PLAN COLOMBIA GETS OFF TO ROCKY START

THE GUAMUEZ VALLEY, Colombia - The largest U.S.-backed counternarcotics
offensive has gotten under way in a remote corner of southern Colombia.

Tens of thousands of acres of coca fields have been sprayed dead.

But Miguel Cortes, a 45-year-old farmer, wants to know why his
innocent-looking pastures also lie withered and brown.

"Look over there," he said pointing across a fence at a neighbors' field of
dead coca bushes, the leaves of which are used to make cocaine. "We
understand that coca has to be got rid of, but they killed my pasture, too."

On Dec. 19, army troops and police crop dusters launched an all-out assault
on this valley in the province of Putumayo, where a third of Colombia's coca
is grown.

The spray missions are Phase One of a five-year joint effort known as Plan
Colombia, designed to destroy half the nation's cocaine production. If
successful, officials hope it will also help Colombia's embattled government
tame rival guerrillas and paramilitary groups who finance their armies with
profits from the drug trade.

This crucial moment in the drug war comes as a new administration in
Washington is still getting to know the ropes. Within the next few months,
Washington will begin to find out if $ 1.3-billion worth of U.S.
taxpayer-funded training and equipment can do the trick.

U.S. military aid - the bulk of Plan Colombia's current resources - is
already arriving. The first 15 of 33 UH-1N "Huey" helicopters were delivered
Dec. 15. Another 14 UH-60 "Blackhawk" helicopter gunships, costing $
208-million, are due later this year.

Two U.S.-trained counterdrug battalions numbering 1,800 men have been
deployed in Putumayo, and a third is undergoing instruction by U.S. Special
Forces at a Colombian army base in the south.

The military "push into the south" has gone ahead with little public
scrutiny. The increased U.S. military presence - limited by Congress to no
more than 500 trainers at any time - is virtually invisible. Most of the
training is conducted behind closed doors at bases far from the public gaze.
Reporters have been allowed only limited access for ceremonial functions.

For the past six weeks nine crop dusters flying up to five missions a day,
financed by $ 115-million from the U.S. aid package, crisscrossed the valley
before calling a temporary halt to analyze the impact.

U.S. officials say they are on a roll, seizing what they call a "historic
opportunity" to hit large industrial-sized coca plantations. On a good day
they say they can target nearly 3,000 acres. By last week officials estimate
they had covered almost 74,000 acres.

There are signs the policy is having the desired effect. The local price of
semiprocessed coca paste - the leaf extract sold by local peasants to
cocaine traffickers - has leapt in price from $ 750 to $ 1,050 a kilogram
(2.2 pounds) since spraying began.

But local peasants and municipal officials say indiscriminate spraying has
destroyed thousands of acres of legal crops.

"The theory of our government and the United States is that the Guamuez
Valley is one big industrial coca plantation, but that's a lie," said German
Martinez, deputy mayor of La Hormiga, the valley's main town of about 15,000
residents. "Yes, there's a lot of coca around here, but there are also
plenty of people who don't grow it, and the spraying affects everyone."

Coca is the main industry in the fields around La Hormiga, a Wild West town
of frontiersmen who colonized the region in the 1960s after oil deposits
were discovered by Texaco.

The surrounding valley of low-lying tropical jungle has been deforested to
make way for an estimated 154,000 acres of coca, the world's largest single
concentration of the plant.

Martinez blamed the coca industry on the central government which he said
had abandoned the region to drug traffickers and armed groups long ago. The
town is not linked to the nation's electricity grid. Its own generating
plant broke down last month and hasn't been fixed due to a lack of spare
parts.

Guerrillas and paramilitary gunmen roam the countryside, claiming they - not
the government - are the law. The only paved road to the nearest other main
town 21/2 hours away is a rutted, foul-smelling single lane of compacted
crude oil residue, which follows a pipeline carrying the region's only other
major industrial product.

In theory Cortes' land was not a spray target.

According to U.S. and Colombian officials, what happened was a mixture of
ill fate and possible human error. Officials say they hit La Hormiga hard
that day. It was Dec. 22, the fourth day of spraying.

Cortes recalls how a crop duster flew low over the pastures he tends and
released a cloud of herbicide killing every plant it touched.

With nowhere left to graze, his 20 dairy cows stood huddled under a half
dead mango tree, feeding on a mixture of molasses and water. Ironically,
part of a neighbors' field of coca was left intact.

"We expect this sort of abuse from our own government," he said as he
trudged through the brittle-dry grass. "But we thought the Americans were
more intelligent."

U.S. officials concede crop dusting isn't an exact science. Collateral
damage is to be expected. Even so, spray missions are carefully
computer-coordinated using U.S. satellite imagery. Flying at 110 knots and
as low as 50 feet, specially trained pilots - some American contract
aviators, but mostly from the Colombian police - are provided each day with
detailed sector coordinates of coca fields.

Pilots keep track of weather conditions, especially wind, to avoid the
herbicide drifting off target.

