COLOMBIA TRIES, YET COCAINE THRIVES

Colombia -- Under American pressure, for most of this decade the Colombian
government has been sending planes to spray herbicides on the fields of
coca that flourish in areas like this. With a new, more cooperative
government in power in Bogota, last year was a banner year for that joint
effort, with a record 135,000 acres fumigated.

But 1998 also turned out to be a record year for cocaine production in
Colombia. By official estimate, acreage devoted to the cultivation of coca,
the plant that provides the raw material for cocaine, surged more than 25
percent and is now three times larger than in 1994. Colombia has passed
Peru and Bolivia to become both the largest grower and processor of coca in
the world.

All told, at least 180,000 acres are now given over to coca cultivation,
according to a survey made public by Colombia's Anti-Narcotics Police in
September.

An additional 14,000 acres are used for growing heroin poppies, another
illicit crop that is booming despite the American-financed spraying
campaign. Such crops were grown in only 10 of Colombia's 33 provinces five
years ago, but are now cultivated in 21, the survey estimated.

The reasons for this surge, which is continuing, are many. American
officials say the success of air interdiction efforts in Peru and Bolivia
has forced traffickers to shift cultivation here.

The surge has also coincided with an intensification of Colombia's
decades-old war against leftist guerrillas, with each fueling the other.
The rebels earn money by selling protection to the growers, who are then
free to cultivate still more crops without fear of interdiction.

Colombia acknowledges that more than three-quarters of all coca cultivation
is concentrated here in the province of Caqueta and neighboring Putumayo,
both strongholds of the country's largest rebel force, the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia. The group operates at will across much of
southern Colombia.

At the same time, American and Colombian officials have gradually come to
realize that simple economic logic has propelled the explosion of coca
production as much as the ebb and flow of the civil war.

Since the collapse of the Cali and Medellin cartels -- the two groups that
dominated the cocaine trade until their leaders were arrested or killed in
the mid-1990's -- trafficking groups too small to be regarded as cartels
have proliferated. In striving to build supply networks of their own, they
have provided credit to peasant farmers.

"You've got a much more decentralized situation with a lot more actors,
well over 100, and that has increased demand," said Bruce Bagley, a
University of Miami professor who is a leading academic expert on the drug
trade.

"They don't have the capital or the equipment to fly coca in from Peru or
Bolivia."

Colombian trafficking groups have also been experimenting with more potent
varieties of coca, Col. Jose Leonardo Gallego, chief of the Anti-Narcotics
Police, said in an interview while flying over this rebel-dominated region.

With the help of agronomists hired for the purpose, they have imported a
type of coca native to Peru and grafted it onto the weaker species
traditionally grown here to create a powerful hybrid.

"Now you have a variety that can be harvested six to eight times a year,"
Dr. Bagley said. "So along with the expanded area under cultivation, you
get much greater productivity per plant and a higher alkaloid content,
which means much less cost in refining and a bigger bang for your buck."

Furthermore, while the United States and Colombia may agree on the extent
of the coca problem, they often diverge on solutions. The Colombian
government has long had doubts about spraying campaigns and prefers to
focus on crop substitution, but because the United States insists on
spraying -- and is willing to pick up the costs -- that approach has been
emphasized.

"To me, fumigation makes no sense," said Armando Borrero, a former national
security adviser to the Colombian government, expressing a view often heard
in official circles in Bogota. "It only forces the migration of cultivation."

In recent years, this area of rolling hills and fertile forest has been not
only a prime region for growing coca but also a laboratory for efforts to
check its spread. Three years ago, coca growers fought pitched battles with
the police just south of here in an attempt to disrupt such efforts.

Nowadays, though, farmers here seem more willing to shift away from coca.
The National Plan for Alternative Development, a government agency that
seeks to wean peasants from coca to legitimate crops like coffee and sugar
cane, operates a pilot rubber-producing program here that has attracted
dozens of peasant families.

"It is a relief not to have the law after me anymore," said Nidia Perdomo,
who grew coca for eight years before stopping in 1998. "You can grow as
much rubber as you want, and you don't have any conflict with the police or
the guerrillas."

The farmers' interest in abandoning coca may stem partly from a growing
resentment of the guerrillas, who have been increasingly unwilling to pay
the market price for coca paste as they have extended their control. At
local markets, the guerrillas have imposed a ceiling of about $410 a pound
for paste; elsewhere, traffickers offer up to $570.

When asked if it was the spraying campaign that made them stop growing
coca, Ms. Perdomo, 41, and her brother Miller, 49, said no. "The problem
with coca is that the profits do not go to those who grow it," she said.
"The intermediaries make all the money while you are barely surviving."

Peasants eking out a living from small coca operations, however, often end
up prime targets of the government's fumigation campaign. In addition, the
spraying appears at times to undermine alternative crop programs based on
rubber, palm and fruit trees.

Legitimate farmers commonly complain of being pushed into poverty after
planes mistakenly spray herbicides on fields in which no coca is growing,
or because pilots deliberately dump their chemicals.

"When you spray indiscriminately, as they often do around here, you kill
off the rubber trees as well as the coca plants," said JesFAs Bastidas,
president of the Caqueta Rubber-Growing and Reforestation Association.

Juan Carlos Claros Pinzon, the crop substitution agency's director for
Caqueta province, said: "Spraying works fine with large-scale commercial
cultivation, but when it is aimed at the smaller producers, it creates a
social problem and only makes our work more difficult. When we show our
project to a person who has been left with absolutely nothing, he says,
'That will be fine in a year, but I am hungry today.' "

Many peasants then simply choose to become "raspachines," or day laborer
hired to tend and harvest coca on large plantations. Those jobs typically
pay $7.50 a day plus meals, twice the going wage for a worker on a
legitimate farm.

Using the slang term for those who run the drug trade, Wenceslao Villa,
operations director for the alternative development agency founded in 1996,
described the problem this way: "You fumigate, and the narcos follow
behind, offering support and financing" to the peasants.

A lack of money has hurt the alternative crop strategy favored by the
Colombian government. Claros learned that firsthand when he recently
visited rebel leaders in San Vicente del Caguan, capital of the
demilitarized zone that the Colombian government handed over to the rebel
group last November. The hope was to get peace talks started, but the zone
is now the focal point of the guerrillas' drug operations.

"One guerrilla commander asked me how much money I can spend in a year,"
Claros recalled. "I answered that I have a budget of $4 million and he
nearly laughed in my face. To them that is nothing -- what they pay in one
weekend at two or three peasant markets to buy coca paste."

The proposal for American aid to Colombia now before Congress contains a
sizable increase meant for alternative development programs like the one
here. But for the foreseeable future, the American focus is likely to be on
aerial spraying, much to the dismay of Colombian officials who believe the
program inadvertently helps the enemy.

"The day after, it looks like you dropped napalm, but four months later it
is all flowering again," Villa said. "You've actually done them a favor by
cleaning up the lot."