Pubdate: Sun, 11 Mar 2007
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact:  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Jens Erik Gould, Chronicle Foreign Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/walters.htm (Walters, John)

U.S. EFFORT TO KILL COCA FAILING IN COLOMBIA

Only three days have passed since airplanes dumped chemicals near 
this isolated village to destroy coca plants, the raw ingredient in 
cocaine that winds up on American streets.

But Jorlin Giovanny, one of some 300 peasants who live here, is 
already rescuing the seeds from dead crops to plant a new batch.

"What else are we going to do?" asked Giovanny, while he replanted 
tidy rows in his backyard. "There's no other option."

Aerial spraying is part of the U.S. government's seven-year, $4.7 
billion anti-drug effort that ran its course last year. As President 
Bush visits Colombia today, his administration has long praised the 
plan for slashing cocaine production and reducing violence in the 
nation, which is the world's largest exporter of the drug.

But the numbers tell a different story.

The campaign, known as Plan Colombia, has neither reduced the 
country's coca crop nor the availability of cocaine in the United 
States. Critics ranging from Colombian peasants to Washington 
politicians attribute the plan's failure largely to its underfunding 
of alternative development programs that help farmers switch to legal crops.

"The coca eradication program has not achieved what we were 
promised," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the 
appropriations subcommittee that oversees U.S. foreign-assistance 
programs. "The amount of cocaine reaching here is no less than it was 
five years ago."

According to the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, 
U.S. retail cocaine prices fell from above $200 to below $140 per 
gram and purity rose from 60 percent to above 70 percent between July 
2003 and October 2006. Such statistics suggest that the drug's 
availability improved at a time when spraying nearly tripled in 
Colombia, which provides more than 90 percent of cocaine entering the 
United States, according to the State Department's 2006 International 
Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

Coca cultivation has increased, despite Plan Colombia's initial goal 
of cutting the country's coca crop in half. The most recent data 
released by the State Department show that more land was cultivated 
with coca in 2005 -- 144,000 acres -- than when the effort began in 2000.

To be sure, drug czar John Walters has credited Plan Colombia with 
helping President Alvaro Uribe push back cocaine-financed guerrilla 
groups that have been fighting the state for more than four decades. 
He and other supporters say increased U.S. military aid has played a 
key role in decreasing homicide and kidnapping rates, spurred 
economic growth and destroyed large coca farms concentrated in the 
south that are run by criminal enterprises.

But when fumigation destroys coca fields, new plots simply crop up 
nearby or in other states. Peasants like Giovanny have figured out 
how to nurse plots that are smaller, more spread out and harder for 
planes to reach. In the past three years, 62 percent of sprayed coca 
fields have been replanted, according to Sandro Calvani, director of 
the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime in Bogota, Colombia's capital.

"That means air spraying does not convince people," Calvani said. 
"You cannot change a dysfunctional social-economic situation by force alone."

Virtually every family in La Balsa continues to grow coca, even 
though they say planes have sprayed their plants at least five times 
in the past five years. The village has no electricity, running 
water, doctor or school past the fifth grade. But it does have a 
small laboratory near the village entrance that turns coca leaf into 
coca base, the first stage of cocaine production.

Farmers here say fumigation actually encourages them to replant coca 
because it makes them dependent on coca profits to buy basic food 
staples. In addition to hitting coca plants, toxic herbicides often 
kill off less-resistant legal crops such as plantains, cassava and 
sugar cane -- the community's main sources of food.

"So what else can you do to give your little kids something to eat?" 
asked Uber Buila, who runs La Balsa's cocaine laboratory. "The 
government should find another method of eradicating coca."

Meanwhile, the Uribe government's proposal for fighting cocaine for 
the next seven years, known here as Plan Colombia 2, promises to 
allocate 48 percent of a desired $43.8 billion to social spending, 
while only parceling 14 percent to the military.

But the Bush administration is not on the same page. Despite 
initially suggesting it would fund more alternative development 
programs, the administration's request for 2008 is a carbon copy of 
previous budgets, allocating less than one-quarter of aid to those programs.

Drug experts in Washington say Congress could allot more money for 
economic programs now that Democrats are in the congressional 
majority. The House appropriations subcommittee is currently drafting 
the 2008 foreign aid bill, which includes Colombia.

"Chances are there will be radical departures from what the Bush 
administration wants," said Adam Isacson, director of the Colombia 
program at the Center for International Policy in Washington.

A current scandal linking prominent members of the Uribe government 
to right-wing paramilitary groups considered terrorists by the State 
Department could also prompt Congress to cut aid. Those paramilitary 
forces, accused of committing mass murders in battling Latin 
America's longest-running leftist insurgency, are also some of the 
country's largest drug traffickers.

"For those disappointed with Plan Colombia because they expected more 
- -- and there are a lot of those people -- this gives them another 
argument as to why it's a bad approach," said John Walsh, an expert 
on U.S. drug policy for the Washington Office on Latin America, a 
nongovernmental think tank.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman