COLOMBIAN FARMERS COUNT COST OF AIRBORNE ASSAULT ON DRUG FIELDS

American-Backed Crackdown On Coca Growers Hits Food Crops And Spreads
Resentment Among The Poor

Luckily for the students the village school was closed the day that
crop-dusters, escorted by combat helicopters, doused the tin-roofed
classrooms with herbicides. Their target was the swath of illegal coca
plantations on the low hills around the village, but clouds of defoliant
engulfed the school, the Roman Catholic church, and the fields of plantain,
cassava and maize.

Miriam Rodriguez, a teacher at the school, said: "The effects have been
catastrophic. They sprayed the coca, but they also killed all our food crops."

The schoolchildren complained of rashes, headaches and vomiting after the
weedkiller fell. Nearby are half-dead fruit trees, withered maize plants
and row upon row of skeletal coca plants.

George Bush will meet the Colombian president, Andres Pastrana, in
Washington today as the biggest offensive against drugs ever released on
Colombia rolls across the southern jungles and farmland.

The blitz on the coca fields is at the heart of Plan Colombia, a $1.3bn
(UKP 900m) strategy to cut drug production by 50% and weaken the leftwing
guerrillas and rightwing paramilitaries who finance their operations with
its profits. Official US figures put Colombian cocaine production at 520
tonnes a year, but analysts say the figure is likely to be much higher.

Guided by spy planes and US satellites, crop-dusters criss-crossed the
skies of Caqueta state in the south and the Middle Magdalena region in the
north last week. Flying as low as 15 metres (50ft) they were protected by
helicopter gunships. Guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (Farc) often shoot at the slow-moving crop-dusters.

The pilots, some of them US contract workers, fly up to five missions a
day, spraying on average 3.8 litres of glyphosate herbicide on every hectare.

Senior Colombian officials say the operation is a resounding success: in
the first phase, 29,000 hectares of coca were destroyed in the Guamuez
valley in Putumayo state, a lawless region on the Ecuadorian border where
nearly half of Colombia's cocaine is produced.

But local farmers and officials say crop-dusting has destroyed thousands of
hectares of food crops and pasture, devastated the local economy, and sown
deep resentment among the rural poor.

"Why should I lie? I had coca. But they've left me with nothing - no work,
and no food," said Otoniel Urrea, staring down at his devastated
smallholding in a barren gully stripped of vegetation.

Officials say crops are only sprayed after they have been identified as
illegal drug plantations, but in high winds the herbicide can drift off
target. Farmers often intersperse coca and opium poppies with food crops,
making mistakes even harder to avoid. The effects of spraying are not seen
straight away, but several days after fumigation, every plant in the
affected zone starts to wither and die.

Farmers say that poisoned ground can take months to recover. Mr Urrea says
coca was his only source of cash. The nearest city is Mocoa, 12 hours away
down a rutted singe-lane road, and transport costs make most legal crops
unprofitable to grow.

In some regions, the government has signed pacts promising emergency food
aid and long-term development assistance for farmers who tear up their own
crops.

Officials describe the Guamuez valley as a vast network of industrial coca
plantations financed and managed by drug dealers. Locals disagree.

"It's not one person with a huge plantation, it's a chain of little crops,"
said Alfonso Martinez, a former mayor in the town of La Hormiga.

"The government has never had a serious social policy in the Putumayo - and
they still don't. Two months after they fumigated we still haven't seen any
aid," he said, warning that some peasants, despairing of government aid,
were already replanting their illegal crops with a new strain of high-yield
Peruvian coca.

"There has been a delay, but that's because we're setting up a social
programme which is unprecedented in Colombia. We really believe we can
solve Putumayo's problems," said Gonzalo de Francisco, who is in charge of
Plan Colombia's social development programmes.

At today's meeting in Washington, Mr Pastrana is expected to ask the US for
up to $500m a year in extra financial assistance, and trade preferences to
help bail out the struggling Colombian economy.

With unemployment nudging 20%, he believes that the anti-narcotics campaign
and peace talks with Farc both depend on social investment. He has warned
that without greater investment in drug-producing regions, poor Colombians
will continue to work in the drugs trade or sign up with the armed factions
which have perpetuated Colombia's 37-year civil war.

Most of the first tranche of US aid went towards helicopters, equipment and
training for the elite anti-narcotics army battalions leading the
fumigation drive.

Troops from the new battalions patrol the roads leading into the Guamuez
valley, but towns in the region are dominated by paramilitary groups. In La
Hormiga, militiamen with hand-guns in their waistbands keep watch in the
town square.

Late last year the paramilitaries launched a campaign of massacres and
assassinations to drive out the Farc guerrillas, who had dominated the
region for decades. Their success helps explain the lack of guerrilla
resistance to the fumigation campaign in Putumayo.

In rebel-dominated Caqueta state, however, fumigation sorties have come
under heavy ground fire, and last week an armed rescue unit - including US
civilian contract workers - braved guerrilla bullets to save the crew of a
downed police helicopter.

But the brunt of the anti-narcotics campaign has been borne by small
farmers and Indians, said German Martinez, a local ombudsman in the town of
Puerto Asis.

"If this is just about destroying coca crops and burning labs, no matter
the price, then it's a victory," he said. "But if you don't tackle the
social causes, the peasants will continue growing illegal crops. We
shouldn't just be eradicating coca - we should be eradicating poverty."