WHERE COCA IS KING

Gustavo Diaz fears for his livelihood. The 33-year-old peasant came to the
southern Colombian state of Putumayo two months ago, looking for work on a
cattle ranch.

Failing to find any, he took a job on one of the many local coca farms.

Diaz earns about $150 a month dousing the dense undergrowth with weedkiller
and harvesting the bright green leaves, the raw material for cocaine.

But, like his absentee employer, he's spooked by reports that a massive U.S.
anti-drug assistance program will finance large-scale fumigation of the
farms. "If they get rid of the coca they'll wipe out the work," he says. "I
will leave."

Millions of Colombians applauded Bill Clinton's visit to Cartagena last week
to herald delivery of a $1.3-billion anti-drug assistance program. But in
the steamy badlands of Putumayo, home to nearly half of Colombia's annual
coca production, locals worried that the U.S. aid would bring nothing but
trouble.

Much of the money will go to buy helicopters and equipment to transform
Colombia's Army and Navy into counternarcotics strike forces in the south.

The region is infested with coca and rebels who export it to finance their
war against the government. They have already shot down planes trying to
fumigate coca fields.

Now, residents of Putumayo fear a stronger military will lead to an
escalation of the 36-year civil war-and the death or displacement of
thousands of civilians. "We want to be free of coca," says Manuel Alzate
Restrepo, mayor of the region's largest city, Puerto Asis. "But this program
has more to do with fighting guerrillas than drugs."

Washington insists it's helping Colombia battle coca, not rebels. And
Putumayo is ground zero in that war. Barely two minutes by chopper out of
the 24th Brigade's headquarters near Puerto Asis, patches of cleared land
with orderly rows of coca bushes leap out of the lush lowlands. Total coca
cultivation in Putumayo was estimated at 56,000 hectares last year,
accounting for most of the 140 percent rise in Colombian coca farming in the
past five years.

The boom has left its mark. Guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia moved into the area in the mid-1990s and forced coca growers to
sell them their production. Paramilitary warlord Carlos Castano dispatched
his soldiers in 1998 to dislodge the rebels and kill hundreds of alleged
sympathizers. Three of the last five mayors of Puerto Asis have died at the
hands of one of the two armies, and bombed-out ruins provide stark reminders
of a car bomb detonated by guerrillas in February, killing two bystanders.

Yet many Putumayenses fear the end of coca cultivation at least as much as
the current violence.

Senior Colombian officials say a fumigation campaign will soon target all
farms larger than 10 hectares.

But local health officials worry about the negative effect on civilians;
earlier this year limited fumigation induced vomiting, diarrhea and, in one
case, a coma, among peasants exposed to the spray.

Moreover, many locals mistrust President Andres Pastrana's pledge to
subsidize alternative crops once coca is curtailed.

With only one tenth of the $818 million in new U.S. funding this year going
to "alternative economic development," growers are unlikely to abandon a
crop with a guaranteed market. "The small growers know they're doing
something wrong," says Alzate. "But what else are people to do?" Farmers may
soon have to figure that out.