WHAT'S AT STAKE?

Alternative development. If Putumayo's farmers are not convinced that
crop substitution - pulling out coca bushes and putting bananas, palms
or cattle in their place - is going to work for them, they will
continue with coca. And the flow of powder to the US and Europe will
continue. Originally under Plan Colombia, Putumayo's coca fields were
to be sprayed indiscriminately with defoliants. But after heavy
protests from local officials, the plan was modified to give small
coca growers a reprieve: Their land will not be sprayed if they agree
to take part in a voluntary crop-substitution program.

Vast acreage of what officials call "industrial production" will be
sprayed, as well as coca fields of absentee land owners.

Regional Stability.

Colombia's neighbors, including Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, and
Panama - worry that instability caused by implementation of Plan
Colombia will spill over their borders. Already, hundreds of
Colombians are seeking refuge in Ecuador, prompting the US to increase
its aid to that troubled country. Tensions have risen especially with
Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez continues to criticize Plan
Colombia as a military plan opening the door to the hemisphere's
"imperial power" (i.e. US) intervention in South America.

Human Rights.

Critics point to the Colombian Army's poor human rights record and
warn that human rights abuses will rise in Putumayo as Plan Colombia
is implemented. The US says no army battalion with demonstrated human
rights violations will receive funding.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana recently purged hundreds of
officers from the forces in an effort to show his seriousness about
the respect for human rights.

But even US officials admit that Army collusion with the feared
right-wing paramilitaries, demonstrably Colombia's worst human rights
abusers with dozens of massacres on their hands, remains a problem.

The environment. Environmentalists and some of Colombia's neighbors
see in large-scale aerial spraying, a potential natural disaster for
the Amazon region.

They worry about chemicals poisoning rivers and residents. Antidrug
officials counter that the spray to be used is commonly found in US
garden shops and poses no environmental threat. They say coca's
unbridled growth is a much bigger threat: Four acres of rainforest are
destroyed for every one acre planted in coca. And they insist that
products like cement, gasoline, and chemicals - which are used in
clandestine jungle labs to transform coca into cocaine - cause much
greater environmental devastation than spraying.

The Next Vietnam? Putumayo as the US's next Vietnam is how some
critics have painted the principal risk of Plan Colombia. But with no
one predicting US ground troops in Colombia, some observers say the
more likely risk is of a "Central-Americanization" of the US
involvement. Their theory: that in the 1980s, the US poured millions
of dollars into regimes in Central America, fighting left-wing
guerrillas and one result was US involvement in numerous cases of
human rights abuse.

Two decades later, they say US military assistance to Colombia risks
pulling it increasingly into Colombia's civil war - on the Army's
side, but not on the side of the poor campesinos who remain caught in
the crossfire of a 40-year-old war.