SPRAYING MISERY

SAN JUAN DE CERRO AZUL, despite its impressive name, consists of just
half a dozen wooden huts. It stands on a ridge overlooking steep
hillsides at the end of a bruising dirt track, an hour by jeep from
the riverside town of San Pablo, on the Magdalena in the south of
Bolivar department. For the past ten years, San Juan has been home to
Eliecer Galvis, a 38-year-old farmer.

Mr Galvis, whose bare upper torso carries a long scar across the
stomach, says he has 30 hectares (74 acres) of land on the scrabbly
soils of the hillside behind San Juan. Like many Colombian farmers, he
grows bananas, yuca and maize. But "food crops don't give a decent
income", he says. So three years ago, he began to plant coca. He had
four hectares of the green-leaved shrub, enough to provide a living
for his family of seven.

That was until the weekend in mid-February when the police helicopters
arrived, escorting a crop-duster that swooped low over the fields and
sprayed the coca with glyphosate, a powerful agricultural weedkiller.
Ten days later, Mr Galvis's coca field looked brown and withered. So,
he claims, were his food crops. "Who knows what we're going to do now?
They've destroyed everything. At least they should pay us something,
and build a decent road, so that we could make a living from
agriculture or cattle," he complains.

Mr Galvis was the target of a vigorous coca-spraying campaign that
American officials see as a key element in tackling their drug
problems. Over the past two decades, the United States has honed a
three-pronged strategy for the Andean countries, aimed at cutting the
supply of cocaine reaching its shores: first, going after
drug-processing labs and transport routes to disrupt the market for
coca leaves, thus driving down their market price; second, eradicating
coca growing, by consent if possible, by force if necessary; and
third, financing the development of alternative sources of income for
at least some of the coca farmers and labourers.

This strategy has been a qualified success in Bolivia, where acreage
under coca decreased from 48,000 hectares in 1996 to 15,000 last year,
according to the State Department's annual report on international
narcotics control. In Peru, too, land under coca fell from 115,000
hectares in 1995 to 34,000 last year. Unfortunately the coca simply
moved to Colombia, where cultivation has risen steadily over the past
decade (see chart 3). In the early 1990s, Colombia's drug traffickers
also introduced opium poppies, which are grown on the high Andean
slopes in the south. Colombia is now a small heroin producer.

What makes matters worse for the drug warriors--and for Colombia--is
that most of the coca is in areas which are under the control of one
or more of the country's armed groups, rather than the government.
That is not coincidental: as an outlaw industry, drugs thrive in a
lawless environment. Superimpose a map of the coca crop on one of
guerrilla and paramilitary territories, and the two will prove a good
fit (see map towards end of this article). Almost half of the coca
crop comes from the southern department of Putumayo, which is
controlled partly by the FARC and partly by the paramilitaries. Coca
cultivation has increased in southern Bolivar, Narino and Norte de
Santander departments--battlegrounds contested by all three illegal
armies.A blitz on coca

Wiping out Colombia's coca crop is, ostensibly at least, the chief aim
of the United States' contribution to Plan Colombia. Several years'
spraying has so far failed to stop the growth of the coca harvest, but
officials insist that for the first time they now have enough
resources, both in hardware and in cash.

Some $440m of American aid is being used to train three anti-drugs
army battalions, totalling around 2,500 men, and to equip them with 16
Blackhawk helicopters. These will not start arriving until June, but
the first two batallions have already gone into action, using 22
Vietnam-era Huey helicopters.

On December 19th, when the thousands of raspachines (migrant coca-leaf
pickers) had gone home for Christmas, the Colombian police began a
lightning spraying campaign in Putumayo. By mid-February, with the
protection of the battalions, they had sprayed some 29,000 hectares
without encountering serious armed resistance. Over half of this was
in paramilitary-controlled areas, and much of the rest in those of the
FARC.

Farmers claim that glyphosate is dangerous to health, though there is
no firm evidence of that. The spraying may be damaging to the
environment, but so is growing coca: large areas of forest have been
cleared to make way for it, and millions of gallons of chemicals used
in its processing.

Much of Putumayo's coca is in large, industrial plantations. Farms
with less than 3 hectares of coca are spared; if food crops are hit,
that is because they have been cunningly planted amid or next to the
coca. If mistakes are made, compensation is paid. Officials say that
the crop-dusters' nozzles are computer-controlled; the targeting
system uses American satellite imagery.

