ENDLESS WAR [Day 1a]

TARGET: COCA

Officials Try To Break Drugs' Deadly Grip On Colombia

LA GABARRA, Colombia -- The rusted gates to the cemetery were locked, so
Sister Sofia entered by crouching carefully between two strands of barbed
wire, making sure she didn't snag her white cotton habit.

As she straightened herself, the 31-year-old nun looked around the
ankle-high grass. Her large brown eyes fixed on four fresh mounds of
reddish soil.

"These are the ones we buried, and this is where we put them," she said in
a calm, soft voice, as if to keep from disturbing these sleeping souls.

On another small hill, three leafless branches were planted upright in the
soil.

"This is a married couple here," the nun said, her voice quivering
slightly. "One stick is for the husband, the other for the wife. The third
is for the baby she was carrying. She was six months pregnant."

When she took her vows to become a Franciscan nun 12 years ago, Sister
Sofia expected to be a teacher, helping to sharpen the minds of Colombian
children. But much of her work over the past year has been with bodies, not
souls. Almost daily, she retrieves corpses from the banks of the Catatumbo
River or from the muddy road that leads into this remote northern village
near the Venezuelan border. When she buries them, only rarely is she aware
of who they were or how they got caught up in the constant violence that
pervades these jungle hills.

Like most everyone else in La Gabarra, Sister Sofia's life is dominated by
Colombia's brutally entwined conflicts -- the booming trade in cocaine and
heroin and the 40-year civil war that is largely financed by drug money.

Years of government neglect and chronic poverty have turned rural areas
like these into fertile ground for producing much of the cocaine and heroin
that is sold in the United States. It also makes these residents more
vulnerable to the unwanted attention of leftist guerrillas or right-wing
paramilitary groups fighting for control of the lucrative bounty from coca
fields.

To help restore peace to places like La Gabarra, Colombian President Andres
Pastrana and the Clinton administration are lobbying the US Congress for
$1.6 billion in aid -- most of it in military equipment and additional
training -- to stop Colombia's drug supply and to strengthen South
America's longest-running democracy.

But it won't be easy. Despite two decades of antidrug interdiction by US
and Colombian authorities, Colombia's drug business is booming. Figures
soon to be released by US drug officials are expected to show that Colombia
produced 520 metric tons of cocaine last year, more than triple the
original estimate of 1998's harvest.

In Bogota and Washington, the generals fighting the drug war say they need
US-made Blackhawk helicopters, better surveillance technology, and more
American-trained units who can swoop into places like La Gabarra and
eradicate its coca fields. But their strategy focuses primarily on
left-wing guerrillas -- not the right-wing paramilitaries who control and
tax the open and flourishing drug trade in towns like La Gabarra.

Supporters of the Clinton administration plan say the Colombians need the
hardware and expertise if they are to find and eliminate drug fields and
break up the cartels that transport 85 percent of the cocaine into the
United States and a growing amount of heroin.

"I would prefer to see less consumption in the United States or in Europe,
rather than to have more helicopters," said Rosso Jose Serrano Cadena,
Colombia's national police chief who oversees most of the country's
antidrug efforts. "But we have an obligation to do all we can with the best
equipment and personnel we can get."

The US-Colombia strategy is to push primarily into the south of the
country, prime coca-growing territory controlled by the 15,000-member
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the largest insurgent group, also
known as the FARC. Planners expect a minimum of 10,000 people will be
driven from their homes by the new operation, likely to begin next year.

For 20 years, US advisers have helped the Colombian police and military
identify fields and laboratories where harvested plants are processed into
drugs. Then crop-dusting planes, provided by an American subcontractor,
fumigate the fields. Days later, a special team of government engineers and
scientists is flown in, flanked by armed troops, to inspect poisoned fields.

Colombia last year received about $300 million in antidrug funding from the
United States, and American authorities are present in almost every aspect
of the country's antinarcotics operations. At any one time there are
roughly 200 to 300 US personnel in Colombia, according to one senior
official. They include military trainers, as well as agents from the FBI,
Drug Enforcement Administration, Justice Department, Treasury Department,
National Security Agency, and the CIA.

