COCAINE SUSTAINS WAR IN RURAL COLOMBIA

Eradication Efforts Elsewhere Have Pushed Coca Cultivation into Rural
El Rosario, Where Workers Processed Coca Leaves Recently.

PASTO, Colombia -- Along with Colombia's successes in fighting
leftist rebels this year, cities like Medellin have staged remarkable
recoveries. And in the upscale districts of Bogota, the capital, it
is almost possible to forget that the country remains mired in a
devilishly complex four-decade-old war.

But it is a different story in the mountains of the Narino
department. Here, and elsewhere in large parts of the countryside,
the violence and fear remain unrelenting, underscoring the difficulty
of ending a war fueled by a drug trade that is proving immune to
American-financed efforts to stop it.

Soaring coca cultivation, forced disappearances, assassinations, the
displacement of families and the planting of land mines stubbornly
persist, the hallmarks of a backlands conflict that threatens to drag
on for years, even without the once spectacular actions of guerrillas
in Colombia's large cities.

For those caught in the cross-fire, talk of a possible endgame for
the war seems decidedly premature, even given the deaths this year of
several top guerrilla leaders, the desertion of hundreds of rebels
each month and the rescue of prized hostages like the former
presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

"The armed groups are like malaria, evolving to resist eradication
and killing with efficiency," Antonio Navarro Wolff, governor of
Narino and a former guerrilla from the defunct M-19 group, said in an
interview. "If anything, Narino shows the guerrillas may have lost
their chance for victory but not their ability to cause suffering."

Today, a dizzying array of armed groups lord over the farmlands of
Narino. These include not only leftist guerrillas from the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, but also right-wing
militias operating under names like the Black Eagles or the Peasant
Self-Defense Forces of Narino.

Their presence reflects the symbiotic nature of the armed groups and
the drug trade, each drawing strength from the other.

In Narino, flanked by the Pacific Ocean on the west and Ecuador on
the south, coca growers have nimbly sidestepped almost a decade of
fumigation efforts by reorganizing industrial-size farms into smaller
plots that are much harder to find and spray from the air. They are
taxed and protected by forces on the various sides of the conflict.

The United Nations reported in June that coca cultivation in Colombia
surged 27 percent in 2007 to 244,634 acres, the first significant
increase in four years. Narino had the largest increase of any
Colombian department, an administrative district, up 30 percent to
50,061 acres.

The expansion has allowed Colombia to remain by far the world's
largest coca producer and the supplier of 90 percent of the cocaine
consumed in the United States.

It has also made the drug-fueled conflict a resilient virus in large
pockets of the country, with double-digit increases in coca
cultivation in at least three other departments, Putumayo, Meta and
Antioquia. In Narino, almost every week, government officials, Roman
Catholic leaders or aid workers report actions by the rebels or
paramilitary groups.

In the last week of June, four schoolteachers in remote areas of the
province were killed by a FARC column called Mariscal Sucre, one of
three units of the FARC that are active in the area. The rebels
claimed that the schoolteachers, all of them recently posted to
remote schoolhouses by Roman Catholic officials, were army informants.

"The guerrillas left the bodies of two of the teachers in front of
their schoolhouses, preventing their families from giving them a
Christian burial" because the families were too afraid to collect the
bodies, said Eduardo Munoz, human rights director at Simana, the
Narino teachers union.

Just weeks before, in April, the FARC knocked out power for 300,000
residents along the Pacific coast with an attack on an electrical
station. Colombian soldiers also found eight fuel-processing depots
- -- holding 77,000 barrels of oil -- used by the guerrillas for fuel
and to process coca into cocaine in makeshift labs.

Nationwide, the FARC still collects $200 million to $300 million a
year by taxing coca farmers and coordinating cocaine smuggling
networks, according to Bruce Bagley, a specialist on the Andean drug
war who teaches at the University of Miami.

That is down from $500 million earlier this decade, Mr. Bagley said,
but it is still enough to finance the FARC after recent desertions
and killings that have thinned its ranks to about 9,000 from 17,000.

Similarly, while the FARC's share of the cocaine trade has declined,
Colombia's share of the world cocaine production has remained stable
at about 60 percent. That means opportunities for new players like
Colombia's resurgent right-wing militias and small-scale armed gangs
taking the place of disassembled cartels.

