THE COLOMBIA QUAGMIRE; THE DRUG WAR GOES SOUTH

Realizing that darkness was quickly approaching, the naval sergeant
frantically pulled out his yellow lighter and tried to get a flame
going. But it did not light, so he turned to his fellow soldier for
help. "Do you have any matches?" he asked.

The soldier shook his head.

"What about you?" he said, turning to the informant who had led them to
this point. But he did not have any, either.

Desperate, the sergeant turned to me. "Sorry," I responded.

"Ah, forget it," he said, throwing the lighter to the ground and walking away.

The drums the sergeant so badly wanted to torch were part of a
cocaine-processing laboratory in the middle of the jungle in the forgotten
southern Colombian province of Putumayo. Lying along the
Colombian-Ecuadoran border, just north of the Amazon basin, Putumayo is
home to 330,000 people, most of them small farmers who colonized the area
after fleeing violence or economic despair in other parts of the
country. Farmers -- from small individual farms and large plantations --
grow coca, the raw material for cocaine, in huge quantities here. Some
estimate that Putumayo, which is about the size of New Hampshire, has
120,000 acres of the cash crop, about half of Colombia's coca fields.

Alongside the coca fields are wooden shacks that serve as rudimentary
laboratories where the farmers use gasoline, bleach, sulfuric acid, and
ammonia to process the leaf into a paste. The farmers then sell the paste
to middlemen who bring it to a more sophisticated laboratory deeper in the
jungle, where it is processed again into the white powder that is shipped
abroad to places like the United States and Europe.

For the Colombian government as well as for the United States -- with its
interest in promoting Latin-American stability and in taking the war on
drugs to the source -- Putumayo is a military and political
nightmare. Some of the fields and laboratories are protected by the
estimated 1,500 left-wing guerrillas from the country's largest rebel
group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which operates in
the region; others are guarded by some of the 500 right-wing paramilitaries
who are also in the area. The two forces tax the coca growers and drug
traffickers to finance their war against one another. Authorities say that
the FARC -- which has between 15,000 and 20,000 troops nationwide -- makes
upwards of $ 500 million per year in the coca-growing areas across the
country. U.S. drug officials say that the paramilitaries, who often work
in unofficial connection with the Colombian military and police, make over
$ 200 million per year drug trafficking.

Plan Colombia

Concerned about burgeoning coca production and rebel involvement in the
trade, the U.S. Senate passed a $ 1 billion aid package for Colombia in
late June, twice what the U.S. gave Colombia in 1999. Three months earlier,
the House passed a slightly more costly version of that bill that includes
money for 30 Blackhawk and 33 Huey helicopters, intelligence equipment, and
the training of two special Colombian antinarcotics battalions for what the
State Department calls the "push into southern Colombia." As this story
goes to press at the beginning of July, the House and Senate are
reconciling the two versions before sending the bill to President Clinton
for his signature.

In the debates leading up to the Senate bill's passage, some members
criticized the aid package, saying that it would pull the United States
deeper into the Latin American country's 36-year-old civil war. Others said
there should be strict human rights conditions tied to the aid, due to the
continuing allegations of connections between the right-wing paramilitaries
and the Colombian armed forces. But the bill's proponents argued
successfully that while the package may have its flaws, it is necessary to
help beleaguered Colombian President Andres Pastrana, who is carrying out a
wobbly peace process with the FARC.

Indeed, according to the U.S. government, the FARC is the last remaining
obstacle to a more stable Latin America. Dictatorships and leftist
guerrillas have dissolved into political parties in the rest of the region,
and for the most part, Latin-American governments have accepted the U.S.
plan to implement free trade policies throughout the hemisphere.

But the FARC -- along with Colombia's smaller rebel group, the National
Liberation Army (ELN) -- has rejected the prevailing model, and both groups
have grown into more powerful adversaries. While the FARC's Marxist
platform of agrarian reform and social and economic equality has rallied
few political supporters beyond the small farmers they protect in the areas
under their control, the guerrilla group has quadrupled in size since the
early 1980s and seems to be gaining political momentum by concentrating on
winning the war. The FARC and the ELN regularly attack police stations,
energy infrastructure, and military installations in at least half of the
country's 32 departments.

