SPRAYING BLITZ CRIPPLES COLOMBIAN DRUG CROP

LA HORMIGA, Colombia -- It is harvest time in the mint-green hills of
southern Putumayo state, the epicenter of Colombia's coca cultivation. But
coca farmers such as Gabriel Nieto are in no mood to celebrate.

The price of what everyone here calls simply "the merchandise" has plunged
following a U.S.-backed aerial defoliation campaign in December and January
that turned huge expanses of coca bushes into dead brown stalks.

Stepped-up army patrols have limited supply and driven up the cost of
chemicals needed to make cocaine, and thousands of farmers and itinerant
leaf pickers have moved out, leaving behind half-filled brothels and churches.

"Now we can barely squeeze a few pesos out of this," Nieto, 38, grumbled as
he mixed 750 pounds of coca leaf with lime and gasoline under an open-sided
hut, grandly called a "laboratory," to produce a pound of unrefined cocaine
known as coca base.

Seven months after the spraying blitz in Putumayo kicked off the
counter-drug campaign broadly known as Plan Colombia, early results suggest
that the offensive has dealt a powerful blow to the local coca industry.

U.S. and Colombian officials caution that it is too early to assess the
campaign, backed by $1.3 billion in U.S. aid. The plan aims to cut
Colombia's cocaine output in half by 2005 and shave the drug income of
leftist guerrillas and right-wing militias waging Latin America's most
violent conflict.

The impact has not yet been felt in the price of cocaine on U.S. streets,
and the campaign -- a three-point strategy of spraying, army interdictions
and giving subsidies to farmers who agree to uproot their coca bushes -- is
in danger of losing its spraying leg.

GROWING OPPOSITION

One reason is growing opposition inside and outside Colombia to the use of
chemicals, which critics say sicken peasants and poison the land.

A Bogota court Friday issued a preliminary injunction against all spraying
but gave the government three days to reply and said it would issue a more
detailed ruling in 10 days. The government said it was studying the ruling.

Still, for now the coca business in this critical production region is
faring badly.

"Here, the coca business is over. Production is way down, maybe 60
percent," said Flover Mesa, mayor of La Hormiga in the Guamuez Valley, a
part of Putumayo that holds one-quarter of Colombia's 402,600 acres of coca.

U.S. and Colombian officials toss out all kinds of impressive numbers for
the Putumayo campaign's progress -- numbers that skeptics say are the
drug-war equivalent of Vietnam's meaningless "body count."

Between sprayings and interdictions, "we've taken 100 metric tons off the
market, and that's not insignificant," said U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson.

Colombia's total cocaine production is estimated at 560 tons per year,
while U.S. consumption is put at 300 tons. Colombia's Defense Ministry
reported last week that soldiers and police had sprayed 128,000 acres of
coca and destroyed 663 "laboratories" in the first half of this year,
almost double the totals for same period in 2000.

SEIZURES DECLINE

Cocaine seizures were down in the same period -- from 38 tons to 23 tons,
largely because of the shortage of leaves, said Gen. Gustavo Socha, head of
the Colombian National Police Anti-Narcotics Division.

Mesa said the spraying blitz in the Guamuez Valley killed some 26,000 acres
of coca and initially drove up the price of coca base from $1,050 to $1,400
per kilogram -- 2.2 pounds -- because of the shortage of leaf.

"It was a very green Christmas -- dollar green," recalled a smiling Nieto,
who farms two acres of coca and works as a hired hand in a neighbor's much
bigger plot, earning $4 for every 25-pound sack of leaves he picks.

But prices have now plummeted to $750 per kilo as intensified patrols by
three U.S.-trained army counter-narcotics battalions scared off major
buyers of base, usually sent by cocaine refineries in central and northern
Colombia, and left the field to locals who are less willing to pay top prices.

`TOO MANY SOLDIERS'

"The buyers say there are too many soldiers, that they have to pay extra to
smuggle the merchandise from here to the refineries," said Ancizar Ardila,
43, as he showed visitors his nursery of 25,000 tiny coca plants just one
mile from La Hormiga.

