U. S. CUTTING BACK AID TO COCAINE PRODUCERS

SAN JOSE DEL FRAGUA, Colombia - The United States is quietly cutting
back economic aid in a region where cocaine production is surging, a
strategy critics say hurts Washington's $4 billion effort to try to
wean Colombia off the illegal drug trade.

In an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press, the U.S. Agency
for International Development blames unacceptable security risks for
its workers and a lack of private investment partners for its pullout
from Caqueta, a former rebel stronghold in impoverished southern Colombia.

Six years and more than $4 billion in American tax dollars after Plan
Colombia was launched in Caqueta, Colombia's army is still fighting
rebels here, and coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine, is still the
region's No. 1 cash crop.

But the alternative development programs meant to provide farmers with
a profitable alternative to growing coca are vanishing in the state -
a symptom, critics say, of how Plan Colombia has failed to persuade
enough coca growers to switch to legal crops even as coca production
reaches volumes unseen in years.

Washington spends $70 million annually on development projects in
drug-producing areas of Colombia. While such projects win praise, the
United Nations and development groups lament their limited scope.

Caqueta and neighboring Putumayo state produced 24 percent of the
356,000 acres of coca detected by the most recent U.S. survey -
contributing to a 26 percent surge last year nationwide. Yet Caqueta
has seen only a trickle of U.S. development aid - $5.6 million since
2000.

And now even that is drying up. As part of the U.S. strategy to win
over coca growers, almost 20 percent of annual assistance is devoted
to nonmilitary social programs and development projects.