Pubdate: Sat, 15 Apr 2006
Source: Hamilton Spectator (CN ON)
Copyright: 2006 The Hamilton Spectator
Contact:  http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/181
Author: Daniel Howden, The Independent, London
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?208 (Environmental Issues)

RANDOM VIOLENCE LEAVES 3 MILLION HOMELESS

Colombia's Curse

SANTA MARTA -- Of the thousand shades of green that wash the hills of  
Tayron national park, the lightest is the coca leaf.

Seen from the air, mud trails spread like yellow veins into the  
forest, each ending in burnt black scars. These clearances give way  
to dense coca fields as the growers move deeper into the primary  
forest, hacking and slashing as they go.

Cocaine labs speckle the high ground, hoisted on stilts and wrapped  
in black polythene against the rain.

These hills that rise out of the Caribbean Sea near Santa Marta in  
northern Colombia are the latest front in a losing battle to stop the  
"white stuff" that's washing up in ever greater quantities on the  
shores of North America, Europe and beyond.

While Europeans are turning in record numbers to cocaine for  
recreational purposes, Colombia's environment and its people are  
paying the price.

The country has been left with three million internal refugees from  
drug-fuelled conflicts; a rapidly diminishing rainforest; the worst  
landmine problem in the world; and indigenous tribes driven from  
their homelands deep in the Amazon.

Eradication campaigns have driven the narco-traffickers deeper into  
the protected national parks, where the spraying planes are barred  
from going.

Thirty-five years into the U.S.-funded War On Drugs, the supply of  
the industrial world's favourite stimulant remains steady.

In Bogota, Sandro Calvani, head of the United Nations Drugs and  
Serious Crime unit, said eradication is simply making the traffickers  
better at farming.

"In the last five years there's been a significant reduction in  
hectorage ... But the narco-traffickers have responded by caring for  
the coca plant better. They're treating them like tea plants."

The logic of Washington's war is to limit demand by choking the  
supply line.

Billions of White House dollars have been spent every year on  
spraying tens of thousands of hectares with pesticides. But there has  
been little or no impact on the street value of cocaine, according to  
this year's U.S. State Department narcotics report.

"This is a global problem," says Colombia's vice-president, Francisco  
Santos Calderon. "On the supply and the demand sides, there is a  
shared responsibility."

Despite its relative stability -- Colombia has avoided the coups and  
dictatorships rife in Latin America -- the country has been blighted  
by four decades of internal conflict.

The "white stuff" has complicated efforts to find a peace.

Today, fighting still rages between the right-wing government and the  
leftist guerrillas, the Farc. A third force of right-wing  
paramilitaries, the AUC, is in a flawed process of demobilization  
that has been heavily criticized by human rights groups.

In the background of each of these battles, paying for the weapons  
and fuelling the fighting is cocaine.

Colombia's rich earth is also its curse.

The mix of nutrients and minerals allow it to grow four of the five  
variants of the coca plant -- the raw material for the "dandruff of  
the Andes."

For centuries, the indigenous people chewed its green leaves to  
combat everything from toothache to altitude sickness. That was until  
a German scientist, Friedrich Gaedcke, isolated the cocaine alkaloid  
in 1855.

There seemed briefly to be a bright future for the new wonder drug  
with applications ranging from soft drinks to anesthetics.

Its fans included Sigmund Freud and Pope Leo XIII, purported to carry  
a hip flask of cocaine-based Mariani wine with him. That came to an  
end with a moral panic in pre-First World War America.

On the streets of Europe, the cost of "blow" can be counted in used  
notes.

It might mean an addiction, a lost job or, worse, a lost loved one.  
In Colombia, which produces 80 per cent of the world's supply, it has  
helped to pay for a conflict that kills as many as 3,000 every year.

Colombia is home to a disproportionate percentage of the world's  
biodiversity. But satellite images taken this year show that coca  
plantations have cut into 13 of Colombia's 51 national reserves.

"They know we're not allowed to spray in the parks," says anti- 
narcotic police's Major Fernando Lopez. In La Macarena reserve south  
of Bogota, the biggest manual eradication effort is underway.

The work is arduous and dangerous. The military has assigned 3000  
personnel to guard 70 workers. "We thought it would take 130 days to  
do it but after a month we have cleared just 1000 hectares," said  
Major Lopez.

In the last three weeks alone, more than a dozen police have been  
killed by guerrillas. The Farc has taken to booby-trapping coca  
plants with landmines.

Turf wars between the government, cartels, guerrillas and  
paramilitaries mean there is an epidemic of land mines.

There have been nearly 5,000 people killed or mutilated by these  
explosives since 1990, according to Luspiedad Herrera, the director  
of Colombia's landmine observatory "Many of them are made of plastic  
to avoid detection and are disguised as toys," she said.

This random violence and territorial conflict has driven entire  
communities out of rural areas and into Colombia's cities.
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MAP posted-by: Jackl