TOO HOT IN COCAINE KITCHENS

BARRANCOMINAS - Until three months ago, bars in this jungle town were
overflowing with whiskey, local cockfights were famous for miles around,
and those who did not pay for purchases in dollars did so in grams of cocaine.

If Colombia's army is right, then for five short years up until February
this down-at-the-heels little collection of wooden houses with zinc roofs
by the slow-moving River Guaviare was the secret cocaine capital of the world.

The army says it was the base of a secret jungle drug empire run by Latin
America's oldest and most powerful Marxist guerrilla movement, the
17,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish
initials FARC.

Deep in the almost impenetrable jungles of Guainia Province near the
borders of Brazil and Venezuela, the town did its business far from prying
eyes. A deep forest canopy hid cocaine "kitchens" from spy planes.

With no roads leading out, locals get around by river and the nearest big
town, Villavicencio, is more than two days' journey, so word of what was
going on was slow to ooze out.

Today, Barrancominas feels like a ghost town. The dark jungle seems to have
closed in around it, only a few people still wander along its dusty
streets, and those who are left are feeling the pinch of empty stomachs.

Life began to fall apart in February with "Operation Black Cat" when the
army sent 3,800 troops backed by planes, helicopters and river launches to
destroy FARC-run laboratories turning coca leaves from local fields into
cocaine.

The army thinks FARC then sold the drug for guns and cash to Brazilian
trafficker Luis Fernando da Costa, providing major fuel for carrying on a
37-year-old war that cost 40,000 mainly civilian lives in the past decade
alone.

Coca business bust

A wounded Da Costa, known by his Portuguese nickname of Fernandinho
Beira-Mar (Freddy Seashore), was hunted down by the army in late April.
Authorities say he told them he was buying 200 tons of cocaine a year from
FARC. If that is correct, it works out to about a third of all world
production.

"The army arrived and the coca business finished. We stopped seeing
dollars. The tough nuts, the drug traffickers who had the money, all ran
away and Barrancominas is dying," said one local man, his skin leathery
from constant exposure to the tropical sun. He preferred not to give his name.

A shopkeeper said his sales have dropped by two thirds since February and
people who are still buying have to scrape together all their coins for a
few cups of rice.

People around here -- tough colonists and native Indians -- used to live by
growing cocoa, bananas and sweet corn, supplemented by river fish. But
almost everyone dropped these traditional activities once they realized how
much money they could earn from cocaine.

Now they do not know what to do.

"People are leaving Barrancominas because there is no work here," said Luis
Fernando Guzman, 34, as he loaded sticks of furniture, a television set and
other belongings onto a flat-bottomed river launch.

"I'm going to look for something better. Seventy percent of the population
has gone. It's my turn now. I've got to leave my old house because if we
don't we're going to go hungry."

Guzman, father of two children, lived here for two years. He admits the
town's economy was based on cocaine but says he was not a trafficker or
coca harvester himself.

The population of Barrancominas grew to 3,000 from 800 when the drug
business set up shop in the mid-1990s. Most of the newcomers were
traffickers, people who worked in the rustic cocaine "kitchens" or coca
leaf harvesters.

The army said it found and destroyed five cocaine laboratories, which each
produced four tons of cocaine a month. Soldiers also destroyed 20,000 acres
of coca leaf, cocaine's raw material. Regular flights brought dollars and
weapons into the town's airstrip of beaten dirt and clumps of grass, then
flew out with cocaine bound for Brazil.

Guerrilla on the run

Gen. Arcesio Barrero, commander of the army's fourth division, said he
thought the FARC got as much as 80 percent of all its income from the
Barrancominas operation. The FARC commander in charge of the area, Tomas
Medina, known as "Black Acacio," is still on the run.

The army was ecstatic about Operation Black Cat, which did not use the $1
billion in mainly military U.S. aid for President Andres Pastrana's "Plan
Colombia," a massive anti-drug offensive in southern Colombia, in the
Putumayo region on the border with Ecuador.

Until the army found the massive plantations near the borders of Venezuela
and Brazil, they thought Putumayo was the center of the country's drug trade.