COLOMBIA COCA FARMERS PROTEST DRUG CROP SPRAYING

Thousands of angry coca farmers and pickers occupying a northern town
on Monday said they would not leave until the government abandons a
U.S.-backed program to aerially eradicate their crops.

The protests that began Thursday in Tibu, a town near the border with
Venezuela, were the first major grass-roots demonstrations against
fumigation since President Andres Pastrana's drug-fighting plan known
as Plan Colombia got underway late last-year.

The protesters came from the countryside where coca, the crop used to
make cocaine, is grown. They want the government to manually eradicate
the crops instead of spraying, said Gonzalo Cardenas, the mayor of
Tibu.

Officials said there was no violence Monday. Over the weekend
protesters-thought to number as many as 4,000 - looted businesses,
torched the fire station and set fire to fumigation chemicals stored
at the airstrip in the town, 322 miles northeast of the capital, Bogota.

"They will stay until the government abandons the fumigation program,"
said Rev. Jose Belen of the Tibu Diocese, which has provided food and
cooking pots to the protesters.

Cardenas, Tibu's mayor, ordered a curfew in the town of 17,000. Police
were sent in to help maintain peace.

Police accused right-wing paramilitaries, who earn huge profits by
taxing drug crops, of instigating the protests.

The spraying is part of Pastrana's Plan Colombia, to which the United
States has pledged $1.3 billion in mostly military aid.

While the government has offered aid to farmers in the southern
Putumayo state - the largest coca region and the main target of the
U.S.-backed anti-narcotics push - who agree to manually eradicate
crops, it apparently has not offered any such deals in the north.

Also Monday, security officials in Bogota said police had deactivated
two car bombs over the weekend, one in Bogota and the other in Cali,
Colombia's third-largest city.

State security police chief Gen. German Jaramillo said the bombs were
not related to each other and were probably placed by criminal gangs.