Maria del Carmen Gutierrez, 
discussing the coca crop as she watched the foot traffic around the bridge. 
Gutierrez directs a nonprofit organization that has received about $200,000 
from Plan Colombia so that 75 former coca farmers can begin planting cacao, 
from which chocolate is made. "Everyone has to be more responsible if they 
want progress or else there will be more of this violence." 
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MAP posted-by: Perry Stripling