COCA CROP SURVIVES 1ST WAVE

LA HORMIGA, Colombia-In January, U.S.-funded fumigation planes swept
over Juan Saraza's 5 acres of coca bushes in the hills of southern
Colombia, leaving three-quarters of them leafless and dying.

The planes "will come back to fumigate again," he predicted calmly, as
field workers harvested his remaining acre of healthy coca, stripping
the alkaloid-rich leaves and heaping them onto plastic grain sacks.

If Saraza, 40, doesn't seem worried, it's for good reason. Just down
the hillside, protected beneath a canopy of black tarps, lies his
future: A nursery of thousands of bright green young coca seedlings,
grown from a new high-yield seed brought in from Bolivia.

Since December, Colombia's remote Putumayo province has been the focus
of a $1.3 billion U.S.-funded effort to reverse the explosive growth
of coca production in Colombia, stem the flow of cocaine to U.S.
streets and, unofficially, cut the drug profits of the armed
insurgents who have turned Colombia into one of the most violent
places in the world.

The U.S. effort, part of a larger $7.5 billion multinational program
known as Plan Colombia, has shown some early successes.

Along Putumayo's washboard gravel roads, camouflage-clad Colombian
soldiers with M-16s slung over their shoulders now wave down passing
cars to squeeze their seats and sniff at the air in their tires,
looking for concealed cocaine base. Since December, the flow of drugs
along the province's roads has fallen by at least half, soldiers say,
and the Marxist guerrillas who once controlled the roads and the drug
trade have been pushed back into the hills.

But the fumigation effort has brought as many problems as it has
solved. Large-scale coca growers are rapidly replanting in Putumayo
and neighboring regions. Far-right militias, responsible for much of
the country's runaway violence, are seizing control of the drug trade
in the province. Near La Hormiga, residents say spraying has targeted
more legitimate endeavors-banana trees, yucca fields, cattle
pasture-than coca.

Just as troubling, the explosive growth in coca production continues
despite the spraying. Last year, as 143,000 acres of coca were
fumigated in Colombia, farmers planted another 197,000 acres, nearly
40 percent more than the government could eradicate, officials admit.

This year, if weather conditions are good and U.S.-supplied UH-60
Black Hawk attack helicopters arrive on time to provide air support,
the government hopes to break even, eliminating old coca as fast as
new fields are planted.

Even then, at best, pilots could spray 220,000 acres, which would mean
a fall in Colombian coca production of no more than 6 percent,
according to Ministry of Defense figures.

"We need to dramatically increase our fumigation capacity to produce
an impact," said Luis Fernando Ramirez, Colombia's defense minister.
"We need more teams and planes than we will have."

U.S. government officials say that kind of ramp-up is just what is
planned. By May 2002, 10 new crop-dusting planes will arrive in
Colombia, they say, doubling the nation's spraying capacity. In five
years, they predict, most of Colombia's coca could be eliminated.
"It's a matter of patience and a matter of will," one U.S. official
said.

Few Colombians think the solution to the nation's ugly decade-long
descent into a coca-fueled hell of massacres, kidnappings, extortion
and drug violence will be that simple. In the 10 years, 40,000 people
have perished in political violence, and the death rate has doubled in
the past four years.

Colombia's problems seem endless: a stalled peace process with leftist
rebels, rampant paramilitary violence, a 20 percent unemployment rate.

But there are bright signs as well for Colombia, from a strengthening
of the country's military to what is believed to be a vital slowdown
in guerrilla drug revenues.

"We're writing the book as we go on this kind of war," said Gen.
Fernando Tapias, the commander of Colombia's military. But, he added,
"little by little we're getting results."

U.S.-backed fumigation of illegal drug crops has a 20-year history in
Colombia. In the 1980s, crop dusters eliminated much of Colombia's
marijuana crop. Then, starting in 1991, the government attacked the
growing heroin poppy industry, reducing but not eliminating the
mountain fields, which still cover about 18,000 acres.

