U.S. EFFORT TO KILL COCA FAILING IN COLOMBIA

Only three days have passed since airplanes dumped chemicals near
this isolated village to destroy coca plants, the raw ingredient in
cocaine that winds up on American streets.

But Jorlin Giovanny, one of some 300 peasants who live here, is
already rescuing the seeds from dead crops to plant a new batch.

"What else are we going to do?" asked Giovanny, while he replanted
tidy rows in his backyard. "There's no other option."

Aerial spraying is part of the U.S. government's seven-year, $4.7
billion anti-drug effort that ran its course last year. As President
Bush visits Colombia today, his administration has long praised the
plan for slashing cocaine production and reducing violence in the
nation, which is the world's largest exporter of the drug.

But the numbers tell a different story.

The campaign, known as Plan Colombia, has neither reduced the
country's coca crop nor the availability of cocaine in the United
States. Critics ranging from Colombian peasants to Washington
politicians attribute the plan's failure largely to its underfunding
of alternative development programs that help farmers switch to legal crops.

"The coca eradication program has not achieved what we were
promised," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the
appropriations subcommittee that oversees U.S. foreign-assistance
programs. "The amount of cocaine reaching here is no less than it was
five years ago."

According to the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy,
U.S. retail cocaine prices fell from above $200 to below $140 per
gram and purity rose from 60 percent to above 70 percent between July
2003 and October 2006. Such statistics suggest that the drug's
availability improved at a time when spraying nearly tripled in
Colombia, which provides more than 90 percent of cocaine entering the
United States, according to the State Department's 2006 International
Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

Coca cultivation has increased, despite Plan Colombia's initial goal
of cutting the country's coca crop in half. The most recent data
released by the State Department show that more land was cultivated
with coca in 2005 -- 144,000 acres -- than when the effort began in 2000.

To be sure, drug czar John Walters has credited Plan Colombia with
helping President Alvaro Uribe push back cocaine-financed guerrilla
groups that have been fighting the state for more than four decades.
He and other supporters say increased U.S. military aid has played a
key role in decreasing homicide and kidnapping rates, spurred
economic growth and destroyed large coca farms concentrated in the
south that are run by criminal enterprises.

But when fumigation destroys coca fields, new plots simply crop up
nearby or in other states. Peasants like Giovanny have figured out
how to nurse plots that are smaller, more spread out and harder for
planes to reach. In the past three years, 62 percent of sprayed coca
fields have been replanted, according to Sandro Calvani, director of
the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime in Bogota, Colombia's capital.

"That means air spraying does not convince people," Calvani said.
"You cannot change a dysfunctional social-economic situation by force alone."

Virtually every family in La Balsa continues to grow coca, even
though they say planes have sprayed their plants at least five times
in the past five years. The village has no electricity, running
water, doctor or school past the fifth grade. But it does have a
small laboratory near the village entrance that turns coca leaf into
coca base, the first stage of cocaine production.

Farmers here say fumigation actually encourages them to replant coca
because it makes them dependent on coca profits to buy basic food
staples. In addition to hitting coca plants, toxic herbicides often
kill off less-resistant legal crops such as plantains, cassava and
sugar cane -- the community's main sources of food.

"So what else can you do to give your little kids something to eat?"
asked Uber Buila, who runs La Balsa's cocaine laboratory. "The
government should find another method of eradicating coca."

Meanwhile, the Uribe government's proposal for fighting cocaine for
the next seven years, known here as Plan Colombia 2, promises to
allocate 48 percent of a desired $43.8 billion to social spending,
while only parceling 14 percent to the military.

But the Bush administration is not on the same page. Despite
initially suggesting it would fund more alternative development
programs, the administration's request for 2008 is a carbon copy of
previous budgets, allocating less than one-quarter of aid to those programs.

Drug experts in Washington say Congress could allot more money for
economic programs now that Democrats are in the congressional
majority. The House appropriations subcommittee is currently drafting
the 2008 foreign aid bill, which includes Colombia.

"Chances are there will be radical departures from what the Bush
administration wants," said Adam Isacson, director of the Colombia
program at the Center for International Policy in Washington.

A current scandal linking prominent members of the Uribe government
to right-wing paramilitary groups considered terrorists by the State
Department could also prompt Congress to cut aid. Those paramilitary
forces, accused of committing mass murders in battling Latin
America's longest-running leftist insurgency, are also some of the
country's largest drug traffickers.

"For those disappointed with Plan Colombia because they expected more
- -- and there are a lot of those people -- this gives them another
argument as to why it's a bad approach," said John Walsh, an expert
on U.S. drug policy for the Washington Office on Latin America, a
nongovernmental think tank.