BIG GAINS, BUT COCAINE STILL FLOWS

The US Cites Record Coca-Crop Destruction, And Major Arrests In
Colombia. But Cocaine Flows North Unabated.

CALI, COLOMBIA - Margarita Consuela Gomez Ricardo and Carlos Murillo
met during a police raid on a warehouse of pirated DVDs seven years
ago. Later that evening, after they swooped in and made the arrests,
he asked her out for coffee. And six months later they were married.

Now, at age 31 and with two small children, Ms. Gomez is a widow. The
last time she spoke to Murillo was on Friday, May 19. He said he was
coming home that weekend. Their 2-year-old son was watching Power
Rangers on TV at full volume and she could barely hear her husband's goodbye.

She went out to get her hair done, and dressed up the kids nicely,
but Murillo never showed. She was disappointed, but that wasn't unusual.

On Monday night, as she channel-surfed in their Cali apartment, she
caught a newsflash: An elite police unit had been shot in Jamundi.
She called the station, but she knew.

Murillo, along with 10 others, most of them US Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) trained counternarcotics specialists, had been
killed by a military unit. Colombia's attorney general says the
soldiers were on the narcotraffickers payroll.

In the weeks and months ahead there would come the questions,
suspicions, accusations, and fears. But right then, with the TV
remote in hand, all that Gomez felt was despair.

"What is wrong with this country?" she thought. "Nothing ever changes."

Sitting in his Washington office a block from the White House, John
P. Walters, President Bush's 'drug czar,' sees a different picture.
"There is absolutely no question we are winning," he states flatly.

The "winning," in this case, is against narcotraffickers. And the
"we" is the US and Colombian governments, inexorably bound together
in a multibillion dollar war against the drug trade.

In 1989, when the US drug czar's post (officially, the Office of
National Drug Control Policy, or ONDCP) was created, Pablo Escobar,
the notorious head of the Medellin cartel, was the kingpin. "Escobar
and other drug lords were the most powerful and violent people in the
world. They could buy or kill anyone. They could go anywhere. They
could do anything," says ONDCP director Walters. Those days, he
stresses, are patently over.

"Through years of systematic efforts, and not always without
obstacles and setbacks, the Colombians have reconstructed their
police, military, judicial, and political institutions," he says,
giving much credit, as many in the administration do, to Colombian
President Alvaro Uribe, Washington's conservative ally in Bogota. Mr.
Uribe's success in bringing stability to the country, says Mr.
Walters, is nothing short of "astounding."

But Walters doesn't downplay the U' role. "You can't build capacities
without metal detectors and armored cars and radios and people who
are going to teach personnel to use all those things effectively,"
says Walters. "It could not have been done without our assistance."

The US Embassy in BogotA!, since the launch of the $4.7 billion Plan
Colombia in 2000, has grown into the second largest US diplomatic
mission in the world, after Baghdad. It employs over 2,000 people,
including some 350 US military personnel and 750 contractors. The
cornerstone of Plan Colombia is the massive effort to eradicate
Colombia's coca plants before they are processed into cocaine. Some
20 aircraft, piloted by contractors with DynCorp International,
headquartered in Falls Church, Va., take turns carrying out daily
spray missions. Army and police units assist these efforts by
clearing the ground of coca farmers, guerrillas, or traffickers
below, and by protecting the spray mission from above - with a fleet
of 71 US provided helicopters. The majority of the State Department's
counternarcotics and law enforcement budget in Colombia is dedicated
- - directly or indirectly - to these endeavors.

In 2005, a record-breaking 170,000 hectares (419,000 acres) of coca
were destroyed: 138,000 sprayed and 32,000 pulled out by hand or plowed under.

In total, since the program began in 1994 (and particularly since it
was ramped up in 2000), 986,925 hectares of coca plant and opium
poppy have been eradicated - an area almost equivalent to the size of
the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

Drug seizures are another pillar of the plan, and here too, there are
results. Two hundred and twenty-five tons of cocaine hydrochloride
and cocaine base were seized in 2005, up from 125 tons in 2002, and
the number of clandestine drug labs destroyed soared to nearly 2,000
last year from 317 in 2000, according to a July study by Colombia's
National Narcotics Directorate (DNE). Meanwhile, the number of
traffickers extradited to the US in the last four years is climbing toward 400.

"We are squeezing them. We are forcing them to change their drug
trafficking routes and their methods," says Walters.

A better-trained and -equipped military and police, meanwhile, has
meant that overall security in Colombia has vastly improved,
especially in the urban areas. From 2002 to 2005, the murder rate
fell 35 percent - from 28,837 murders to 18,111 - and kidnappings
have dropped from nearly 3,000 in 2002 to 800 last year, according to
Uribe's office. As a consequence, nearly 1 million foreigners visited
last year, a 21 percent jump compared with 2004, and foreign
investment hit $10 billion last year, a fivefold increase since 2002.
Microsoft's Bill Gates is scheduled to visit in March, to take a
look, he said last week, into business opportunities.