Coca proves troublesome

Battling coca, however, has been an experience on an entirely
different scale. Often compared to squeezing a water balloon-as you
squeeze in one place, the balloon expands elsewhere-the largely
U.S.-funded drug war in the Andes has been aimed at a moving target.
As coca fields in Peru and Bolivia were eradicated in the past decade,
production moved aggressively into Colombia, where traffickers once
processed the leaves grown elsewhere.

Today this Andean nation, riven by mountains and sprawling from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Amazon basin, officially has 340,000 acres of
coca bushes. Experts, however, believe the acreage may be as much as
40 percent higher, giving Colombia more than 80 percent of the world
cocaine market.

Control of Colombia's cocaine traffic, once in the hands of the felled
Medellin and Cali cartels, has passed to left-wing guerrillas, who
have become rich and well-armed. However, the rebels face
unprecedented competition from the nation's brutal paramilitary
"self-defense" force, originally created by kidnap- and
extortion-weary landowners to combat guerrillas.

In Putumayo, the paramilitaries moved in last September, invited by
coca growers fed up with guerrilla roadblocks that had virtually shut
down the region, part of a protest of the planned fumigation campaign.
A bloodbath ensued, analysts say, and by the time the spraying
campaign began, on Dec. 19, the paramilitaries controlled a majority
of the region's coca fields.

In a six-week fumigation campaign, crop dusting planes destroyed
58,000 acres of coca, most of it the Guamuez Valley, which includes La
Hormiga, U.S. officials said. Today, the hillsides are covered with
largely leafless brown bushes, and growers say the price for processed
coca base-once a guerrilla-fixed $400 per pound-fluctuates wildly.

That's the good news for U.S. and Colombian officials. The bad news is
most of the brown hillsides already have been replanted with neat
green rows of young coca, and a new round of harvests is less than a
year away.

Fumigation proponents say persuading growers to abandon coca for good
will take repeated spraying.

"It's something of a war of attrition," one U.S. official said. "You
spray a plantation, they replant, you spray again. Sooner or later
they get the idea you're going to be back every time."

Putumayo's farmers, however, say they have little choice but to stick
with coca. For years, government development officials have promoted
alternative crops and promised new roads to get them to market and new
local processing factories. Little has materialized.

Jose Cuaspud, 56, a peasant farmer whose 4-acre coca stand was
fumigated in January, ticks off on his fingers the crops the
government has asked him to grow instead of coca over the years:
cardamom, rubber, rice, bananas, yucca and soybeans.

The problem, he said, is none ever produced a profit. While coca
buyers arrive at his door, cash in hand, markets for other crops are
occasional at best.

"No one buys any of our [other] products," the La Hormiga farmer said.
"That's why we'll go back to growing coca."

Following through

Colombian and U.S. officials, again promoting alternative development,
say they hope to make it work this time by following through on
promises to improve the region's dismal roads and open local
processing factories for high-value products such as palm hearts.

Alternative development is part of a two-prong approach to coca
eradication. U.S. and Colombian officials say they have tried to focus
fumigation efforts on large, so-called industrial plots of coca, while
encouraging small-scale peasant producers to manually eradicate coca
in exchange for payment for their labor and help getting started with
new crops. Small farmers whose crops are fumigated also will get help,
they say.

The U.S. has pledged $42.5 million toward the project. Colombian
President Andres Pastrana visited Putumayo on Thursday to deliver
emergency aid and promote the effort.

Local officials say they will wait to see whether the money really
arrives this time.

"For a long time, campesinos have been foiled. They don't believe
anymore," said Manuel Alzate, the mayor of Puerto Asis. "If the
government doesn't come through, the campesinos won't either."

Government entreaties to grow alternative crops have met particular
cynicism in the Guamuez Valley, where farmers charge that the
fumigation effort earlier this year killed more legal crops than it
did coca.

