U.S. ANTI-DRUG STRATEGY ACCUSED OF KILLING COLOMBIAN FOOD CROPS

Narcotics Official Defends Quality Of Satellite Intelligence, Says
Spraying Isn't Random

Colombia's national ombudsman has issued a stinging critique of a
U.S.-funded drug-crop eradication campaign, saying that
"indiscriminate" herbicide spraying had wiped out food crops across
southern Colombia.

Human rights ombudsman Eduardo Cifuentes called for an immediate halt
to all counternarcotics operations involving aerial herbicide
spraying, saying that the U.S.-supplied technology being used was not
distinguishing between legal and illegal cultivation.

Although the ombudsman is a government appointee, his recommendations
are not binding and do not carry a government stamp of approval. His
independent study does, however, call into question the intelligence
used by the United States to target drug crops in a $1.3 billion U.S.
counternarcotics program in Colombia.

A report by Mr. Cifuentes said, in effect, that while the Colombian
government and the United Nations were substituting legal crops into
southern Colombia in hopes of weaning farmers from dependence on
drug-crop income, government military and police forces were using
U.S. military aid to kill those same crops with herbicides.

The government says about 65,000 acres of coca, the plant that
provides the base ingredient for cocaine, were destroyed during a
six-week eradication campaign in December and January by U.S.-trained
troops and police.

The ombudsman's report, distributed on Tuesday, comes at a time of
growing clamor throughout Colombia to suspend the use of military
aircraft and troops to attack cocaine-production facilities in
southern Colombia. The program is the central aspect of the U.S. aid
provided to support Plan Colombia, a counternarcotics and
crop-substitution program launched last year by President Andres Pastrana.

Mr. Pastrana ordered a halt to the spraying campaign nearly two weeks
ago as he was preparing for a landmark meeting with the head of the
nation's largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC. The FARC has been among the chief opponents of the
campaign, but U.S. and Colombian officials accuse the guerrillas of
profiting from "war taxes" they collect from coca farmers and drug
traffickers.

Mr. Cifuentes said that crops eradicated during the campaign included
those planted under six separate alternative-development programs
sponsored by the U.N. Development Program, European governments and
the Colombian government itself.

Investigators from the ombudsman's office, responding to complaints
from farmers, were able to find damage inflicted on legal food crops
in at least nine towns and villages targeted by government
counternarcotics forces in southern Colombia.

In interviews before the report was released, police officials
defended the herbicide-spraying campaign as virtually foolproof.

Gen. Gustavo Socha Salamanca, chief of the national counternarcotics
police force, explained that the eradication program relies on U.S.
satellite intelligence and other electronically gathered data, along
with human intelligence obtained from aerial surveillance of areas
under coca cultivation.

"It is said that the police have engaged in acts of indiscriminate
spraying of legal crops. This is not true," he said. "There is no
possibility that our planes can spray over legal crops or populated
zones."