"Plan Colombia," says Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue,
a think tank in Washington, "....has manifestly helped the government
restore some measure of authority in a country that was on the verge
of being a failed state six years ago."

But even Plan Colombia advocates admit the impressive statistics do
not a complete victory make.

"We're making first downs," US Ambassador to Colombia William Wood is
fond of saying, "...but we're not sure how long the football field is."

President Uribe is often even more circumspect. "It is clear we
cannot abandon Plan Colombia," he said while in New York last
week."But it is also clear that, in comparison to our efforts, we
should be seeing better results."

Sometimes, it seems the harder Colombians and Americans fight, the
more the drug lords push back and the coca fields reproduce.

When Escobar was shot to death on a MedellA-n rooftop in 1993, some
expected the industry in which he had played such a key role would
contract. But, the MedellA-n cartel was soon replaced by their Cali
rivals. And when key Cali cartel leaders were jailed a few years
later - the trade was divided up by competing factions of the Norte
del Valle cartel and a host of smaller "cartelitos." Mexican cartels
meanwhile, moved quickly to fill remaining voids.

Uribe's government, meanwhile, is being criticized for allowing some
top drug traffickers to avoid extradition by surrendering themselves
as part of the government's peace deal with the paramilitaries. And
the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in turn, may
have been pushed into more remote zones - but they are estimated to
still be earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year from their
involvement in the drug trade. There is no lack, after all, of coca.
Despite the unprecedented eradication efforts, coca cultivation
actually increased last year by 8 percent, according to a study
released in June by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). More
significantly, the amount of cocaine being produced from coca leaves
is also increasing. According to DNE, Colombia produced 776 metric
tons of cocaine last year, 231 more than previous US estimates, and
enough to supply almost 80 percent of the world market.

Why? Growing techniques have improved over the years and farmers in
some regions are now able to harvest coca leaf six times a year,
instead of the usual four harvests, according to UNODC. Also, aerial
spraying has pushed farmers to smaller, more isolated plots deeper in
the countryside, making spray operations more complicated and less
effective. While coca was concentrated in three provinces at the
start of Plan Colombia, today, it has spread to at least 23 of the
country's 32 provinces.

This geographical expansion also feeds a different problem, explains
Pablo Casas, a security expert at the Security and Democracy
Foundation in BogotA!. In the past, counternarcotics work was
concentrated in a few areas, he says, but "everyone touches drugs
now. Which means there are more police, military, and local
authorities for the narcos to try to corrupt."

Even worse - as far as Washington is concerned - is that the most
expensive US foreign aid program outside the Middle East has
apparently failed to significantly change the availability, price, or
quality of cocaine on American streets.

The question of cost and purity of street cocaine in the US remains
contentious, due both to methods of gathering statistics, and ways in
which those statistics are interpreted. When the White House drug
czar's office announced last November that the price of a gram of
cocaine was slightly higher (a sign of less availability), it was
quickly attacked with statistics showing the opposite.

Sen. Charles Grassley, (R) of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Caucus on
International Narcotics Control, in an April letter to Walters, even
suggested the White House was selecting data to paint "a rosier, but
not necessarily more accurate, picture" of the achievements of Plan Colombia.

Most sides to the debate agree however with the findings of the 2005
US National Survey on Drug Use and Health released this month. The
study shows youth rates of cocaine use have fallen slightly since
2002 - but the number of first-time users is up, as are the number of
hard-core addicts. Overall, according to the survey, levels of
cocaine use and addiction are at least as high as they were in 2000.

"We need a new a new approach to drug policy," says John Walsh, a
drug policy expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA),
an advocacy group. "A reevaluation is long overdue."

Gomez quit the police force when she got married and lost interest,
over time, in the drug war shop talk. But Murillo, her husband,
remained a member of the counternarcotics unit, and "he loved being
part of the big game ...working with the Americans," she says.

Once, she says, he called her from San Diego, Calif., where he was
testifying in a big case. "He was so excited. He felt he was doing
something important," she remembers.

In the year before his death, Gomez admits, they had begun to argue a
lot. He would say he was going to do something with her and the kids,
and would be called away by the unit. He would promise to call, and
then be out of touch. When he missed their sixth wedding anniversary
because of a drug operation, she had just about had enough: "Tell
your Gringo masters I want my husband back!" she had screeched down
the phone line.

They talked of separating. She berates herself most now for not
telling him she still loved him, the last time they spoke.

Lately, after speaking out in the press against the Colombian
military, Gomez has been receiving menacing phone calls late at
night. "Prepare coffins for the rest of the family," a muffled voice
told her last week.

She is scared to take the kids to the park across the street. She
rarely goes out herself. "If I could just speak to Carlos one more
time, I would tell him I was never angry with him," she says. "I was
just angry with the way everything was being done... I would tell him
we needed to do it over again, differently."