Pubdate: Tue, 18 Jul 2017
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2017 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Nicholas Casey

PEACE IS NEW TEST FOR COLOMBIAN COCA FARMERS

LOS RIOS, Colombia - Every three months or so, Javier Tupaz, a father
of six, heads downhill from his clapboard home to work in his cocaine
laboratory.

Under a black tent in the jungle, he shovels coca leaves into a giant
vat with gasoline, then adds cement powder - the first steps in his
cocaine recipe.

Like everyone in his village, Mr. Tupaz depends on coca for cash and
has survived decades of war here in Colombia. He churned out his
product during the seemingly endless conflict between the rebels and
the government, which tried many times to destroy his coca plants. He
simply replanted.

But there is one thing that Mr. Tupaz says his crops may not survive:
peace.

The peace deal signed late last year between the government and the
main rebel group - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known
as the FARC - was never just about ending the Americas'
longest-running conflict. Continue reading the main story

The Colombian government also sees peace as its biggest chance in
decades to uproot the rebel-controlled drug trade and replace it with
crops that are legal, though admittedly less lucrative.

"We celebrated the deal; after all, the conflict was over," Mr. Tupaz
said next to one of his large drug vats. "But on the other hand, the
FARC had control here - you could grow coca, have a lab, and you were
protected."

Peace means that soldiers no longer have to shoot their way into
rebel-held territory to pull up coca plants or dismantle drug labs.
Now the FARC, which formally disarmed last month, is joining forces
with the government to wean farmers off coca - one of the first
collaborations ever between the old enemies.

Outside Mr. Tupaz's village, Los Rios, the rebels now appear in
civilian clothes alongside government officials, selling farmers on
crops like black pepper and heart of palm.

"Without the war with the FARC we have a great opportunity ahead,"
said Vice President Oscar Naranjo, a retired general who spent much of
his career fighting the rebels.

There is a clear urgency to the effort. Even as the government and the
FARC were negotiating peace, coca cultivation in Colombia soared last
year, with a record amount of land being used to grow the crop,
according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Now, as part of its reconstruction plan for Colombia's war-ravaged
countryside, the government is promising money to the first 50,000
coca-growing families that take the offer: a monthly payment of about
$325 for the first year that farmers give up coca, followed by
subsidies to plant new crops and education on how to grow them.

But with the carrot comes sticks, General Naranjo warned.

"Not everyone will want to substitute their crops," particularly those
with deep ties to the drug industry, he said. "And for them, there
will be forced, manual eradication."

 From the tiny plot near his village, Mr. Tupaz says he has seen this
before.

He recalls the early 2000s, when the government gave every family here
two cows to ease them off coca production, which led to plummeting
prices for cattle when people sold them. Or, when officials came with
a plan to grow vanilla, which failed because no one knew how to grow
vanilla in Los Rios.

There was even the time in 2010, after so many fumigations of his coca
plants, that Mr. Tupaz simply gave up on drug cultivation and trekked
down a muddy path to the bank in town, taking out a loan to plant two
acres of cacao, which is used to make chocolate.

"They were just this size when they were sprayed, too," he said,
raising his hand a few feet off the ground as he recounted how
military planes dropped chemicals that ended up killing his legal crops.

The fumigations were eventually halted in 2015 because the herbicide
used, glyphosate, was linked to cancer by the World Health
Organization. When the spraying stopped, American officials have
argued, coca cultivation increased. (Colombian officials dispute that
conclusion, citing other factors, like the falling price of gold in
recent years, that made coca farming more attractive.)

For many rural Colombians, the issue is one of simple math: The coca
plant used to make cocaine is far more profitable than anything else
that could be grown here.

Los Rios, with 32 families, sits more than an hour's hike through mud
and rivers, cut off from hospitals, markets and virtually every
industry except drugs. Its residents say peacetime leaves them with a
choice between the criminality of coca and the even deeper poverty
they would face by planting something else.