On the edge of the drab town of 13,000 people, more signs of the coca
industry's downturn: a half-dozen shuttered brothels and a dozen more open
but nearly empty except for a few bored-looking girls sitting on the sidewalks.

"There used to be 300 prostitutes and lots of happy business with the leaf
pickers who came into town on weekends to spend their salaries, but now
there are less than 100," said parish priest Julian Gomez. "But most of the
pickers are gone now, and even attendance at Sunday Mass is down."

In a possibly more significant sign of the impact of the counter-narcotics
crackdown, Guamuez Valley peasants say they have begun to believe that coca
has turned into an unprofitable business.

"The farmers have been doing their math and thinking that it's time to
quit," said Harold Montenegro, who lost two of his three acres of coca when
they were sprayed Jan. 14. "If they spray again, we're all dead."

PREDICTIONS FAIL

Perhaps just as significant for the long-term effectiveness of the
counter-narcotics campaign, none of the hoary predictions of disaster that
accompanied the start of the spraying blitz in Putumayo have come to pass.

The sprayings did not drive waves of refugees into neighboring Ecuador, and
leftist guerrillas from the 17,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, who collect hefty "taxes" on the coca business, have not
significantly increased their attacks around the region.

NO RIGHTS COMPLAINTS

Nor have human rights complaints been filed against the three Colombian
army counter-narcotics battalions, trained by U.S. Special Forces, that are
spearheading the Putumayo campaign, U.S. officials said.

"We're extremely pleased with the results" of the U.S.-trained force, said
a military officer at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. "That's got to make a
dent on the [drug] trade."

For all its success, the Guamuez Valley offensive has not been without
problems.

Fields of coca bushes only a foot high show that many farmers whose crops
were sprayed either replanted or pruned their bushes immediately after the
spraying, to keep the leaves from absorbing the herbicide.

Montenegro estimated that one-third of the Guamuez farmers whose crops were
sprayed have replanted, most of them owners of large fields who had already
invested money in fertilizers, pesticides and a new high-yield strain of
coca just brought in from Bolivia. Their first harvest is four months away.

"I am replacing coca with coca. Yuca or plantains bring in even less
money," said Manuel Palacios, a 46-year-old farmer whose two-acre lot in
the village of La Vega was killed by the spraying campaign Dec. 22.

Farmers said that many of the new fields are in areas declared off-limits
to spraying by the government -- in Indian tribe reservations and populated
areas along the edges of main roads -- or in the neighboring state of
Narino to the west.

And there is a black cloud on the horizon -- mounting attacks on the aerial
spraying by a broad range of Colombian politicians and activists who insist
that the herbicide glyphosate makes peasants ill, poisons the land and only
drives coca farmers elsewhere.

NO FAITH IN SPRAYING

"Fumigation is easy but does not work . . . You need more, a lot of
economic and social development programs, or farmers will just plant
somewhere else," said Klaus Nyholm, head of the U.N. Drug Policy office in
Bogota.

The governors of Putumayo, Narino and four other drug-producing states have
demanded a stop to the spraying, and a senator from the Conservative Party
of President Andres Pastrana announced two weeks ago that he would submit
legislation decriminalizing small coca fields.

PRESSING AHEAD

So far, Pastrana has stood by the spraying. "It is not in the government's
plans to halt the fumigations," said Gonzalo de Francisco, Pastrana's
national security advisor and point man on the Putumayo campaign.

The U.S. government's position is much the same.

"Manual eradication has a role to play but, given the amount of coca and
[opium] poppy cultivation in Colombia, it can be only part of the
solution," Patterson, the U.S. ambassador, said.

"Especially in areas of large-scale production or where [guerrillas are]
most active, it takes too long, is too dangerous and -- frankly -- it's too
expensive."

Patterson said Washington is paying for a study that will test blood and
urine samples from 1,000 people -- 500 living in areas sprayed and 500 in
areas far from the spraying -- for any signs of glyphosate.

"We have a moral responsibility to be sure what we're doing is right," the
ambassador told reporters Wednesday.