Colombia's guerrilla groups are doing more than defending the old Marxist
order; they represent a new, more formidable insurgency. Both the FARC and
the ELN use taxes from the drug trade and ransom money from an estimated
6,000 kidnappings per year to remain financially independent and recruit a
staggering number of soldiers from among those left unemployed or
disillusioned by the lagging Colombian economy.

The FARC's military power compelled the Colombian government to cede a
16,000-square-mile area to the rebels as a condition for starting the peace
process last year. It is one of the few places in Colombia where fighting
is not taking place.

Negotiations have stalled on several occasions, and the brazen attitude of
the FARC leadership -- in April the group announced "law 002," which calls
for all individuals and businessmen with more than $ 1 million in assets to
pay the rebels a "peace tax" or risk being kidnapped -- has led many to
question the guerrillas' intentions. If the United States is to
incorporate Colombia into the region's political and economic structure,
the rebels will have to be dragged to the negotiating table. Proponents of
the Clinton aid package say that doing this will require eliminating the
guerrillas' key source of income: drugs.

"It's no secret that the FARC and the ELN derive money from either
protection or taxing, if not actual participation in narcotics operations,"
Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering said while visiting Colombia last
year. "And our common effort to get at narcotics activities should have at
some point some influence on the negotiating process."

U.S. aid would form part of President Pastrana's $ 7.5 billion Plan
Colombia. Designed to fight drugs and shore up the country's economy, the
three-year plan has made the province of Putumayo its first target. The
helicopters, intelligence equipment, and troops would be part of Colombia's
15,000-strong Joint Southern Task Force. Made up of Colombian police,
army, and navy personnel, the task force will try not only to retake
Putumayo from the guerrillas and drug traffickers that dominate the area,
but also to fumigate and destroy the large coca fields in the province.

This will not be easy. There is only one major road through Putumayo, much
of it unpaved and impassable during the rainy season. The helicopters the
Colombian government is expecting from the United States also have limited
troop capacity, making transportation a serious military obstacle. In
addition, the ambitious Plan Colombia draws an unprecedented number of
troops to one region, leaving other areas of the country vulnerable.

None of this seems to matter in Washington, where the debate centers more
on whether the aid should go toward the military or to the police, when
neither force has shown it can consistently defeat the rebels on the
battlefield or that it will have any real long-term impact on drug
production. As Peru's and Bolivia's coca production dropped by 66 percent
and 55 percent respectively during the past four years, Colombia's coca
production has more than doubled. According to recent Central Intelligence
Agency figures, Colombian cocaine production has increased from 51,000
hectares (126,000 acres) to 123,000 hectares (304,000 acres). And there is
little evidence to show that if the Colombian government succeeds in
ridding the region of coca, production will not emerge in another part of
the country or return to Colombia's Andean neighbors.

A Navy Raid

But for now, the navy is focusing on Putumayo, operating out of the
province's principal naval base in the town of Puerto Leguizamo along the
Peruvian border; there, it is tasked with controlling the Putumayo River
and its tributaries, 1,500 miles of water that the rebels use to mobilize
their troops and the traffickers use to export their product. The navy also
occasionally enters the jungle looking for the processing labs and coca
fields, but normally does not venture far into rebel-controlled
territory. The military even withdrew a naval base from the town of Puerto
Espina, 70 miles up river from Puerto Leguizamo, because of the FARC threat.

"They might attack us," said Colonel Diego Patron, the commander of the
Advanced Navy Base 91, 20 miles from Puerto Leguizamo. "They might even
try and hit Leguizamo."

Patron's fear is well-grounded. In mid-December, the FARC killed at least
25 navy soldiers and overran a base in the town of Jurado, near the
Panamanian border. As we traveled warily up the Putumayo River on the
150-foot naval gunship to decommission some coca labs, several of the 72
troops on board made reference to the Jurado attack. Despite the boat's
formidable armory -- two high-powered cannons, a grenade launcher, and
three heavy machine guns -- the soldiers were still anxious. "No one
really wants to go to combat," one soldier told me. "It's a job. We just
do this because we're fulfilling our military service."

After lunching on bread and Kool-Aid, the troops followed German Arenas, a
powerfully built, U.S.-trained lieutenant, across a deforested plain, where
they found three vast coca fields just a mile from the riverbank. With a
Sony minicam in one hand and an M-16 in the other, Arenas led the unit to
three abandoned laboratories, one of which had a makeshift kitchen with
freshly cooked rice and soup on the stove. Along the way, the troops
passed a laboratory they had burned just a few weeks before this
mission. They also found a greenhouse hidden in the thick jungle that
Arenas said contained 10,000 Peruvian coca plants.

