U.S. BEGINS NEW EFFORT TO KILL COLOMBIAN COCA GROWTH

ROSAL, Colombia - With the full support of the Colombian president, the
United States has begun what American officials say will be the biggest and
most aggressive effort yet to wipe out coca growing.

A round of aerial spraying to kill Colombia's mammoth drug crops, which
resumed here a month ago, is part of a new phase in the war on drugs.
American officials said that it was bigger and more aggressive than before
and that if sustained, it could at last make substantial inroads against
Colombia's coca growing.

With the approval of Colombia's new president, Alvaro Uribe, the American
plan calls for more crop dusters operating more hours and with none of the
restrictions that officials say hampered spraying programs in the past.

In the Guamuez Valley, the world's richest coca-producing region, the
effects are clear.

The crop dusters have returned, flying low and leaving a fine mist of gray
spray in Colombia's coca-growing heartland. Fields of brown, withering coca
bushes, whose leaves are used to make cocaine, remain in their wake.

"Look at all this - it was all fumigated," groused one farmer, Diomar
Montenegro, 49, as he stood in a field of wilting coca bushes in this hamlet
in southern Colombia.

"I cannot do this anymore. They have put me out in the street."

It is a refrain American officials are happy to hear. In the last
large-scale spraying of this region, a two-month onslaught that ended in
February of last year, the United States said it would concentrate on
"industrial size" plots.

American and Colombian officials pledged that small farmers would be spared
as long as they had agreed to stop growing coca voluntarily in exchange for
modest government benefits.

In reality, many small farms were sprayed. But the spraying ended earlier
than American officials had hoped, because Andres Pastrana, then the
president, forbade some missions for fear of further alienating peasants in
the midst of delicate peace negotiations with leftist rebels.

The result was that 80 percent of the crops sprayed in this province,
Putumayo, were replanted, and cocaine trafficking to the United States
continued unabated.

Now, Uribe is allowing U.S. officials to plan missions wherever and whenever
they see fit, and there is no pretext that small farmers will not be hit.

American planners say they intend to cover as much acreage with defoliant as
possible to stop the replanting of coca.