A HARVEST OF DOLLARS

Despite Failures, U.S. Is Increasing Aid To Colombia

LAS TRES BOCANAS, Colombia -- A little more pruning, a little more patience.
That's all these chest-high coca shrubs require before their emerald-green
leaves can be harvested, infused with chemicals and turned into cocaine.

But time has run out for the coca crop of Edwar Moreno, who, like many
Colombian peasants, helps feed the drug habits of users in the United
States.

A Colombian army unit trained with U.S. tax dollars has spotted Moreno's
field in southern Putumayo state and told the farmer that spray planes will
soon douse his three-acre plot with poisonous herbicide.

Such crop-dusting sorties are one of the linchpins of an aggressive U.S.
campaign to roll back Colombia's illegal drug industry and prop up a Bogota
government debilitated by a 38-year guerrilla war.

But after two years and nearly $2 billion in assistance, Washington's
strategy appears to be foundering.

Even though thousands of acres of drug crops have been destroyed, Colombian
peasants like Moreno still produce tons of cocaine and heroin each year.
Marxist rebels and right-wing paramilitary fighters continue to finance
their war efforts with millions of dollars reaped from the narcotics trade.
The illegal armies control more of the countryside than ever.

Yet America's role in this nation's multifront war, an endeavor widely known
as Plan Colombia, is set to escalate.

Already the third-leading recipient of American largesse after Israel and
Egypt, Colombia is expected to get another $658 million in U.S. assistance
next year.

What's more, in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon, the Bush administration has recast the Colombian conflict as
part of the global war against terrorism. For the first time, Washington has
authorized Colombia to use some of the aid directly for counterinsurgency
operations.

Drawing parallels with Vietnam, critics claim that the United States is
marching farther down a South American road to perdition.

"What began as mission creep has now turned into mission gallop," says Sanho
Tree, a Colombia expert at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
"We have no definition of success and no logical stopping point."

This summer, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee released a report
concluding that the results of Plan Colombia have "fallen far short of
expectations."

The attitude of Moreno, the coca grower caught red-handed by the soldiers,
may help explain why.

His crop doomed, his investment lost, it might seem that Moreno's world is
coming undone. But the skinny 20-year-old wearing a Bugs Bunny baseball cap
takes the long view. Like most drug farmers, he keeps a plastic bag full of
bright red coca seeds on hand for future plantings.

"Just about everyone has his own supply," says Moreno, as a scarecrow at the
far end of the field sways in the wind. "You can't get rid of coca."

Bush administration officials point out that much of the promised military
assistance was slow to arrive. Now, they note, just about all of the
hardware is in place and Colombia's new president, Alvaro Uribe, backs a
more vigorous war against rebels and drugs.

Plan Colombia, they say, demands a little more patience.

"Although we have been talking about Plan Colombia for what seems like
years, we have actually only been implementing our support for the plan for
14 or 15 months," says Marc Grossman, U.S. undersecretary of state for
political affairs. "I think our money has been spent very responsibly and we
are beginning to get substantial results."

American-sponsored anti-drug operations have been under way here since the
1970s, but Washington began wading deeper into Colombia's quagmire two years
ago.

By then, coca production was exploding and guerrilla groups that had been
battling the government since the 1960s had become deeply involved in the
narcotics trade.

Trying to turn the tables, then-President Andres Pastrana unveiled plans to
upgrade the armed forces, target drug traffickers, negotiate a peace treaty
with the rebels and extend government services to rural areas.

To make that happen, Pastrana pleaded for international help. The United
States responded with the lion's share of the support. In 2000, the U.S.
Congress approved a $1.3 billion aid package and added another $426 million
this year.

American lawmakers justified their support by pointing out that 90 percent
of the cocaine and most of the heroin sold on U.S. streets comes from
Colombia.

"Pastrana's greatest success," writes Julia E. Sweig in the
September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, "was in conditioning the United
States to see Colombia's peril as its own."

Nearly 80 percent of the U.S. aid has come in the form of military hardware
and training. The army and police have received 18 Blackhawk and 42
reconditioned Huey helicopters as well as high-performance crop-dusting
planes.

The helicopters are used to protect the spray planes during fumigation runs.
In addition, the choppers have provided a vital boost to the Colombian
military, allowing it to deploy troops quickly throughout this Andean nation
divided by three mountain ranges.

U.S. advisers have also trained three elite anti-drug battalions, which have
destroyed scores of jungle cocaine laboratories and confiscated drug
shipments.

"Our combat capacity is so much better" than normal army units, says Lt.
Col. Dario Diaz, an officer in one of the counterdrug battalions based in
Putumayo state.

The rest of the U.S. aid, about $364 million, has been earmarked for
humanitarian projects, including alternative development programs that help
drug farmers switch to legal crops. Other programs have helped resettle
330,000 Colombians displaced by the war and protect labor leaders and
journalists threatened by rebels and paramilitaries.

But neither the Colombian government nor European nations have come through
with all their promised funding. The last of the U.S. helicopters arrived in
December, and the Colombian army has been slow to train crews for them.
Pilots are still waiting for the delivery of six spray planes from the
United States, which will bring the size of the fumigation fleet to 22
aircraft.

"We recognize that change is not easy and that it is too soon to reach
definitive conclusions," says Tim Rieser, an aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy,
D-Vt., the chairman of the Appropriations Committee's foreign operations
subcommittee.

Even so, he says, "So far, Plan Colombia has accomplished very little."