"A few battles won is not a war won," Mr. Bagley said. "The FARC and
other groups will survive as long as there are safe havens, the flow
of drug money and large, remote regions unconnected to the broader economy."

One such area is El Rosario, a municipality three hours from Pasto,
the capital of Narino, by four-wheel drive on winding switchbacks
along the spine of the Andes.

A decade ago, coca was a rare crop in the area, farmers in El Rosario
said. Then, eradication efforts under Plan Colombia, the $5 billion
counterinsurgency and antinarcotics effort financed by the United
States, forced the migration of coca cultivation here from other
parts of the country.

To them, the eradication effort has simply pushed the coca -- and the
groups that feed off it -- into ever-more isolated parts of the
country. Now that coca has become their livelihood, too, the farmers
are determined to hold on to it.

At one remote spot, a 45-minute hike from a section of the dirt road,
Liborio Rodriguez maintains a small coca field on a slope that has
been subjected to aerial spraying and direct eradication efforts in
recent years.

"I know nothing is eternal, but I am not leaving this land," said Mr.
Rodriguez, 41, while he and half a dozen laborers harvested leaves
off coca bushes under the hot sun, pausing to sip chicha, an
alcoholic drink made from corn. "After everything we have been
subjected to, I feel that I can survive here."

He and the other farmers say they have developed strategies to
protect their coca bushes, planting smaller plots under canopies of
trees and coating their leaves with sugar cane juice, thought to
prevent phosphate-based herbicides from sticking.

In an example of unintended consequences, the phosphates repelled
from coca bushes may soak into the ground and serve as a fertilizer,
some botanists say, helping increase coca yields.

Other coca farmers have developed hybrid varieties of coca that grow
lower to the ground and can be harvested four to six times a year,
almost double previous levels.

Faced with the unexpected surge in coca cultivation in Narino and
other areas, Colombian officials take comfort in findings by the
United Nations that cocaine production in the country is believed to
have remained stable in 2007, at about 660 tons.

And they say cultivation could have been much larger than the 543,630
acres measured last year were it not for the aerial spraying and
manual eradication efforts, combined with strides in intercepting
cocaine shipments and military victories against the FARC in numerous
rural redoubts.

Yet while interdiction levels are promising, the growth of coca
cultivation also promises the FARC and rival groups new opportunities
to profit from the cocaine trade.

One paramilitary group, the Black Eagles, has so terrified residents
of El Rosario that they will hardly utter the militia's name when
discussing how it extorts payments from them each month.

Elsewhere in Narino, residents similarly report that paramilitary
groups are thriving, despite government efforts to demobilize more
than 30,000 paramilitary combatants in recent years.

These militias, sometimes in camouflaged uniforms -- bearing the
letters A.C.N., the initials in Spanish for Peasant Self-Defense
Forces of Narino, or O.N.G., for New Generation Organization -- have
uprooted villagers near the Pacific coast, according to testimony
collected by aid workers, as paramilitary groups, guerrillas and
small-scale drug gangs struggled for control of cocaine smuggling routes.

Government figures suggest that displacements are declining in
Narino, with about 7,500 people forced from their homes so far this
year in comparison with almost 30,000 in all of 2007. But other
agencies paint a more distressing picture.

Codhes, a leading human rights group, said overall displacements in
Colombia climbed 38 percent last year to more than 300,000, with
Narino emerging as "the center of Colombia's humanitarian crisis,"
said Jorge Rojas, the group's director.

Seemingly marginal organizations persist in pockets of rural
distress. Another leftist rebel group, the National Liberation Army,
or E.L.N., has at least 100 combatants in the area, local officials
and aid workers said.

A FARC rival that has been vastly diminished in recent years, the
E.L.N. normally avoids involvement in the cocaine trade. But its
riches are so tempting, community leaders say, that a rogue column of
the group in Narino, Comuneros del Sur, has secured a new lease on
life by financing itself through drug deals.

In June, three boys from the Awa indigenous group walked into a rural
area planted with land mines by the E.L.N., community leaders said.
The boys, ages 8, 12 and 15, were instantly killed, placing them
among 31 victims of land mines in Narino this year, a grim figure
that includes 19 civilians, according to Colombia's government.

"Our view is that all sides are not weakening but getting stronger,"
said an Awa leader, asking not to be identified out of fear of
retribution from the rebels. "Where else in the world can the
authorities claim to be winning when their opponents continue
planting both coca and mines?"