Pubdate: Sun, 23 Apr 2006
Source: New Zealand Herald (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2006 New Zealand Herald
Contact:  http://www.nzherald.co.nz/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/300
Author: Daniel Howden, The Independent
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

DYING FOR THE WHITE STUFF

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 arriving in ever greater quantities into the West.

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 US-funded "War on Drugs" and supply of the  
industrial world's favourite stimulant remains steady. In Bogota,  
Sandro Calvani, head of the UN's Drugs and Serious Crime unit said  
eradication was simply making the traffickers better at farming.

"In the past five years there's been a significant reduction in  
hectarage ... 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 Washington dollars have been spent every  
year on spraying tens of thousands of hectares with herbicides but  
there has been little impact on the street value of cocaine,  
according to this year's US 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."

The Latin American country that has become synonymous with the  
supposedly glamorous drug is trying to tell the world that snorting a  
line of coke is killing a Colombian.

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, the 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 demobilisation  
that has been heavily criticised 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. The new wonder drug promised a bright  
future with applications ranging from soft drinks to anaesthetics.  
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-World War I America, based on the  
spurious assertion of a cocaine epidemic among black Americans in the  
deep south led to prohibition. Criminalisation followed.

On the streets of London, Sydney or New York "blow" 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 3000 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 under way. The  
work is arduous and extremely 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 1000ha," said  
Major Lopez.

In the past 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 an epidemic of land mines.

Almost 5000 people have been killed or mutilated by these explosives  
since 1990, says Luspiedad Herrera, the director of Colombia's  
landmine observatory. "Many of them are made of plastic to avoid  
detection and disguised as toys," she said.

This random violence and territorial conflict has driven entire  
communities out of rural areas and into Colombia's chaotic cities.  
Unofficial estimates put the number of displaced people at over three  
million, an internal refugee crisis rivalled only by the Congo.
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MAP posted-by: Jackl