The navy's arrival at the greenhouse surprised two men and a small family.
Arenas said the men were migrant laborers known as raspachines, for the act
of raspando, or picking the coca leaf. Colombian authorities say there are
between 30,000 and 40,000 raspachines in Putumayo. Most are men between
the ages of 25 and 35, and many have come from coffee- and cotton-growing
regions, where work is scarce following the dip in production in both
sectors. As Colombia suffers through its worst economic recession in a
century, official unemployment figures show that 20 percent of the urban
population is without work. Unemployment is even higher in rural
areas. Coca-picking is an attractive alternative to unemployment.

Many of these migrant workers will be left without a job once the police
start to fumigate the large coca fields in Putumayo, making the workers
ripe for guerrilla recruitment efforts. But the government says it is
going to try to incorporate the raspachines into the legal economy by
involving them in public-works projects like reforestation and road-building.

"The idea is that the plan offers them an alternative," said Fernando
Medellin, the head of the government's National Solidarity Network -- the
organization coordinating the social part of the Putumayo strategy -- told
me in his office in Bogota. "An alternative that gives them better social
conditions -- for example, in health coverage -- while doing similar things
in other parts of the country."

Medellin says that the government's bold plan for Putumayo calls on it to
combine these types of economic programs with the military offensive in the
region. According to Colombian officials, Putumayo's raspachines and small
farmers will benefit from $ 70 million during the first two years of Plan
Colombia for projects that include substituting their coca crops for legal
products that they can sell on the open market. The government even says
it has a no-fumigation zone in Putumayo, and that it will try to wean the
small farmers away from coca over time rather than turning them against the
government by destroying their livelihood like former administrations have.

Corn For Coca?

The no-fumigation stipulation is an important one: While most of Putumayo's
coca production comes from large fields, the majority of small farmers also
cultivate the crop alongside their legal crops such as plantains, rice, and
corn, and even cattle. Thus the herbicides the police airplanes spray on
the coca will frequently kill the legal crops as well. In 1996 small
farmers, organized in part by the FARC, marched on several cities in the
southern part of the country, demanding that the government stop
fumigation. Several violent clashes between the farmers and the military
ensued before the sides agreed on a settlement. But when the government
continued to fumigate the areas, many small farmers and raspachines joined
the guerrillas.

Despite Medellin's promise that there will be a no-fumigation zone, the
specter of police planes spraying the fields of Putumayo remains one of the
principal mobilizing forces in the province. In the municipality of Puerto
Asis, local government officials, the church, and nongovernmental
organizations are scrambling to get the small farmers to voluntarily
eradicate the coca before the airplanes unleash the herbicides.

In Puerto Asis, one plan organized by a local farmers' union calls for 10
families per village to eradicate one acre of coca per family during the
first year, effectively killing off 2,000 to 4,000 acres of the crop. In
their place, the farmers will use government subsidies to raise cattle and
grow Amazon fruits, rice, yucca, and plantains. The next year, 10 more
families will cut out coca, and during the third year, the rest of the
families will manually eradicate what remains of the 15,000 acres of the
crop in the municipality.

But local farmers are skeptical. Despite having direct contact with the
government's National Solidarity Network, Eder Sanchez, who is heading up
the effort for Putumayo's most powerful farmers' union, says he has not
received any funds for his project and the families are losing faith in the
plan.

Jose Aldemar Pedrero lost faith a long time ago. He lives with his wife
and four children on a 130-acre farm just outside Puerto Asis in a
settlement known by the name of the dried-up oil field next to it,
Quilili-1. At the government's behest, Pedrero replaced his 12 acres of
coca with palm trees in 1997. In return the government said it would build
a processing plant to bottle the hearts of the palm trees Pedrero and 120
other families grew so they could sell them in the United States and Europe.