By contrast, the United States is currently providing $5 million for crop
substitution and other social and economic projects administered by the
Agency for International Development.

Critics of the current antidrug strategy say that more money should go
toward programs that foster rural economic development, a better court
system, and basic government services. Fumigation, they add, only worsens a
bad situation for many peasant farmers who resort to growing coca and poppy
- -- the flowering plant used for heroin -- either for economic survival or
because they have been coerced by a rebel group.

"All fumigation does is displace poor people who are already living under
extremely difficult conditions," said Ricardo Vargas, director of the
Colombian office of Accion Andina, an umbrella group of antidrug activists
in the Andean region. "Once their field is lost, they'll simply find
another place to try again." Month by month, more of them are coming to La
Gabarra.

Located a few miles from the Venezuelan border in an oil-rich swath in the
state of Norte de Santander, there are only two ways to get here: by canoe
along the Catatumbo River, or a spine-shaking 10-hour drive -- most of it
over rocks, mud, and thick, wet clay -- from the city of Cucuta.

The area was once a hub for banana and mango farmers. But over the last
five years, it has become the center one of the country's fastest-growing
coca-producing regions.

On weekends, La Gabarra's population swells from 2,000 people to nearly
10,000. Young males, wearing knee-high black rubber boots, descend from
coca fields in the surrounding hills and arrive in one of the dozens of
canoes that taxi them along the Catatumbo River. They come to the village
to "rumbear," the local slang for "partying," which usually involves two
days of heavy beer drinking, several games of pool, and two nights with
some of La Gabarra's 500 prostitutes. In one weekend, a worker can easily
spend most of his week's salary, about $1,000.

Back on the coca farms, the workers perform backbreaking and often noxious
tasks. Those who pick the leaves are known as "scrapers," for the way they
harvest the leaves off plants with their bare hands. Meanwhile, "chemists"
assigned to the rustic processing labs are exposed to large quantities of
cement dust, gasoline fumes, and sulfuric acid that are used to make the
cocaine base.

"Nobody around here consumes cocaine, probably because everyone knows the
kind of things that go into it," said one 20-year-old farm worker who goes
by the nickname, "Diablo."

Fumigation and other government-sponsored eradication programs haven't
begun here yet, although Colombian and American officials say this area
will be targeted under the new aid plan.

One of the first challenges for authorities will be to update the
government's outdated estimates for the amount of coca grown here.
Officially, the La Gabarra region contains about 8,000 acres of coca. Most
residents and farmers, however, say the figure is closer to 50,000.

Another reason these programs haven't arrived yet is that La Gabarra
remains a volatile zone in the civil war.

For years, Marxist guerrillas controlled La Gabarra as if it were an
independent state, dictating who entered and exited the area, painting Che
Guevara graffiti on walls and creating a tax system that allowed them to
collect a portion on all the coca that was grown and processed on nearby farms.

But paramilitary squads launched a massive surprise attack last May,
pushing the guerrillas they didn't kill deep into the jungle or up the
Catatumbo into Venezuela. Then they killed or evicted farmers and residents
suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers.

That's when Sister Sofia began collecting bodies, about 50 of them from
that attack. Three months later, the paramilitaries swept through the town
again, looking for guerrilla infiltrators and killing another 30 residents.
They currently are in control of the La Gabarra region, but the guerrillas
still operate in the countryside.

Because of protests by human rights groups over the August massacre, the
Pastrana government sent in 500 soldiers and a unit of the National Police.
The troops remained until late last month, leaving behind 80 police
officers who patrol La Gabarra's unpaved streets twice a day.

There is no mayor here, no school system, banks, or courts. The top
government official is Marceliano Castiblanco, the 32-year-old police
captain who sometimes performs civil marriages. But his main concern is
looking out for his officers, who have bunkered themselves in foxholes and
behind sandbags outside a storefront next to Holy Trinity Church, a block
from the convent where Sister Sofia and five other nuns live.

