A STRIKE AGAINST PLAN COLOMBIA

Guerrillas blockade food, supplies in a coca-growing region to protest
anti-narcotics initiative.

For five days, Omar Ramos, his wife, and their five children have been
sitting on a concrete curb outside the airport of this Colombian jungle
town, waiting for a military helicopter to take them away from the frontier
that for four years was their home.

"There's no food for the kids, there's no transportation, no gas or lights,
and there's no work for me," says Mr. Ramos. "Why would we stay? How could
we stay?"

The Ramoses are among 335,000 residents of the southern-border,
coca-growing department of Putumayo who, for more than a month, have
endured an "armed strike" called by the Colombian Armed Revolutionary
Forces (FARC), the country's largest insurgent group.

Aimed at blocking the supply of food and other goods to the isolated
department, the transport strike is the guerrilla group's first salvo
against the government's ambitious new offensive, Plan Colombia.

To the government, Plan Colombia is a way to rid Putumayo and other
departments of a thriving coca industry - and help bring peace to areas
where guerrilla organizations and right-wing paramilitary groups have
challenged the government's authority. President Andres Pastrana insists
that Plan Colombia, announced last year by the government, will offer
social progress and a stabilizing institutional presence to areas that have
lacked both for decades.

But to the FARC, Plan Colombia is a declaration of war.

Some $1.3 billion of the $7.5 billion plan comes from the United States -
with nearly $1 billion of the US aid earmarked to train and equip Colombian
anti-narcotics personnel.

For four decades Marxist guerrillas have been fighting Colombia's
government, for much of that time in marginalized rural areas. While other
insurgencies in Latin America died out with the cold war, Colombia's only
intensified as the guerrilla groups built up income as associates of
Colombia's cocaine traffickers.

Paramilitary groups entered the fray over the past decade, first as
security forces for rural landowners, but increasingly as an independent
militia with its own agenda, at times linked to the armed forces.

The FARC is protesting the buildup of right-wing paramilitaries in Putumayo
and insists that alleged Army support of the paramilitaries must end.

Some analysts say the continued heavy fighting between the FARC and
paramilitaries in Putumayo is part of a war for the right to protect and
profit from the region's cultivation of coca leaves, used to make cocaine.

While the FARC, paramilitaries, and the government grapple over the future
of Putumayo, local residents say they are coming up the losers. "The
guerrillas, the paras, they fight, but those who suffer for it are the
poor," says Ramos.

The FARC have burned cars and buses that defied the strike order. Electric
lines have been cut and gasoline supplies reduced to a trickle. Food is
increasingly scarce, prices skyrocketing.

Just across the silty Putumayo River from Puerto Asis, FARC soldiers openly
man a river port checkpoint. They interrupt their pool game and flirtations
with local girls to bar local residents from carrying produce across to
hungry Puerto Asis.

"The people understand why we are doing this," says one FARC officer, who
declines to give his name. "They are with us in opposition to Plan Colombia
and the paras, so they are willing to put up with the hardship of the strike."

"Putumayo has been abandoned for 20 years, so people have gotten used to
surviving by avoiding taking any side," says Oscar Montero, a young truck
driver idled by the strike.

Puerto Asis store owners, however, took a stand Tuesday by closing their
shops in protest against the slow arrival of government help.

Mr. Montero says most people wouldn't oppose the Army "taking care of
things" - meaning ending the FARC strike by force - but he adds, "The
government won't let the soldiers do it." Noting that the government will
return to peace negotiations with the FARC later this month, he adds,
"We're being sacrificed for the peace talks."

That's a view shared by the mayor of Puerto Asis, Manuel Alzate.

"We're victims here. As a mayor I can't do anything about the guerrillas
and the paras, so while the government decides what to do about the peace
process, we have to sit here like this."

Government officials say they are working overtime on addressing the
emergency - and are not sacrificing anyone to the FARC.

"I recognize this is a crisis, but we're getting it under control," says
Humberto de la Calle Lombana, Colombia's interior minister. Regular
electric power is about to be reestablished, dwindling chemicals for the
Puerto Asis drinking water system will be replenished, and the Army is
continuing its airlift of food and supplies, he says.

Minister de la Calle says Plan Colombia is the strongest proof that the
government has no intention of abandoning Putumayo. The government is
working to develop a new economy not based on coca, he adds.

But farmworker Ramos, who says he worked in Putumayo's coca fields, doesn't
want to hear about "one more government project that never reaches the people."

He adds, however, "If they really got something going in the place of the
coca, I'd come back. The only thing that matters to me is that there's work."