COLOMBIA COCA PROTEST SHOWS DRUG POLICY'S SOCIAL CHALLENGE

Coca pickers held the largest grassroots protest yet to stop
fumigation planes from flying over the cocaine-producing fields in
this northern hamlet.

As about 4,000 itinerant workers headed home Sunday without any accord
to stop forced eradication under a U.S.-backed plan, fumigation planes
continued their runs. But the 10 days of sometimes violent protests in
the nearby town of Tibu did highlight Colombia's challenge in trying
to carry out the anti-narcotics plan without igniting a social tinderbox.

Hundreds of thousands of Colombians are believed to make a living
either by farming coca, or working as field hands picking the green
leaves used to make cocaine.

They feel threatened by President Andres Pastrana's Plan Colombia, to
which Washington has promised $1.3 billion in mostly military support,
including the airplanes dropping chemical herbicides over the crops.

Frustrated by the government's lack of response, the protesters looted
stores, clashed with riot police, and burned down the police station
where they believed the herbicide was being stored.

One protester was killed and two police officers were injured, in
addition to property damage estimated at $350,000.

For Graciela Rincon, a harvester who stood in a coca field, the
protests were a matter of survival.

"One cannot survive here without coca," she said above the buzz of a
crop dusting plane flying overhead, and the clatter of three
helicopter gunships escorting it over the field. "It's the only thing
this land produces."

The protests began June 7 when farmers and harvesters from this
eastern region near Venezuela called for an end to the fumigation -
estimated to have killed more than a third of the region's 17,000
acres of coca in only a matter of weeks.

Government officials accused right-wing paramilitary militias of
instigating the protests - a charge the demonstrators and the militias
deny. Both groups are believed to finance themselves from revenues
collected by taxing and drug production.

The spraying offensive around Veta Central follows record eradication
during the beginning of the year in southern Putumayo state, the
largest coca-growing region, and the main target of the U.S.-backed
program.

After spraying a record 86,000 acres, the government halted forced
eradication in Putumayo in April and has used the pause to try and
enlist farmers in voluntarily eradication agreements offering them aid
for alternative crops.