MAJOR COCAINE SOURCE WANES

The U.S.-Backed Effort to Eradicate Colombian Coca Plants Is Working,
Killing 38% of the Crop. Farmers and Guerrillas Are Feeling the Pinch.

EL TOPACIO, Colombia -- For the first time in at least a decade, the
amount of coca grown in Colombia is falling sharply, largely the
result of an aggressive, U.S.-backed aerial fumigation campaign.

Repeated spraying by crop dusters plus government programs to
encourage farmers to pull up coca plants have reduced Colombia's coca,
the source of cocaine, by 38% to 252,000 acres in the past three
years, according to a United Nations study released this year.

What's more, coca cultivation appears not to have simply moved
elsewhere from Colombia, for years the source of 90% of the cocaine on
U.S. streets, as it has in the past. While both Bolivia and Peru have
reported slight increases, the rise has not been enough offset the
decline in Colombia. The U.N. study found that throughout South
America, the number of acres devoted to coca dropped 22% in the past
three years.

The program has not yet affected the street price of cocaine in the
United States, and some congressional critics have complained that it
focuses too much on coca and not enough on Colombia's growing crop of
the poppies used to make heroin. But fumigation is working, according
to interviews and visits conducted during a weeklong trip in the
region around this small coca-growing town.

"The fumigation has blasted everything," said Javier Yepes, a
40-year-old coca farmer who was rushing to harvest his plants after
spray planes wiped out his neighbors' farm in a village in southern
Colombia.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, elected last year on a promise to
crack down on the drug business and the leftist guerrillas it helps
fund, has pledged to continue fumigating until there are no coca
bushes left in Colombia. Within a year, many U.S. and Colombian
officials expect that Colombia will cease to be a major producer of
cocaine.

U.S. officials are also publicly acknowledging what had long been
private: that the U.S. spraying operations have become a key weapon in
Colombia's 40-year-old internal conflict, which pits the army and an
illegal paramilitary force against leftist rebels. Both the
paramilitaries and the rebels rely on the coca trade for financing.

"We're seeing a little bit of the money dry up," said Gen. James T.
Hill, in charge of U.S. military operations in Latin America, during a
congressional hearing last week. "The eradication effort is beginning
to make some inroads in their ability to fund themselves."

But the success of the U.S. State Department's effort to halve coca
production here by 2005, which has cost $2 billion to date, has also
ruined the lives of thousands of people in southern Colombia, where
migrants and dirt-poor farmers seized on coca as a steady, if illegal,
source of income. Local farmers are suddenly caught in the cross-fire
of a vicious and unpredictable war between rebels and paramilitaries
fighting over the remains of the cocaine trade.

And tens of thousands have fled the region, a vast exodus of poor,
uneducated people looking for money to feed themselves in an economy
in which unemployment hovers at 15%.

"Yes, the spraying has been a success," said Jose Efren Villota, 48,
as he surveyed the ruins of his once-profitable coca farm. "But it has
come at a high cost."

The idea behind Plan Colombia was simple: By cutting back on coca
supply, State Department narcotics experts hoped to drive up street
prices so high that addicts would cease using the drug and seek treatment.

Instead, the price in the U.S. remains steady at anywhere between $20
and $200 per gram, depending on location and market conditions,
according to recent congressional testimony from Drug Enforcement
Administration officials.

There are varying explanations why the price hasn't gone
up.

U.S. officials say they believe the market is starting to change.
State Department officials confidently predict that prices will
increase soon as cocaine in the pipeline between Colombia and the U.S.
is used up. DEA officials say the program is cutting into an
oversupply of cocaine at the street level, and that dealers are
cutting the purity of the cocaine they sell.

"Our years of effort, and the money that we have invested in Colombia,
are beginning to pay off," said Paul Simons, the acting assistant
secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement
affairs, during a congressional hearing last week. "We believe we have
turned a corner, particularly with the coca crop."

