DRUG WAR RAVAGES COLOMBIA

PUTUMAYO, Colombia -- Swathes of southern Colombia look like desert:
crops withered, the ground parched and brown. The biggest aerial drug
eradication in the world is well under way, destroying every plant
that grows on more than 30,000 hectares of fragile Amazonian
ecosystem.

"This is a carefully planned campaign," said James Mack, United
States deputy assistant secretary of state for international
narcotics and law enforcement. "Crop-dusting aircraft guided by
satellite positioning systems are spraying areas plotted by aerial
photographs," added Washington's point man for Plan Colombia, the
almost Pounds 1 billion anti-drugs initiative.

However, there is little evidence of this scientific planning on the
ground. Many Colombian peasants have planted legal crops amid the
coca, the raw material for cocaine, to hide the targeted bushes and
so have lost everything. However, charred fields of plantain are also
apparent, with the nearest coca crop almost a mile away.

While the fumigation campaign has been going on since the end of last
year, the other component of Plan Colombia, some Pounds 50 million in
aid to help coca farmers to switch to legal crops has not arrived.
"What are we supposed to do?" asked Cecilia Amaya, who heads a
peasant association based in Puerto Asis, the largest town in the
province of Putumayo. "None of this can be achieved overnight. They
have fumigated the crops anyway and the promised help has not
arrived, and we suspect it never will. Corrupt politicians have
already pocketed it."

The other concern is the effect of the chemicals. Mr Mack insists the
glyphosate being sprayed is safe and is used by millions of Americans
as weedkiller. In the US, however, it is not sprayed on people
tending their fields and Americans are not drinking from streams and
lakes dusted with the chemical.

The US Environmental Protection Agency says glyphosate products
should be handled with caution and could cause vomiting, swelling of
the lungs, pneumonia, mental confusion and tissue damage. Clinics in
Putumayo have seen widespread cases of skin irritations and
respiratory and eye problems, particularly in children. "We are
getting cases of mild poisoning every week after the planes have
dropped their loads," said a nurse at San Francisco Hospital in
Puerto Asis.

Environmentalists have also expressed concern. "The situation is
alarming," said Ricardo Vargas, an environmentalist and author of a
book on coca eradication. "Forests have been destroyed, birds sprayed
as well as food eaten by monkeys, in a region with great
biodiversity."

At least 10,000 peasants have fled Putumayo in the last six months,
leaving behind barren fields and escalating violence. Those that have
stayed have sought virgin forest to clear for land to sow crops,
among them coca; others have joined the guerrillas, strengthening the
force the campaign is designed to undermine.

Many insist that the problem is not going away, just shifting
location, most immediately to the neighbouring province of Narino.
Evidence shows that coca fields in Peru, dormant since US action
drove plantations into Colombia, are being resown and drug fields are
appearing in northern Ecuador, which borders Putamayo.

But the most obvious result is the explosion of new coca crops: not
the large fields that attract the crop-dusters, but small plots
behind peasant shacks. Coca growing is becoming the new cottage
industry and no aerial eradication programme will be able to destroy
it.

Few Colombians believe the US strategy has any chance of success. The
street price of cocaine has not changed. Farmers make Pounds 600 for
a kilogram of coca base, which is then refined into cocaine worth
Pounds 30,000 in the United States and Pounds 40,000 in Britain. Most
Colombians believe that as long as demand remains, the supply will
feed it.

Colonel Roberto Trujillo, head of the anti-narcotics brigade, is a
small, energetic man, carrying out his mission to attack crops and
laboratories with efficiency; but he has some doubt about the
effectiveness of the overall strategy. "There does seem to be a gap
between the fumigation of the fields and the delivery of alternative
aid," he said. "Many of the peasants have little alternative to coca."

For the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia (FARC), which controls much of Putumayo and profits from
the drug trade, Plan Colombia has reinforced their propaganda as well
as their ranks. Comandante Simon Trinidad, a FARC spokesman,
insisted: "The US is attacking the Colombian peasant who makes
nothing from the drug trade, while the huge profits are made by
gringo [American] drug dealers and stashed in gringo banks. The
Colombian people are paying for gringo drug addiction. We are paying
with our blood."