"We have accepted it: We will earn less with other crops," said Edward
Cuaran, 23, a coca grower who returned to Los Rios, despite having
attained a university degree, because he could not find work. "But
what choice is there?"

Already, coca prices have dropped because so much coca was planted and
fewer rebels are involved in the drug trade, leaving many growers
without a buyer.

Meanwhile, the government has taken marijuana, long trafficked by
rebels, and legalized it for medical production, largely by
corporations. Few licenses have been granted so far, and many small
farmers complain that they have been shut out.

That has left difficult choices in places like Corinto, a town 300
miles north of Los Rios, at the foot of mountains threaded with
marijuana bushes and the light bulbs they grow under.

At a meeting of dozens of farmers, a woman opened with the Lord's
Prayer and urged God to "to help us all substitute illegal crops with
legal ones." Edward Garcia, the mayor, outlined a government package
for townspeople on a whiteboard.

"They won't wait forever for us to sign up," he said, warning that the
military was already patrolling the edges of the town.

A few farmers have made a successful switch. Near the border with
Ecuador, Pablo Angel Cuaran hacked down a tiny palm tree with a
machete, then sliced open the trunk to reveal its juicy center: heart
of palm, which he started cultivating a decade ago.

He and other members of a farmers cooperative all plant the crop now,
and bargained with the local government to bring them electricity in
exchange for their uprooting coca plants. The legal crops stretch out
for 200 acres of flatlands that include a mass grave site where
paramilitary fighters buried scores of victims.

A tall cross marks the site, now overgrown with a new crop of palm
trees. When Mr. Cuaran was a child and coca grew in the fields, a man
in a white coat could be seen sometimes at a bend in the road,
dismembering bodies with a machete, he recalled.

"You had a lot of money then, but you were never calm," Mr. Cuaran
said.

A few hours' drive away, 500 families have signed up for the new
government crop substitution program in La Carmelita, a region with a
dozen villages next to a rebel demobilization camp. Last month, they
began pulling up their coca plants, said Aldemar Yandar, the local
coordinator of the program.

"People will soon see what their neighbor is doing, and they will want
to copy it," Mr. Yandar said.

But the draw of the coca leaf is always near. Near La Carmelita, a
government-sponsored sugar cane processing plant had dropped to a
dozen workers, from more than 30 a year ago. Most of the employees had
left to harvest coca leaf and the processing plant could not find
anyone to take their places, workers said.

"We are surrounded by coca fields," said Alirio Hernandez, a leader in
the local processors' association. "They pay double."

General Naranjo, the vice president, remained upbeat. Because the
government was no longer focused on war with the rebels, he said, it
could finally build the roads and infrastructure to create markets for
legal crops, while delivering a finishing blow to the remaining drug
traffickers.

But he acknowledged the program might not work for everyone, like
those in very small villages not connected to roads, or those who have
settled as squatters in national parks, where coca growing exploded in
recent years.

"These families will have to relocate," the vice president
said.

Campo Elias Chagua, 50, a coca farmer outside a town called La
Hormiga, hopes he will not have to move.

On a recent morning, Mr. Chagua trudged through a dense rain forest of
vines and tropical birds, which suddenly opened up to his coca farm.
He and his 27-year-old son spent the day harvesting the coca bushes as
a fellow coca farmer, Arnulio Quinones, looked on.

"The FARC would keep order," said Mr. Chagua's wife, Mariana Narvaez,
remembering the old days.

But, they wondered, would the government? There was still no
electricity here, no running water. And now officials were asking them
to give up their coca.

"We could go back to violence if the government doesn't hold up its
end of the deal on this," Mr. Chagua said.

That day, they visited the lab of a neighbor, who was processing
cocaine paste with help of a hired hand. The smell of gasoline and raw
leaves hung in the air.

"He just wouldn't survive off of black pepper," Mr. Quinones said.
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MAP posted-by: Matt