Critics of the plan say that cutting into cocaine production is simply
forcing nimble drug traffickers to adjust. Users who cannot find
cocaine are choosing other drugs, such as ecstasy, to satisfy their
needs, reducing demand and therefore keeping the price stable. Coke
dealers have switched to selling cheaper, easier-to-obtain drugs such
as methamphetamine.

"We have been forcing the drug economy to evolve," said Sanho Tree, a
researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies who has been sharply
critical of the war on drugs. "For decades, we have been selectively
breeding super traffickers who adapt to market conditions very quickly
with new substitutes."

The effects of the program in Colombia -- on farmers trying to make a
living and on the country's internal conflict -- are more clear-cut.

Together, the guerrillas and paramilitaries are estimated to make
between $150 million and $300 million per year from the coca trade,
U.S. officials estimate. Both groups acknowledge "taxing" coca
production about $100 per kilogram, or about 10% of the price at the
local level. Both also have been accused of processing and trafficking
the drug themselves.

But they are now retreating in the face of a U.S.-backed offensive by
the Colombian military, at least partly due to economic difficulties,
according to military experts, State Department officials and
interviews with paramilitaries.

Guerrilla deserters have told military officials that they face
shortages of ammunition and even food. Paramilitaries are now at war
among themselves. Some are trying to remain in the coca business while
others are trying to get out of it.

"It's no mystery how we make our money: We charge a tax on the coca
grown" here, said Alvaro, a paramilitary commander in El Tigre, a
coca-growing town in the province of Putumayo, as his heavily armed
men nervously patrolled a road near the site of a recent battle with
guerrillas. "Of course [the spraying] has affected us."

U.S. statements about the effect of the fumigation on Colombia's war
represent a remarkable turnabout.

When Plan Colombia was launched in 1999, U.S. aid was restricted to
antinarcotics efforts. Several U.S. representatives worried that the
U.S. was about to get involved in a quagmire like Vietnam.

But after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress changed its tune, allowing
the Colombia aid to be used for military purposes against the rebels
and the paramilitaries, both of whom have been designated terrorist
groups by the State Department.

Antidrug helicopters could now be used to track guerrillas. U.S.
intelligence could aid the search for paramilitaries.

The U.S. now plays a greater role than ever in the conflict. American
pilots contracted by the State Department fly crop dusters following
routes over coca fields mapped by Defense Department contractors. So
far this year, three U.S. contractors have been kidnapped and five
have been killed as a result of plane crashes.

U.S. officials now say the fumigations are a success because they are
helping Colombia win its war -- no matter the effect on the war on
drugs at home.

"There are three benefits from spraying: reducing the supply of drugs,
halting environmental damage from the very dirty and destructive coca
industry, and reducing funding for terrorist groups in Colombia," one
U.S. official wrote in an e-mail interview last fall. "Even if
cultivation moved elsewhere, the terrorism rationale would still apply."

Putumayo is a province of wide brown rivers and soft green hills that
at one time produced much of the world's cocaine.

But hillsides once covered with the bright green leaves and neatly
tended rows of healthy coca plants are now filled only with dying
yellow bushes or new-grown jungle brush. Towns dedicated to the
harvest and production of cocaine have been abandoned like ghost towns
in the old American West, their stores empty, their people vanished.

Of more than a dozen farmers interviewed in mid-May, not a single one
planned to continue planting coca. Repeated visits by the crop dusters
dropping glyphosate -- the chemical found in the commonly used
herbicide Roundup -- wiped out the coca as well as nearby food crops
and convinced them to give up the business.

This represents a significant change from the past, when coca farmers
would defiantly replant their fumigated fields. Until the recent drop,
studies had indicated a steady increase in coca production in Colombia
from the mid-1990s.

"It's better to rip this stuff out and see how the government treats
us," said Villota, who was chopping down his coca plants with a
machete in the hope that the government would pay him for the deed.
All around him, the hillsides were littered with dead coca bushes.

