COCAINE KINGDOM

Rare Visit To Jungle Lab Probes Rebels' Drug Connection

Caguan River, Colombia -- This story is one in a series on Latin American
issues and culture that appears every Thursday in The Chronicle World section.

The jungle laboratory was stacked high with steel drums of processing
chemicals. Wooden walkways weaved through the trees at waist height,
connecting sheds and shacks.

A chemical cloud hung over the area as coca paste, a breadcrumb-like powder
made from coca leaves, was refined into snow-white cocaine at the rate of
more than a ton a week.

The working cocaine lab in southern Caqueta province is believed to be the
first visited by any reporter in at least five years.

Manned by civilians, the site lies alongside a maze of river canals about a
half-hour canoe ride from a guerrilla camp of the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Illicit drug plantations are spread throughout
the region, which the rebels rule. Little enters or leaves without their
permission.

U.S. and Colombian officials contend that the FARC, the country's largest
insurgent group, has become a major drug exporting cartel. With this claim
in mind, conservative politicians and military brass in both countries are
waging a pressure campaign to transform the $1.3 billion American aid
program to Bogota. They say the United States should broaden its emphasis
from fighting drugs to helping the government defeat the rebels with
military means.

But the lab visit and an earlier trip to a nearby secret market where
peasants sell semi-processed cocaine found no evidence that the FARC has
expanded its role in the drug trade.

Instead, all appeared to be business as usual -- with guerrillas levying a
well-documented "tax" on all stages of drug production, from the processing
and refining phases through to transport.

There was no sign that the FARC had become middlemen in drug transactions
or stepped in to fill the vacuum created by the disintegration of the
once-mighty Medellin and Cali cartels in the mid-1990s.

Along the Caguan River, the 42-year-old foreman of the cocaine lab, who
gave his name as Elver Gomez, said the FARC had no role guarding drug
complexes such as his. "As long as we pay our taxes, the guerrillas leave
us in peace. They don't even come around here," he said.

At the lab, which Gomez said belonged to a drug lord from northwest
Antioquia province, there was not a gun in sight, and most of the 50 or so
workers questioned said they were peasant laborers whose incentive was the
$40- a-day pay -- a large sum for Colombia.

'Very Risky Business'

"This is a very risky business, but as long as there's hunger in this
country this trade will not stop," said Gomez, who agreed to the visit on
condition that the lab's precise location and the names of its workers
remain unreported. The local FARC commander permitted the reporter
unrestricted access to the area.

Gomez, as he chatted, placed a kilogram brick of cocaine to dry in a
whirring microwave oven and then hermetically sealed it in plastic using
another machine -- ready for the long and profitable journey to North
America or Europe.

In these jungles, peasants sell their coca paste to drug dealers for around
$800 per kilo (2.2 pounds). Once refined and cut, that same kilo will be
sold for up to $170,000 on the streets of New York, London or Paris,
according to estimates by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson stated publicly in April that the FARC was
"up to the head in drug trafficking," while Colombian army chief Gen. Jorge
Mora has accused the rebels of controlling the cocaine trade from the seed
to the street.

"We know that the FARC grow coca, they own drug laboratories and . . . sell
(cocaine) to international cocaine cartels," Mora told reporters recently.

The Colombian government's planning department estimates that the FARC
earns $290 million yearly from the drug trade. That represents less than
2.5 percent of the value of Colombia's estimated annual cocaine output of
580 tons.

Some leading analysts believe the FARC's involvement in the drug business
is being overstated for political purposes.

FARC Is No Cartel

"While the FARC are certainly involved in the drug trade at several stages .

. . they don't have enough control . . . to qualify as a cartel," said Adam
Isacson, a senior researcher at the Washington Center for International Policy.

"Whether a cartel or not, though, the FARC's involvement in the drug trade
is going to be used more by those who would support a U.S. military buildup
in Colombia."

This corner of Caqueta province, like neighboring Putumayo province, is
firmly in the sights of the U.S.-backed Plan Colombia anti-drug offensive,
which started late last year.

There have been a few spraying sorties by U.S.-donated crop duster planes,
some of them piloted by civilian American contractors. But the Colombian
Army's elite anti-narcotics battalions, trained by U.S. Special Forces,
have not yet seen action in Caqueta.

Gomez, the cocaine processor, said drug labs are moved every six to 12
months to avoid detection by government planes. He said his drug complex
took about six weeks to build and was completed about four months earlier.

For the time being, the drug trade continues uninterrupted in secret
markets held every weekend throughout the region.

Peasants line up outside a wooden shack on the riverbank clutching small
bags of coca paste. Inside, a set of scales is in constant use, and a drug
dealer burns a small pile of coca paste on a spoon to test its purity. The
dealer pulls a stack of 20,000-peso notes, each one worth about $8, from
under a poncho and hands it to a peasant.

On a normal weekend more than 200 kilos, or 440 pounds, of coca paste
change hands at a single market. The peasant receives from the trafficker
around $800 per kilo of paste, the minimum price fixed by the FARC to
ensure what they say is a fair deal for the producer.

The traffickers then have to pay the rebels a tax of between $220 and $350
per kilo of paste.

The drug trade is unarguably the economic mainstay of the region. When no
buyers show up -- because of Christmas holidays or because a major cartel
has been busted -- cash runs short and paste becomes the currency.

A can of soda costs around a gram and a meal goes for anything between
three and five grams. Payment for hurried sex at the "Grand Saigon" brothel
in the riverside village of Penas Coloradas is carefully measured out in a
shot glass -- the equivalent of 10 to 12 grams.

Fabian Ramirez, the FARC commander on the Caguan River, concedes that his
fighters levy a tax on all phases of production -- both at the point of
sale of the coca paste and also on every kilo of pure cocaine refined and
shipped out. But he rejected charges that the rebels had become a cartel.

"There's no reason for anybody to say that we've any links with narco-
trafficking. We only collect a simple tax," he said, working on a laptop
computer in a jungle clearing.

Ramirez is the author of a FARC plan to wean the region's peasants from
coca profits. The proposal, first floated as part of the slow-moving peace
process in 1999, calls on the government to offer low-interest loans and
pay for FARC road-building squads and teams of agricultural advisers to
help peasants switch to legal crops over a five-year period.

The guerrillas have asked Colombian President Andres Pastrana to pull
troops out of the municipality of Cartagena del Chaira, which includes this
stretch of the Caguan River, to allow them to run a pilot project.

The government has rejected the proposal. Pastrana instead started a
separate crop substitution program within government-controlled territory
in Putumayo and has promised peasants a $2,000 onetime grant in return for
voluntarily pulling up their coca bushes. The program has yet to begin in
earnest, and no subsidies have been paid out.