Despite the police presence, paramilitary troops dressed in civilian
clothes walk confidently through the village, the butts of their 9mm
pistols jutting from their baggy jeans. Nearly everyone knows where they live.

By themselves, the police can do little to stop them, since they provide
the only protection against the guerrillas who lurk nearby, waiting for
their chance to reclaim the area.

"We're either waiting for the next guerrilla attack or for the next
[paramilitary] massacre," said one officer who requested anonymity. "There
is tension here all day and all night."

By seizing La Gabarra, the paramilitaries have also taken control of the
area's lucrative cocaine industry, which centers around an outdoor market
that operates every weekend at a bend in the Catatumbo.

Canoes filled with large white bags arrive from the local coca farms. The
bags, which contain coca paste, are sold to drug cartel buyers, who form
one long and orderly line.

Before each sale, a spoonful of paste is held over a burner and melted to
check for its purity. Every transaction is recorded in a spiral notebook
and conducted under the watchful eyes of armed paramilitary troops, who
take a percentage from each sale.

This type of tax system was begun by the FARC to help fund its operations
and has been duplicated by nearly every rebel group. Experts say these
taxes now account for up to 50 percent of all guerrilla and paramilitary
funds and offer strong proof that Colombia's civil war and its war on drugs
have become one and the same.

The system also shows how the country's narcotrafficking industry has
evolved over the last two decades. When the government first began its
joint eradication operations with the United States in the early 1980s,
marijuana was the main target. But in the mid-1980s, as American forces
were successfully eliminating coca crops in Peru and Bolivia, the plants
were brought to Colombia.

That gave rise to the notorious cartels like those in Cali and Medellin,
and to drug lords like Pablo Escobar, who were known for their violence,
kidnappings, and cold-blooded efficiency with which they ran their operations.

One by one, authorities dismantled the cartels, culminating with Escobar's
death in a gun battle with police at one of his hideouts in 1993.

But in breaking up the cartels' vertically-integrated businesses, the
government also opened the way for hundreds of smaller organizations to
step in and take over different pieces of the drug-trafficking operation.
It also allowed insurgent leaders -- many of whom had previously fought
against cartels like Escobar's -- to pick up where the drug lords left off.

Standing in the middle of his 40-acre coca field outside La Gabarra, Luis,
a 57-year-old farmer, isn't sure who he'd rather sell to.

When the guerrillas controlled the area, he could count on getting about
$1,500 for each kilo of cocaine paste he sold at market, even after the
rebels collected their tax. It was just enough to pay his 60 farm workers
and to feed his family of six. Now, under the paramilitary system, he gets
roughly $900.

But even worse, Luis said, is the anxiety that fills their lives -- fear
that the paramilitaries will order them off their land or raise the tax,
fear that guerrillas will return and take revenge on him for paying the
paramilitaries. And the new fear: that fumigation and rapid intervention by
US-trained forces will dramatically escalate the violence in the region.

Like Sister Sofia, Luis is doing something he'd rather not do. For a
moment, it's enough to make him reconsider coca farming.

"I know that growing coca is bad and it causes problems not just here but
all around the world," said Luis, a former carpenter. "I'd much rather grow
fruit. But if I can't make money, then we die. And I'd rather die producing
something than die starving."

Sister Sofia's mother has been so worried about the danger around her
daughter that she once called the mother superior, begging that Sister
Sofia be reassigned to a safer place. The daughter refused.

Soon, however, she will be reassigned, perhaps to a quiet girls school like
the one in Bogota where she used to teach. Maybe then, after three years in
La Gabarra, she can start to heal, can start to forget the endless war that
drugs have brought to this remote village.

"I know this has had an effect on me psychologically and spiritually," she
said while walking along the dirt road from the cemetery back to the town
square. "I've had to deal with a lot and it's taken some enthusiasm out of
me. But I know it's the same for everyone else who lives here."