FARMERS DECRY EFFORT TO HALT COCA PLANTING

Colombia: Growers Who Signed Up For A U.S.-Backed Plan To Alter Their Crops
Are Frustrated By Unkept Promises. Many Have Reverted.

LA HORMIGA, Colombia -- When Ilia Garcia signed up for a U.S.-backed
program to eradicate her coca bushes eight months ago, she thought Uncle
Sam had answered her prayers for a better life. She promised to uproot all
her coca shrubs, the raw material used to make cocaine, in return for a
government gift of two healthy cows.

The cows haven't arrived. Nor have the fertilizer and pigs promised to her
neighbors. Then, last month, U.S. spray planes appeared on the horizon,
raining down powerful pesticides that would transform her farm of coca and
vegetables into a wasteland of brittle stalks and scrolled leaves.

"We're going to be without food," said Garcia, bending over the yellowing
leaves of a squash plant. "These were worth $1.30 each. Now they aren't
worth anything. It's over." Garcia is one of 35,000 farmers in the
cocaine-rich Putumayo basin who have signed pacts to destroy their own coca
bushes under Plan Colombia, a $1.3-billion U.S. anti-narcotics initiative
passed by Congress last year. While the plan's largest outlays were
earmarked for military hardware and training, its strongest selling point
was a promise to help Colombia's impoverished farmers replace their drug
crops with less lucrative legal ones.

Locals Say Promises Haven't Been Kept

But a year after the first farmers began signing up for the crop
replacement programs in the southern province of Putumayo, Plan Colombia is
faltering. Rebel violence and bureaucratic delays have paralyzed aid
distribution in many sectors, so that only 12% of coca growers have
received the livestock and seeds promised them.

Perhaps more seriously, the price of cocaine on the streets of America has
not significantly changed since the plan began. One of the selling points
of the U.S. infusion of aid was driving up the price of cocaine by
restricting supply.

For instance, in June 2000, a gram of cocaine was worth $80 to $100 in Los
Angeles, and $75 to $100 in Chicago, according to Drug Enforcement
Administration figures. At the end of last month, drug dealers were selling
a gram of coke in Los Angeles for between $80 to $100, the same as 18
months earlier. In Chicago, the price actually dropped to between $60 and $80.

In the meantime, a new round of aerial spraying in Putumayo as part of Plan
Colombia has infuriated locals. According to government estimates, 10% of
the farmers who signed the crop replacement pacts have already given up,
slashing and burning their way into Putumayo's dense rain forests to sow
new lots.

As a result, the coca is still flourishing in this remote, lawless region.
Lime-green coca bushes sprout along every dirt road, and between lines of
freshly hung laundry. Weed cutters, used to chop up coca leaves before
processing, hang from the ceiling of every feed store.

"People aren't going to abandon a crop that provides them with something to
eat in order to watch their children die of hunger," said Mario Cabrera, an
engineer in the dusty frontier town of La Hormiga, where gaudy bordellos,
visited by itinerant coca harvesters, open for business at breakfast time.

Coca More Profitable Than Other Crops

Describing the eradication pacts as "a Band-Aid measure," he added, "As
long as the gringos are consuming cocaine, it will always be produced."

The economics of the cocaine trade bear him out. After paying for
fertilizer and farmhands, a typical farmer with two hectares (about 5
acres) of coca turns a profit of roughly $600 a harvest, or $3,000 a year.
If the same farmer were to take a sack of yucca to market, he would
probably spend more on transportation costs than he could make selling it.

With coca, the buyer comes right to the door, be it a rebel soldier or a
drug cartel middleman. The product has no expiration date. Start-up loans
are easy to come by.

Besides the allure of high coca prices, agricultural aid agencies have to
contend with an entrenched rebel army that relies heavily on drug profits
to fund its insurgency. The 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, said early on it would permit voluntary eradication
projects in areas under its control, but in September the guerrilla group
kidnapped two project managers and accused them of spying for the military.
Their bullet-ridden bodies were dumped on back roads several days later.

Since then, the FARC has ordered all nongovernmental organizations to
replace their technical staff with local farmers, setting the schedules for
aid distribution back still further.

According to Juan Carlos Espinosa, president of the Fundaempresas company
that oversees 6,000 families enrolled in eradication pacts, staggering
bureaucracy also has taken a toll.

"It seems ridiculous that the government should take eight months to
approve a $300 transfer" to purchase relief supplies, he said. With funds
trickling in so slowly, Espinosa added, "people are angry, skeptical. Our
credibility is on the line."

But the biggest obstacle by far, local officials say, is the return of U.S.
crop-dusters to Putumayo after a nine-month hiatus. Flying low with
helicopter gunships at their side, the planes unload glyphosate weedkiller
over the region's coca shrubs, leaving scorched earth in their paths.

The government says farmers who have signed eradication pacts are fair game
if they plant new coca crops. Local officials say spraying has been
haphazard at best.

"The government has failed us," said Maria Pastora Guzman, who left her
coca bushes to languish after the last round of spraying. "I signed the
pact. I wanted to keep my promise to the government, but now look: My land
is covered in plantain and corn, and they're spraying again."

Hoping to shore up confidence, the government has changed the terms of the
pacts, extending the 12-month period that farmers are given to eradicate
their coca crops.

Nonetheless, government envoy Gonzalo de Francisco estimates that thousands
of Putumayo farmers have thrown in the towel, planting 10,000 to 15,000
hectares (about 25,000 to 37,000 acres) of new coca in the last four months
alone.

"Putumayo has been characterized as a zone with very little state
presence," De Francisco said of the long delays in administering farm aid.
"We practically had to start from zero."

Local officials say they would prefer that the United States take its war
on drugs somewhere else, somewhere closer to home. Consultants to the U.S.
Treasury Department have estimated that American banks annually receive as
much as $24 billion in deposits stemming from the cocaine trade.

Even with sophisticated controls in place, Treasury investigators are able
to detect only about 10% of these ill-earned proceeds, meaning that the
banks may inadvertently act as money launderers for drug traffickers.
Interdiction efforts also have a low rate of success.

"The small producers are just one link in the drug trafficking chain. They
may be the weakest and the easiest to detect, and the easiest to attack,"
said Puerto Asis Mayor Manuel Alzate, "but the traffickers and the
consumers are hardly touched."

As long as a kilogram of cocaine sells for $1,000 in Putumayo and $100,000
on the streets of Los Angeles, he added, drug traffickers will be in business.