But the government agency handling the crop substitution, the National Plan
for Alternative Development (PLANTE), underestimated the costs of the
processing plant. The structure has been built, but it is empty except for
a few pieces of greased machinery and two full-time guards. "The government
conned us," Pedrero told me while hacking apart a palm tree on his
farm. "Now we feel totally disillusioned." PLANTE officials say they will
finish the factory by July of this year. But the problem, a PLANTE
administrator told me, was not obtaining the $ 140,000 the government
needed to complete the project, but getting a company to build the factory
in Putumayo, where violent clashes between left-wing guerrillas and
right-wing paramilitaries make the environment dangerous.

Janette Landinez is also afraid for her safety. In defiance of the FARC's
order not to work with government officials, Landinez, who heads a farmers'
cooperative in the guerrilla-controlled town of Pinuna Negro, took a
four-hour boat ride to Puerto Asis to meet with the local PLANTE
office. With her four-year-old son by her side, Landinez explained to the
PLANTE worker that she needs $ 125,000 in feeder money to help the 75
families she represents start a cattle-ranching business. Cattle, Landinez
argues, is the only profitable substitute for coca, and only the government
has the capital to start the type of cattle coop Landinez is planning for
her organization.

Landinez says it costs about $ 300 to grow and process a kilo of coca
paste, which she can then sell for the fixed price (set by the FARC) of $
800. But she says the rebels take a $ 400 tax, leaving her with just a $
100 profit. She has tried substituting corn for coca, but it did not
work. According to a study by local agronomists, corn yields about $ 75
per kilo. Landinez said it only yielded losses. "It wasn't even worth
what it costs to transport it," she explained.

Landinez risked her life to go to the PLANTE office. The FARC, she says,
is against the plans to eradicate coca and seeks reprisals against those
who request government assistance. According to Landinez, they are also
forcibly recruiting minors to help combat the government's coming military
offensive. "They came after my other, 11-year-old son," she says, tears
welling in her eyes. "I had to get him out of there."

The Colombian military has two army battalions in Putumayo, but the
paramilitaries are the only group that really challenges the guerrillas'
dominance in the province. They arrived in 1996, following the marches
against the government's fumigation efforts. With support from the army and
police, they have since established firm bases of support in various urban
centers. The right-wing groups' headquarters is Puerto Asis, where they
carry out their dirty war against suspected FARC supporters with relative
impunity. The district attorney of the town, German Martinez, said the
right-wing groups operated with the tacit consent of the police and the
military. Martinez catalogued 153 homicides last year, most of them at the
hands of the paramilitaries, as well as dozens of cases of people being
"disappeared."

But just a few miles outside of Puerto Asis, the FARC seems to act with the
same level of impunity. Father Luis Alfonso Gomez corroborated Landinez's
story that the guerrillas were forcibly recruiting youths, especially in
the areas where the paramilitaries were most active. Gomez also said that
he had arrived to find entire villages missing. When he asked about them,
he was told the people were doing a week of training with the FARC.

FARC commanders negotiating with the government deny that they forcibly
recruit anyone, and told me that the rebels' policy is to employ youths who
are 15 years or older. "The people [of Putumayo] are preparing for the
war," said Gabriel Angel (not his real name), a member of the guerrillas'
negotiating team. "We're simply arming the people." FARC leaders said they
consider Plan Colombia a battle plan rather than a social plan, and added
that U.S. aid could present an obstacle in the negotiations they are
holding with the government.

There are reports that the guerrillas have obtained high-tech weapons, like
heat-seeking missiles lethal enough to destroy the Blackhawk helicopters
the United States may send to Colombia for the war effort. FARC leaders
would not confirm these reports but did express their resolve to engage
Colombian troops in Putumayo. "We're expecting a bloody war," Simon
Trinidad (not his real name) of the FARC's negotiating team told me, "and
we're going to defend ourselves with rocks, sticks, and whatever else we find."

Barry McCaffrey's Morale

To defeat the FARC in Putumayo, the Colombian and U.S. governments have
placed their hopes on three special antinarcotics battalions. Members of a
250-person team of U.S. advisers in Colombia trained the first 900-man
battalion last year; the team is waiting for Congress to approve the new
funds so it can train two more this year. The first new unit is being
housed at the Tres Esquinas military base in the province of Caqueta, along
the Putumayo border, where Colombian military officials hosted U.S. drug
czar Barry McCaffrey during an official visit in February.

