AFTER RIOTING, COCA WORKERS AND COLOMBIA TO NEGOTIATE ERADICATION

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Some 3,000 coca workers who rioted in the town of Tibu
to protest the U.S.-backed spraying of their fields with herbicides have
returned home but will meet with government envoys to negotiate a voluntary
eradication pact, officials said Friday.

The disturbances were the first outbreak of public violence against
stepped-up Colombian government efforts -- financed and operated by the
U.S. State Department -- to eradicate coca fields with aerial spraying of a
herbicide.

The 3,000 farmhands began leaving Thursday, after residents angered by the
rioting forced their way into the stadium where they were staying and took
away their food stocks, acting Tibu Mayor Gonzalo Cardenas said.

"Our people picked up rocks and lined up on the side of the riot police
because they were tired of all the outrages," Cardenas said in a phone
interview from Tibu, a town of 13,000 people 280 miles northeast of Bogota.

One rioter was killed by police in a week of intermittent clashes in which
the coca workers set fire to a local refueling base for the crop dusters, a
firehouse and the town's only school.

But the farmworkers got part of what they wanted, a meeting with government
officials to discuss their demands for a halt in a three-week old spray
campaign against the estimated 17,000 acres of coca north of Tibu.

In return for the halt and government subsidies for alternative crops, they
are offering to uproot their coca bushes, a deal like others negotiated in
December by the national government with coca farmers in southern Putumayo
state.

Cardenas said he will send a delegation today to the village of La Gabarra,
the region's coca-growing center, to help organize a negotiating committee
made up of coca farmers and field workers.

The committee will later meet with state Gov. Juan Alcides and eventually
will travel to Bogota to meet with aides to President Andres Pastrana in
charge of the voluntary eradication pacts, Cardenas said.

U.S. officials have expressed misgivings about the agreements in Putumayo.

The officials say the agreements stop the fumigations but offer few
guarantees that the coca farmers will uproot their crops, and none at all
that they will not replant.