Many coca farmers also say that the repeated spraying has sickened
them, their children and their animals.

Several studies conducted by the U.S. and Colombian governments have
found no evidence to back up claims of long-term health damage. They
say that the chemical has no long-term effects, and that coca
processing, in which gasoline and sulfuric acid are frequently used,
is far more damaging to the environment.

The spraying also is pushing farmers back into poverty. In a country
where the minimum wage is $1,200 a year, a coca farmer with three
acres could clear almost 10 times that.

For many itinerant farm workers, the money paid for little more than
liquor and prostitutes. But for local families, it was a way to buy
school uniforms or a motorcycle or an electric generator. Now, the
boom is over and the money is gone. Many coca farmers have decided to
simply pick up and leave.

Although Colombia's crops diminished overall, the U.N. study found
that some provinces have seen tremendous jumps in coca cultivation as
people seek out places where spraying isn't yet concentrated.

An estimated 50,000 people, or about 15% of the local population,
moved out of Putumayo last year alone, according to the government's
survey of displaced people.

Here in El Topacio, a hamlet of a few dozen homes in the heart of coca
country, most of the families abandoned their homes and moved to new
coca frontiers elsewhere in Colombia. Of the 138 families who once
lived here, only 32 remain.

"The fumigation has done away with everything: the town, the business,
the people," said Omar Parramelendez, 38, a community leader in El
Topacio.

The decline in coca in this region has also unleashed more fighting
between guerrillas and paramilitaries over what patches of the crop
remain.

In the towns, the murder rate has soared as both sides pick off urban
sympathizers. And in the countryside, the two groups have waged bloody
battles.

"We lost 23 people in February -- that's a lot for a tight-knit
group," said Tike, a paramilitary political commander, as he watched
about two dozen of his fighters patrol through a field of dying coca
bushes -- a crop that he said belonged to local farmers. Farmers are
unsure of what lies ahead.

Some, like Yepes, are resigned to poverty. This month, he watched a
trio of workers he hired ripping off the last leaves from his woody,
five-foot-high coca bushes, rushing to beat the spray planes.

Four years ago, he sold his family's coffee farm in the Colombia
highlands when worldwide coffee prices had plummeted to buy land here
in Putumayo to take advantage of the coca boom.

Now, he seemed weary, like a boxer bloodied by a long match, unsteady
on his feet and unsure of what to do next.

"I'll plant corn, or yuca, or plantains," he said. "But we won't plant
more coca. They'll just spray me."

Those such as Villota and Parramelendez who stayed behind in El
Topacio have scrambled to take advantage of government programs
designed to reward those who give up coca.

Parramelendez and two other men from the village gathered one recent
day just outside the village on a muddy track that leads to coca
fields. Heat, humidity and cloudy skies made the farm feel like a
bleak, gray sauna.

The men trod through sucking, ankle-deep mud to get to Villota's coca
farm, about 30 acres of cleared hills surrounded by thick green
jungle. It had once earned Villota and two partners about $60,000 per
year.

Money like that had convinced Villota and others in El Topacio to
ignore earlier government offers to give up their coca plants in
exchange for an alternative development aid package worth about $800
- -- a cow, some chickens and seeds.

But the planes came again and again, spraying the land around this
town three times in a year, and the townspeople finally decided to
give up.

Those who stayed signed up for the latest iteration of the Colombian
government's attempt to wean them from coca. Now called "Forest
Guardians," the men get paid $150 a month to chop down the coca and
reforest the area with new trees.

Government representatives have already told the men the money will
only last a few years. After that, they will be on their own: poor men
with no education and no prospects for jobs.

They know this, and they worry. But there is not much they can do. The
forces that govern the ebb and flow of coca are far beyond their control.

"It's better to pull it up than get fumigated and have your fields
ruined and your health damaged," said Alveiro Solorzano, a 25-year-old
who was hacking away at coca bushes with a sharp machete. "Coca just
brings trouble."