COLOMBIA COCA FARMERS PROTEST

Filed at 8:26 p.m. ET BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- 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.