U.S. and Colombian pilots, flying high above the fields to avoid
potential anti-aircraft fire, managed to spray nearly 3,000 acres of
bananas, 9,000 acres of pasture and 1,300 acres of yucca, as well as
kill 200,000 fish, local farmers say in a police report.

A children's mural, painted near the La Hormiga city hall, shows a
black fumigation plane raining chemicals down on a stream full of fish
skeletons, a barren tree and a skeletonized mountain lion.

"Here they fumigated everything," said Leandro Romo, a human-rights
ombudsman in La Hormiga. "The fumigation was very indiscriminate."

While farmers who lost legitimate crops can petition for compensation,
U.S. officials insist claims of massive spraying of legal crops are
spurious. Glyphosate-known in the United States by its trade name,
Roundup-does not kill fish, they insist, and pilots operate under
rules that forbid spraying on windy days or from heights much above
tree line. Violations have happened, and pilots have been disciplined,
officials admit, but they say such instances have been rare.

To the relief of officials on all sides, no pilots-U.S. contractors or
Colombians-have been shot down as part of the Putumayo spraying
effort, which critics had warned could turn Colombia into a 21st
Century Vietnam for the United States.

Another major worry in Putumayo-massive emigration by displaced coca
workers-also has not materialized so far.

Right now, the majority of coca farmers in Putumayo province are
staying put, intent on replanting, local officials say. The spraying
program, however, has pushed some migrant coca pickers and
coca-growing families into neighboring Narino province and across the
border to Ecuador.

New jobs vital

Military officials say finding such displaced workers new jobs or work
as legitimate farmers is key to the long-term success of eradication.
Without alternatives, coca growers will deforest new swaths of jungle
to set up new coca plantations-an environmental disaster-or join
guerrilla or paramilitary groups to survive.

"No matter how successful fumigation is, if it doesn't come with real
alternatives it won't work," said Ramirez, the defense minister.

For most Colombians, the biggest question about the U.S.-funded coca
eradication program is whether it will produce political results
beyond simply reducing coca production-such as pushing the guerrillas
toward peace talks.

One of the most encouraging signs in Putumayo these days, analysts
say, is the increased military presence on the roads, once controlled
by guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Colombia's military, long weak and in disarray, is undergoing reforms
aimed at improving its fighting strength and effectiveness.
Combat-ready professional soldiers are replacing teen draftees.
Military guards are being hired to protect bridges, roads and
communication towers, freeing combat troops for front-line duty.

As part of its Plan Colombia commitment, the U.S. has trained three
counternarcotics army battalions, the last of which will graduate this
week. The 2,500 soldiers are using Vietnam-era UH-1H Huey helicopters,
provided by the United States, to protect fumigation flights and will
begin getting more advanced Black Hawk helicopters next month.

The Bush administration so far has indicated it will stand by the
Clinton administration's Plan Colombia commitments, though it said
additional aid to the region would be more evenly split between
military assistance and development aid.

Slowly, Colombia's military is beginning to have greater success in
combating the country's well-armed insurgent groups, though military
analysts warn the beefed-up force still has only two soldiers per
rebel, far short of the 10-1 ratio considered necessary to win a
guerrilla war.

"You can't reach any conclusions too quickly but it seems the state is
trying to regain some sense of control," said Michael Shifter, a
Colombia analyst with Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

U.S. and Colombian officials believe the fumigation effort is cutting
into the FARC's drug profits, something they hope eventually could
push the guerrillas toward the peace table. Alternatively, the rebels
could turn to greater use of kidnapping and extortion to stem the loss
of cash, they say.

Everyone warns that progress toward dismantling Colombia's coca
culture will be slow.

"It took 21 years for the coca economy to form here," said Carlos
Palacios, a former priest in Putumayo province and now an organizer of
a peace network in the region. "We won't eliminate it in one year."