That is the theory. In practice, this is not an exact science. And for
the farmers, growing coca is a rational economic choice; being made to
stop growing it causes them serious problems. Plan Colombia does
recognise this. "The whole project is carrot and stick: they see the
spray planes and sign up for manual eradication," says Anne Patterson,
the United States' ambassador in Bogota. Already, about 2,000 coca
farmers in three municipalities in Putumayo have signed up for manual
eradication. Gonzalo de Francisco, the Colombian official in charge of
the programme, says he hopes that in all, 26,000 families in Putumayo,
with 16,000 hectares of coca, will sign up. They will have a year to
destroy their coca; in return, they will get emergency aid, and
long-term help to develop alternative livelihoods. These could include
cattle, forestry, fish, palm hearts and natural medicinal products.

One problem is that the emergency aid has been so slow to reach the
farmers. Another, as American officials admit, is that alternative
development in Putumayo will be far harder than in, say, Bolivia. "The
infrastructure is poor, so is access to markets, quality of soil and
climate, and the security situation is complex," says George
Wachtenheim, the outgoing Colombia director of the United States
Agency for International Development. There is also a high risk that
coca will simply move on: already it is being planted in the
inaccessible rainforests along the Pacific coast.

In Putumayo, the government is spending $50m on improving roads, but
the biggest question mark is security. As part of an agreement reached
with Mr Pastrana in February to revive the moribund peace talks, the
FARC said they would not obstruct voluntary coca-eradication schemes.
But will that stick? And if the government fails to provide swift
alternatives, how many of the disgruntled farmers and labourers will
join the guerrillas?

In the middle-Magdalena region, which includes southern Bolivar, a
development project run by Desarrollo y Paz, a non-government
organisation, gives some grounds for hope. This is perhaps the most
violent and conflict-ridden area of Colombia. But by taking a
politically neutral stance, Desarrollo y Paz is managing to work, more
or less in peace, with around 5,000 peasant farmers. It gives advice
and arranges credit (through private banks, though with government
subsidies and guarantees) for projects ranging from organic farming to
buffaloes, sugar cane and African palm.

A well-managed small farm can provide an income of at least three
times Colombia's minimum wage, says Francisco de Roux, the director of
Desarrollo y Paz and a Jesuit priest. "Nothing is more profitable than
coca, but the farmers know it has a very high social cost. They say:
show me an alternative that offers a reasonable living, and I'll leave
coca."Vicious circle

Tired of the United States' bullying hypocrisy over drugs, Colombians
have often downplayed the industry's disastrous effect on their own
country. For a while, a decade or so ago, that became impossible. The
traffickers based in Medellin, led by Pablo Escobar, sought political
and economic power: when thwarted, they resorted to bomb attacks and
assassinations of judges, politicians and journalists. In 1989, three
presidential candidates were murdered.

With help both from the rival gang based in Cali and from the United
States, the police eventually dismantled the Medellin cartel, killing
Escobar in 1993. The Cali traffickers preferred bribery to terrorism:
their undoing was to respond to a request for campaign cash from aides
to Ernesto Samper, who was elected president in 1994.

Mr Samper survived impeachment over the matter, but the affair had
some disastrous consequences. One was that the United States sought to
weaken Mr Samper's government, cutting aid to Colombia. That was one
reason why both coca and the illegal armies flourished in the mid-1990s.

The Samper government did crack down on the Cali gang. The police,
with much American tuition, regularly bust traffickers and
laboratories. But none of this has cut the flow of drugs from
Colombia. Nowadays, according to Bruce Bagley, a researcher on drug
trafficking at the University of Miami, up to 60% of the trade is in
the hands of small "boutique" syndicates, run by family groups of
middle-class professionals with close links to the paramilitaries.
Much of the remainder is controlled by an old-established gang in the
Cauca valley, north of Cali.

American officials periodically link the FARC to international
trafficking, but without firm proof. Still, nobody disputes that the
guerrillas make money from taxing coca farmers and traffickers, and
from running processing laboratories and airstrips. The best estimate
of their income from drugs, extortion and kidnapping is perhaps
$250m-300m a year. Alfonso Cano, a member of the FARC's seven-strong
secretariat, as its top leadership is called, admits that the
guerrillas receive money from "retentions" (kidnaps). "We know that
this is bad, but we have a very large force that needs to eat and to
dress, and we need arms and munitions." He adds that drug money is
"everywhere in the world economy". The paramilitaries earn perhaps
$200m from similar activities, reckons Mr Bagley.

That is the vicious circle that is at the heart of Colombia's plight.
As an illegal product, cocaine attracts a risk-inflated price.
Although most of the profits go to dealers in consumer countries, what
filters back to Colombia amounts to significant wealth in a poor
country: estimates of the money repatriated by the drug industry range
from $2.5 billion to $5 billion a year (or 2-4% of GDP). For
comparison, Colombia's defence budget is $2.8 billion, including army
and police pensions. Whether the drug money is used to finance illegal
armed groups or to corrupt officials, the outcome has been a
catastrophic weakening of the democratic state and the rule of law.