PASTRANA TAKES TO THE ROAD TO SELL THE SOFTER SIDE OF PLAN COLOMBIA

VILLA GARZON, Colombia -- Almost the entire town turned out in the morning
humidity, gathering under palms in the central square to see a president of
their country for the first time. Some chanted angrily. Others cheered the
sheer oddity of a motorcade roaring along their pocked streets.

"Never before in this town has there been an event of this magnitude and
importance," said Milton Rojas, mayor of this collection of tile-roofed
shops, dirt roads and tin-sided houses in Putumayo province, 300 miles
south of the capital, Bogota. "We are not alone in this great struggle."

The struggle against coca, which fills Putumayo's lush canyons and plains,
has been hampered for years by the government's financial neglect. In place
of government help, residents created an economy based on the ready market
for coca, turning the province into the world's cocaine heartland and a
booming financial concern for the armed groups of the left and right that
control many of its towns and villages.

On Thursday, President Andres Pastrana, cabinet ministers and top generals
spent an hour here to inaugurate several long-awaited social programs
designed to rid the province of coca, the raw material for cocaine, by
helping farmers grow legitimate crops. Handing out government checks to at
least a dozen poor families, Pastrana announced the impending distribution
of $60.9 million for regional roads, schools, health clinics and aqueducts.

"Today Plan Colombia is a reality," the president said during a second stop
in nearby Mocoa, Putumayo's capital. "We are here to show the presence of
the government . . . to show that we want what you all want -- a Putumayo
without coca, a Colombia without coca."

His gesture came at a time of increasing criticism that the U.S.-backed
military part of his strategy, which has attracted the most attention so
far, has outpaced the part designed to promote social improvement for the
region's farmers.

The money announced during the two-day trip is part of Colombia's own
contribution to the $7.5 billion Plan Colombia, as Pastrana's anti-drug
strategy is known. It marks the start of what is scheduled to be the
biggest social investment in the country's history. In Pastrana's vision,
about 80 percent of the overall anti-drug strategy will be spent on
improving the lives of Colombian farmers in programs managed largely by
local governments and nonprofit organizations.

The United States, after lengthy congressional debate over whether more
resources should be devoted to strengthening Colombia's social fabric or
its military clout, is contributing $1.3 billion, mostly in the form of
military transport helicopters, later this year. The plan's European
patrons settled on the opposite tack, and have criticized Pastrana for
concentrating first on the military and an aerial herbicide-spraying strategy.

Groups of protesters marred many of the president's stops, mostly teachers
opposing a measure that might cut education and public health funding to
the provinces. Such a move typified for them Pastrana's priorities. They
waved signs showing a Colombian flag being subsumed by the Stars and
Stripes. "Plan Colombia's achievements," the sign announced. "Pastrana
subservient to the gringos," another group chanted over a loudspeaker.

"This will only be negative for us," said Alicia Moscera, a teacher in
Villa Garzon, referring to Plan Colombia. "These promises of highways and
money for health are a big lie. It will never happen."

While the U.S. military aid has come to define the program, Pastrana
describes the larger investment in schools, legal crops and other programs
as the key to the strategy's lasting success by imposing a new civic order
on a place with a weak government and a tradition of frontier violence.

Putumayo accounts for the majority of Colombia's coca, which makes up about
90 percent of the world supply, and over the years its economy has become
almost entirely reliant on the trade. In turn, Colombia's leftist
guerrillas and rightist paramilitary groups that profit from serving as
intermediaries in and protectors of the drug industry have turned the
province into one of the country's most violent.

Much of their military operations nationwide are financed by money made
from Putumayo's drug trade. But the Colombian armed forces -- the chief
recipients of the U.S. aid package -- have done little to drive the
guerrillas and paramilitary units out of areas where the social development
programs are expected to take place.

"Today, Putumayo is poorer and more violent -- with more widows and
orphans," said Gov. Ivan Gerardo Guerrero, who along with five other
southern governors has been a vocal critic of Plan Colombia's aerial
spraying and military components. But, he said, "This [social aid] returns
something we have recently lost -- our human values."

Overall, the scope of the coca industry is still emerging. A U.N. study
released last week shows that there was perhaps 17 percent more coca in
Colombia than thought before the herbicide spraying campaign began in
December. But the report, which relied on aerial surveillance photos, also
indicates that new coca was being planted at a slower rate over the past year.

Since it began, Plan Colombia's aerial spraying has wiped out what the
government says is 60,000 acres of coca in the south, or about 6 percent of
the country's total. By reducing supply, it has driven up the price by
roughly 30 percent and coaxed new farmers into the business while prompting
others who lost crops to preserve coca seedlings and wait for a safer time
to replant.

The social development portion of the plan was supposed to arrive far
sooner to help soften the blow of the lost coca crop and prevent the
emergence of new growers. Subsidies to encourage farmers to pull up coca
that were scheduled to begin at the beginning of the year have yet to
arrive in many areas. The amount of the promised subsidies, supported in
part by $81 million in U.S. aid, has shrunk by more than half.

On the surface, the illegal economy appears to be thriving in urban
centers. In Puerto Asis, shops are filled with digital cameras, Swiss Army
knives and other items unaffordable in most other towns its size. A new
dance club, its facade a huge Georgian-style colonnade, is under construction.

But the countryside has been ravaged, especially western Putumayo, where
the spraying and violence between the strengthening armed groups has left
whole towns feeling abandoned. Many farmers remain reluctant to uproot coca
before the government delivers on its promised subsidies. They point to a
record of broken promises by Bogota, including a half-built hearts-of-palm
factory on Pastrana's tour, and the violent pressures applied by armed
groups to keep producing the lucrative crop.

"We believe the word of the people," Pastrana said, referring to pacts
signed by thousands of Putumayo farmers to uproot coca crops within a year
in exchange for a small subsidy and exemption from the spraying. "I hope
that the people of Putumayo believe in the word of the government."

Jose Julian Meneses, a 24-year-old coca farmer from the town of Orito,
arrived in Villa Garzon the night before Pastrana's visit. He made the
seven-hour drive to hear the president's plan for improving a dilapidated
regional road network that makes delivering legal crops to market almost
impossibly time-consuming and expensive.

Pastrana's pledge to improve several key highways, which the president said
would bring Putumayo into the regional economy, was greeted with cheers.
But Meneses said much of what else he saw, including the monthly subsidies
to poor families that amounted to roughly $40 each, would not be enough to
encourage the kind of fundamental change Pastrana is seeking.

"In terms of the infrastructure, they make a lot of sense, and we need the
roads more than anything," Meneses said. "But the money these families are
receiving is barely enough to cover the cost of the bus ticket in to pick
it up."