Plan For Colombia: Day 1c

PROSPERITY ON THE FARM

PUERTO RICO, Colombia - Alejandro is a farmer fairly typical of those who
eke a living out of the fertile but thin-soiled earth near Puerto Rico, a
town of some 10,000 in Colombia's Caqueta province, site of the nation's
second-largest concentration of coca fields.

Like some 50,000 other small farmers in Colombia, Alejandro, 30, earns a
small income growing and refining coca leaves at a makeshift lab. He also
grows yucca, plantains and corn, but "nobody wants to buy any of that," the
stout, broad-faced and bronze-skinned farmer complains.

Alejandro is lucky. The farm where he lives with his wife and infant
daughter is near the Guayas River, worked by boatmen who carry passengers
to town for a small fee. Other farmers in the region, those whose plots are
farther up the sweltering hillsides - or across equally tropical mountain
peaks - couldn't get hundreds of pounds of staples to town even if they
tried - or even if a market for their goods were to be created.

As things stand, Alejandro grows staple crops for his family's consumption
and doesn't ever go to market to sell, because runners come to his farm
about every six months, paying for his cocaine base in cash, on the spot.

Colombia is today "importing beef, rice, corn and wheat," writes Hector
Abad Faciolince, a columnist for Colombia's Cambio newsmagazine. "If they
won't buy yucca and fruits ... then we will plant what certainly can be
sold: coca. This is the sensible logic that one learns, let us say, in
Money magazine."

"Without coca, we wouldn't have any money at all," Alejandro said,
confirming the columnist's claim.

The ways in which the illegal coca leaf has brought a modest prosperity to
small farmers are easy to spot. Alejandro's family occupies a two-room
shack, built with lumber milled on the farm. Alejandro and his wife do not
own a television, for reception is spotty in their region, nor a radio. Nor
does the home have electricity; its only appliance is a small wind-up
clock. Running water comes from a spring a short distance from the house
that Alejandro tapped with a length of white plastic pipe.

Alejandro's home has a roof of corrugated steel - in the Puerto Rico
region, cocaine prosperity has ended the age of palm-leaf roofing - and a
cement floor. In the Amazonian jungles, those kinds of improvements are the
marks of a moneyed man, indeed. So, too, is his family's manner of dress.
Both Alejandro and his wife wear new, if simple, clothing: no hand-me-down
or imported T-shirts are to be seen here.

Alejandro's coca field is only one hectare in size, or about 2.5 acres, a
third as big as the average field in the area. It stands on a steep
hillside from which he can point to similar barbed-wire-fenced fields on
the lands of his neighbors. All of the fields are illegal, but the only
penalty usually meted out to growers is burning.

"The police can burn your fields," Alejandro advises, "but if they do, you
just plant them again."

Alejandro planted his field of perennials nearly five years ago, with
cuttings that he said were given to him by neighboring farmers - though in
this area drug-traffickers operate greenhouses for producing them. Once the
stems were stuck in the ground, Alejandro recalls, it took about a year for
them to grow into mature, waist-high plants, ready for harvesting about
once every two months.

At harvest time, the only tools Alejandro needs are a left-handed glove and
a tow sack. Holding the sack in his right hand, he strips the thumb-sized,
dark green leaves by moving a cup between his thumb and forefinger up the
pencil-thick stems of the plants. He throws the leaves into his bag until
it is so full that he must stuff them, using the force of both hands.

His use of a glove is a bit of a novelty, the mark of a dandy in the
regions. Other harvesters, especially the raspachines, professionals who go
from place to place harvesting leaves for big-time coca planters, usually
work barehanded. But the practice leaves signature calluses on their hands,
a mark that Alejandro doesn't want to take to town.

But if planting and harvest are easy chores for coca, keeping his plants
alive is not. Every week, Alejandro must walk the rows of his field with a
hand-operated pump sprayer, spreading fertilizers, eyes on the alert for
bugs and barely visible pests, returning, as often as not, to spray with
pesticides. "Coca takes an awful lot of care and an awful lot of chemicals"
he said with nearly a sigh.

Bending low, Alejandro picks up a darkly discolored leaf from the ground.

"Look," he said. "Do you see how the leaf is whole? It hasn't been gnawed
by insects. There are no holes in it, its edges are clean. Something has
cut it off, neat as can be, from its stem."

That something, he said, is what coca farmers call "the gringo"- a nearly
invisible pest.

"Some people claim to have seen them," Alejandro said, "but not me. I've
looked for the gringos, but they're too small to see."

The rumor among farmers - all that Alejandro knows about the origins of the
gringo - is that it was brought to Colombia by American drug-eradicators,
as part of a campaign of biological warfare.

After Alejandro has harvested twice, he empties his bags of leaves on the
cement floor of a small lab, about 15 feet long and 10 feet wide, with a
black vinyl canopy for a roof, which he and his neighbors have built in a
jungle clearing.

With a gasoline-powered weed-eating machine, he chops the leaves into bits,
to prepare them for dusting with ordinary cement and for sprinkling with
ammonia-"precursor chemicals," as the drug warriors say, that he buys in town.

Then he drops the treated leaves into a 55-gallon white plastic barrel,
filled about halfway to the top with gasoline. Resting there overnight, the
leaves lose their color, becoming dimly transparent, their chlorophyll
dissolved.

He takes the mash of leaves and puts them into a metal barrel chopped to
half-height, with crude holes punched into its sides. The half-barrel goes
beneath a hand press, where Alejandro squeezes the mash until it is nearly
dry. Trapping the runoff, he pours it into small plastic bottles that he
empties into another white vinyl barrel, to which he adds sulfuric acid -
common battery acid - for another period of rest and evaporation.

To the residue, he adds a small quantity of potassium permanganate
crystals, which, over a resting period, transforms the smelly liquid into
an off-white paste, base or bazuco, the final product of the coca farmer's art.

Base can be smoked, like crack cocaine, to produce a high, but Alejandro,
who admits knowing farmers who've tried it once or twice, said he's never
felt the urge. Nor, he said, has he ever seen what buyers make out of the
base in a second round of laboratory treatments - cocaine.

When the buyer comes, Alejandro pulls book-sized bundles of base from a
backpack that he keeps near his bed. There's never much of it, he said -
never more than a kilo, or about two pounds - for which he is paid from
$200 to $300. But a transaction of that size, made twice a year, gives him
what the family needs to make ends meet.

Before leaving his lab, Alejandro turns to a tree with branches protruding
inside the nearly wall-less structure. A fist-sized fruit hangs from one of
them. Alejandro pulls the fruit, cuts it in half and offers its halves to
his guests, explaining how they should suck its seeds, enveloped in moist,
transparent natural bags, while squeezing juice out of them with the
compression of their mouths.

"That's a badea fruit," he said. "I just wanted to introduce you to it so
that if you're ever out here in this jungle, you'll know that you don't
have to starve to death."

Alejandro grows the illegal coca leaf, not to stave off hunger, but
because, thanks to coca, he can now buy most of the food for his table at
one of Puerto Rico's general stores.

Continued: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n146/a01.html