COLOMBIANS ENDURE FALLOUT FROM ANTI-COCAINE OFFENSIVE

IBERIA, Colombia - Three-year-old Mauricio Lopez spends most of his day
playing with a plastic model airplane.

He says it's like the real planes - US-donated crop dusters - that dump
little drops of powerful defoliant on the drug fields around this one-street
hamlet in southern Putumayo Province.

The youngster can just about pronounce his own name and count to five. But
the only full sentence he has mastered so far is this: ''The helicopters
killed my daddy.''

Mauricio has muddled the facts a bit. But he does know that the last five
months of his short life have been marred by violence and destruction from
Plan Colombia - a Colombian government offensive to wipe out the booming
cocaine trade in Communist guerrilla power using $1.3 billion in mostly US
military aid.

In November, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas stormed
Siberia and seized Mauricio`s father on suspicion of being an informant for
the rival right-wing paramilitary gangs that flourished in the region before
the US-backed antidrug offensive.

On the outskirts of the town, the rebels clashed with paramilitary gunmen
backed by two army helicopter gunships, according to Mauricio's mother, Lupe
Lopez. In their rush to flee, the guerrillas peppered their captive with
bullets and dumped the corpse on a roadside, she said.

Then in December, a fleet of helicopters and crop dusters began spraying
glyphosate on crops of coca leaf - the raw material for cocaine - here in
the Guamuez Valley, in the western portion of Putumayo, the province
responsible for about half of Colombia's 520-ton annual cocaine output. By
the end of last month, the army and police had sprayed almost 75,000 acres
of coca plantations in the province.

Withered fields of corn, plantains and yucca and scorched pastures
demonstrate how the eradication program occasionally wipes out the legal
subsistance crops.

Since spraying began, the region's inhabitants have been surviving largely
off food imported from neighboring Ecuador as well as irregular shipments of
government relief parcels.

''Plan Colombia is a plan of destruction,'' declared resident Irma Galarza,
looking over the browned remains of what had been healthy corn, alongside a
small patch of coca.

''We're ready to change but only if the government helps us,'' she added,
expressing a familiar complaint among Putumayo's inhabitants: that the
government began destroying drug crops, the region's only cash crop, before
it set up crop substitution programs.

But even those who voluntarily eradicated drug crops under previous deals
with the government suffered in the latest spraying campaign. Moises Burbano
took out a low-interest, $4,000 government loan in the mid-1990s and
replaced his coca crops with cattle pastureland. That pasture has now been
destroyed by the glyphosate.

''Why work all your life when the government destroys all your achievements
in just three days?'' he asked.

The government has signed alternative development pacts with several
thousand peasant families throughout Putumayo that should guarantee a $2,500
subsidy for each family that agrees to pull up the coca bushes. But so far,
the plan has not gotten off the ground because funds for the subsidy have
not filtered to the local level.

Crop damage is not the only side effect. Doctors reported a flurry of health
problems in the immediate aftermath of the spraying.

A doctor, Efrain Estrada, said at least 30 percent of the 1,500 inhabitants
in the village of El Placer suffered rashes, breathing problems and vomiting
in the days immediately after the spray planes passed over.

Many people have migrated, most drifting to larger cities such as Pasto,
Neiva and Cali, where they rely on handouts and the promise of a bed from
relatives or friends.

Of all the crops in the Guamuez Valley, coca has suffered perhaps the least.
In many areas, the characteristic bright green leaves can be seen growing
back on hardy Peruvian and Bolivian varieties of the shrub.

''It will take more than that to finish the coca,'' said resident Aura
Gomez, sitting in a small restaurant in Siberia. ''But when they do kill the
coca, then that really will mean the start of all-out war.''