The Appropriations Committee report questioned the Bush administration's
overall strategy in Colombia and pointed out that the aerial-eradication
program seems to be running in place.

Last year, for instance, spray planes laid waste to 232,000 acres of coca.
But partly because so many drug farmers replanted, the size of Colombia's
coca crop, measured in acres, jumped by about 25 percent compared with the
previous year, according to CIA estimates. By contrast, the United Nations
believes, based on surveillance photographs, the size of the crop dropped by
11 percent.

Either way, "there is no reason to feel euphoric," said Klaus Nyholm,
director of the U.N. Drug Control Program in Colombia.

Nyholm pointed out at a news conference last month that the amount of
cocaine produced per acre has jumped, because growers are planting more
potent strains of coca and irrigating their fields. In another alarming
trend, coca cultivation has spread to 22 of Colombia's 32 states, up from 12
states in 1997.

"Fumigation kills coca, but the peasants go deeper into the jungle to cut
down more forest and to continue planting drug crops," Nyholm said. The
region's overall production of cocaine, he added, remained fairly steady
last year at about 800 metric tons, as coca acreage increased slightly in
nearby Bolivia and Peru.

And in spite of stepped-up air, land and sea interdiction efforts, Colombian
authorities have managed to seize just 20 percent of all drugs leaving the
country, President Uribe says.

Drug profits, according to many experts, are one of the main reasons that
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the nation's largest rebel group
known as the FARC, has shown little interest in negotiating a peace treaty.

In February, three years of peace talks with the Bogota government broke
down. And in what could signal a new focus on urban warfare, the FARC
launched a mortar attack on the National Palace last month that killed 21
people as Uribe took the oath of office.

"Colombia became much weaker under Pastrana and the guerrillas became
stronger," says a senior Republican congressional aide who tracks Colombia.
"Now we've got an even bigger problem, and we have to figure out what to do
about it."

By any normal criteria, many critics say, the bleak scenario would prompt an
overhaul of the U.S. aid program.

Instead, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have convinced many in Washington
that the stakes in Colombia should be raised.

Until recently, most U.S. lawmakers firmly opposed funding counterinsurgency
operations here, mainly because the civil war was widely viewed as
unwinnable.

But amid the global crackdown on terrorism, attitudes have hardened. Even
before the Sept. 11 attacks, the State Department had placed the FARC and
the paramilitaries on its list of terrorist groups, because both had
increasingly resorted to killing and kidnapping civilians.

Now, there is a growing belief in the U.S. Congress that military aid, which
had previously been restricted to counterdrug operations, should also be
used to help the Colombian army attack rebel and paramilitary units and
establish government control in war-torn rural areas, says a high-ranking
Bush administration official.

Last month, President Bush signed the paperwork authorizing such a policy
change for military aid already committed to Colombia. Congress is widely
expected to adopt similar measures for future assistance.

One example of the dual strategy is a $98 million proposal for U.S. advisers
to train 500 to 1,000 Colombian troops and provide them with helicopters to
guard a strategic oil pipeline. Jointly run by Colombia's state-owned oil
company and Occidental Petroleum of Los Angeles, the 481-mile-long pipeline
was bombed 166 times by guerrillas last year.

"Clearly there is a better understanding of what's really at stake here and
that (U.S. policy) has to be more far-reaching," says Luis Alberto Moreno,
Colombia's ambassador to Washington. "A lot of it has to do with Sept. 11."

A lot of it also stems from the election last May of Uribe, a hard-liner who
calls himself "Colombia's No. 1 soldier."

Five days after taking office, Uribe declared a state of emergency and
promised a huge increase in military spending. Unlike former President
Pastrana, who suspended the fumigation program in some areas to give
crop-substitution programs a chance, Uribe has pledged to spray every last
acre.

"He's a man who told the people of his country that he would work to
eradicate terrorism, narco-trafficking," Bush said last week at a Washington
news conference with Uribe. "The Colombian people believe him, and so do I."

A U.S. Embassy official in Bogota insists that Colombia's drug
infrastructure will remain the principal target of American military aid. He
says that only if rebels and paramilitaries are spotted in or around zones
where anti-drug operations are already under way will American officials
authorize the use of U.S. helicopters to go after them.

To some extent, that's been the case all along. In the heat of battle,
Colombian military officials say, it's often impossible to distinguish
between drug traffickers, guerrillas and paramilitaries.

"When we go after a drug lab, there might be 50 guerrillas guarding it,"
says Diaz, the officer in the counternarcotics battalion.

The U.S. Embassy official insists that America's strategy will soon pay off.
If it does not, Washington's enthusiasm and funding for Plan Colombia could
evaporate.

"The Congress will continue to support Colombia through next year," says
Rieser, the aide to Sen. Leahy. "By then, we will have spent over $2 billion
and people will ask: `What's there to show for it?' "

Sidebar:

The Drug War In Colombia

· Since 2000, the United States has given Colombia $1.73 billion in mostly
military aid to fight the drug war.

· In 2001, the size of the coca crop, the raw material for cocaine, was
estimated at 417,430 acres, up from 302,575 acres in 1999.*

· In 2001, the size of the opium poppy crop, the raw material for heroin,
was estimated at 16,055 acres, up from 12,350 in 1999.*

· Coca is now grown in 22 of Colombia's 32 states, up from 12 states in
1997.

· Left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries continue to earn
millions of dollars a year from the narcotics trade.

* Source: CIA; 2001 is the latest year for which statistics are available.

Source: the United Natio