COLOMBIA GROWING MUCH LESS COCA

U.S.-Led Herbicide Spraying Has Cut Acreage Dramatically, U.N. Finds

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.

Although the program has not yet affected the street price of cocaine in
the United States and its final success remains unclear, 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."

One result of the success is that Colombia and Mexico now are the dominant
suppliers of heroin to the United States, supplanting Asia, authorities said.

In the mountains of Tolima province, rebels of Colombia's largest guerrila
group stand watch near opium farms that experts say help produce upward of
80 percent of the heroin that reaches U.S. streets.

From Maine to California, law enforcement authorities report a rising rate
of overdoses from a dangerously potent and cheap form of heroin. While
total heroin use in the United States has not risen signifigantly, the drug
is appealing to new, middle-class users because it can be smoked or
snorted, rather than injected.

Unlike coca, the plant used to make cocaine, opium poppies can be grown
high in cloud-shrouded mountains and in ever smaller and scattered plots,
experts and U.S. authorities say. When crop-dusters arrive with
plant-killing spray, officials said, traffickers often open fire on them.
Opium traffickers in Mexico have shot down three army helicopters this year.

The success of the Satate Department's $1.3 billion Plan Colombia, which is
intgended to halve coca production in Colombia, where migrants and poor
farmers seized on coca as a steady, if illegal, source of income.

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.

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."

In Putamayo, 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.

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 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.

The New York Times contributed to this report.