To check that the correct targets are hit, a satellite system allows
Colombian police working with State Department counternarcotics experts to
monitor the coordinates every time a pilot releases the spray nozzles on the
planes' wings.

Pilots also are alerted by a red light in the cockpit if they are within
half a mile of a designated "no-spray" zone, where farmers have signed
government pacts not to grow coca.

But officials recognize that mistakes are made and pilots have been
reprimanded - even fired - where negligence can be proven. Pilots must also
contend with occasional ground fire from drug traffickers and armed groups.

During a tour of the area around La Hormiga it was clear that most of the
time, pilots hit the mark. But the intermingling of coca and legal crops -
sometimes deliberate - make precision almost impossible.

That was the case at a peasant cooperative on the outskirts of La Hormiga,
where workers said two years of hard work planting 42 acres of yucca had
been destroyed by the spraying.

"The planes didn't come right over us," said Marcelo Campana, 32. "They came
close by," he said pointing to a field of coca 100 yards away.

He pulled up a yucca plant, and broke open its bulbous root, called cassava
and used to make bread and tapioca, to reveal a poisoned core. "It's ruined,
it tastes horrible," he said.

Campana said that unlike many itinerant peasants in the region who came to
reap the rewards of coca, he was was born and raised in Putumayo.

"Our idea was to show other farmers and the government that you can live off
other crops besides coca, but the government ruined us in one day."

The architects of Plan Colombia had intended for the military operation to
go hand in hand with economic support for alternative development. But, as
with so many good intentions in Colombia, violence intervened.

In September, guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or
FARC as they are known by their Spanish letters, mounted an "armed strike"
virtually cutting Putumayo off from the rest of the country. Paramilitary
forces had also entered the area to dispute control of the coca business,
turning the region into a cauldron.

The strike finally ended in December. Besides disrupting local commerce, it
also frustrated government efforts to negotiate "no-spray" pacts with the
Guamuez Valley coca farmers. In an effort to limit the need for spraying,
the government had in the months before Plan Colombia's commencement offered
farmers $ 2,000 worth of livestock and food if they agreed to manually
eradicate their coca fields.

The pacts have been a great success in other parts of Putumayo, where
officials say several thousand farmers have signed on.

But not in La Hormiga.

"We didn't think the government was serious," deputy mayor Martinez said.
"We were under fire from all sides and we didn't know what to do."

U.S. officials say local drug dealers were to blame, calling in paramilitary
forces to protect their cocaine processing laboratories. In a matter of
weeks paramilitary gunmen had run the guerrillas out of town, executing
dozens of suspected collaborators.

Rather than delay Plan Colombia, U.S. and Colombian officials decided to go
ahead anyway.

With Christmas coming, many of the itinerant coca leaf pickers, known as
raspachines, would be gone, making family visits back to their home towns in
other parts of Colombia. It was too good an opportunity to miss. The
greatest fear of officials was that spraying during the picking season could
force the layoff of thousands of coca laborers and create a potential for
organized civil protests.

The winter months are also the driest in Colombia, providing optimum
conditions for spraying. Clouds and wet weather combine to make flying
impossible, and rain washes the herbicide from the plants.

However, some help has arrived and more is on its way, Colombian relief
officials say.

Last week municipal workers from La Hormiga distributed emergency food
packages to dozens of families who lost crops in the hamlet of El Rosal. The
government has sent more than 80 tons of food to the area in the last two
weeks.

"We will continue the food assistance as long as it is needed," said
Fernando Medellin, director of the government-run Social Solidarity Network
which provides assistance to conflict zones.

But Medellin said the government's resources were being stretched to the
breaking point. He also stressed that Plan Colombia was not designed as a
purely military action. Its success relies heavily on international
financial aid for social and economic development, human rights education
and strengthening of the local judiciary.

But the U.S. military component of the plan has been poorly received outside
Colombia, and so far Bogota has received only token offers of support from
Japan and the European community.

"Colombia is fulfilling its side of the bargain to eradicate coca," Medellin
said. "We accepted our responsibility as the producer of drugs, but we
expected more from the drug consumer nations. So far the only non-military
help we are getting is from the United States, and so far we haven't seen
much of that."

Of its $ 1.3-billion support for Plan Colombia, the United States is
dedicating $ 260-million to social and economic projects. But unlike the
military spending, those are still mostly in their infancy.

Colombia, for its part, has announced ambitious plans, including
humanitarian assistance, road building, job creation and agricultural
development.

But it will be months before those projects take effect. "The government
cannot expect overnight to solve the problems of 20 years of backwardness,"
said Olga Maria Echevery, president of the Investment Fund for Peace, the
government institution coordinating Plan Colombia spending.

Meanwhile, Colombia says it is committed to continuing its drug eradication
effort, whatever the consequences.

In La Hormiga, municipal officials say they are willing to cooperate if the
government can guarantee economic help. They remain skeptical.

"Like everything in this country, Plan Colombia looks good on paper," said
Janeth Salas, a municipal social worker. "But in practice it's another
story."