"Your dedication, your courage, your respect for human rights will allow
the police to reassert the rule of law in southern Colombia," McCaffrey
told the 50 cadets on the muddy, open training field following a 10-minute
demonstration of the battalion's firepower, complete with mood music,
helicopters, gunships, and another 50 soldiers firing live ammunition at
paper targets in the distance. The demonstration gave the 900-man battalion
an opportunity to show it's ready for this war that McCaffrey half-jokingly
said would last another 200 years. "The main purpose I came here for was to
raise my morale," McCaffrey said, "to see the Colombian armed forces and
the police actually here prepared to confront the drug production problem."

Tres Esquinas is also the headquarters of the government's Joint Southern
Task Force. The antinarcotics battalion is the latest addition to the
team. The battalion's principal function is to give support to the police
so they can decommission the drug-processing laboratories hidden in the
dense jungle. The battalion is expected to enter the fray as soon as the
United States sends the first round of helicopters to Colombia.

But the FARC's dominance in the area is palpable, and its ability to
surprise the army well-documented. The guerrillas have devastated the
military on several occasions in recent years in the region, overrunning
entire army bases and taking hundreds of soldiers and police hostage. In
1998 the FARC ambushed a 150-man mobile brigade in El Billar, Caqueta,
killing over 70 soldiers. Like the special antinarcotics battalions being
created today, the brigades were supposed to be an elite counterinsurgency
fighting force. But the attack in El Billar crushed the brigades' spirit
of invincibility and brought the entire military's morale down with it.

German Arenas seemed to be thinking of these attacks as the sunlight faded
and the sound of the bugs around the abandoned coca labs became
louder. Our journey into the coca fields along the Putumayo riverbanks
would be over as soon as Arenas and his flustered sergeant could find some
matches to burn the gasoline drums left overturned in the leaves.

The task of burning abandoned gasoline drums seemed so simple yet so
futile, much like the Colombian government's plan in Putumayo. The
Colombian military will have a hard time defeating the FARC in the
province, especially because the rebels will turn their strategy against
them: If the promised aid for Putumayo does not arrive soon, the guerrillas
will no longer need to use force in recruiting the small farmers and
raspachines.

In fact, many analysts wonder whether the social plan can be implemented at
the same time as the military offensive. If local workers start getting
killed, the unions and the government workers will almost certainly leave.
"How are they going to do these programs if the legitimacy and power of the
government doesn't exist?" asks Ricardo Vargas of the drug research
foundation Accion Andina. "Who is going to guarantee these people's security?"

Despite these concerns, the Clinton administration argues that burgeoning
drug production and lawlessness in Colombia threaten the gains the
governments have made in reducing coca production in Peru and Bolivia in
recent years. Officials also say that regional stability is at risk, while
the guerrillas continue to grow using drug money. The illicit drug
industry has become a corrosive force without precedent, relentlessly
eroding the foundations of democracy in the region, corrupting public
institutions, poisoning youth, ruining economies, and disrupting the social
order," said General Charles Wilhelm, commander in chief of the Southern
Command. "Colombia is key to the region's stability."

Drug officials say that they aim to reduce coca production by 50 percent in
Colombia in the next four years, in line with what Pastrana's Plan Colombia
states. But few other benchmarks exist to measure the success of the plan,
and lawmakers fear that the vague nature of the aid proposal for Colombia
does not warrant U.S. support. Others say the war will only get worse if
the United States finances the Colombian military.

"Today's prediction is that by building up the Colombian Army and
eradicating more coca, the guerrillas' source of income will dry up, and
they will negotiate peace," Senator Patrick Leahy said during a foreign
relations subcommittee hearing on the matter. "It is just as likely that
it will lead to a wider war, more innocent people killed, more refugees
uprooted from their homes, and no appreciable change in the flow of cocaine
into the United States."

Even if they succeed in destroying the coca fields and running the
guerrillas out of the province, there is little evidence to suggest that
the large coca-growers, small farmers, and rebels will not replicate their
massive coca operation further into the Colombian jungle. "It's probable
that this is going to happen," Medellin of the National Solidarity Network
admitted. "It's not that we think this is going to work; it's just that we
have new ideas to try and do it better."

By the time the sergeant returned from destroying the useless gasoline
drums, Arenas was visibly frustrated by the whole operation. They had
succeeded in burning a few abandoned coca labs and had captured four
suspected raspachines. But we were also just minutes away from becoming
prime targets for a FARC ambush.

"Let's go," Arenas yelled. "We're running really late!"