COLOMBIA CHALLENGES CIA REPORT ON DRUGS

Coca crop monitors at center of dispute

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Colombia's police are challenging recent U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency assessments that coca crops expanded wildly last year,
making Colombia by far the world's biggest producer of cocaine. They say
CIA analysts can't always tell a dead coca bush from a productive one.

In a recent meeting, National Police Chief Rosso Jose Serrano bristled when
two CIA analysts and other U.S. officials asserted that coca crops expanded
28 percent in 1998 in Colombia.

Check your satellite images again, Serrano retorted.

At stake in the dispute is not only the wounded pride of the Colombian
police, whose fumigation pilots constantly brave enemy gunfire, but also
methods for keeping tabs on a narcotics industry that Washington has
portrayed as growing unmanageably in Colombia while declining in Peru and
Bolivia.

While the CIA's word might reign supreme in Washington, Colombians have won
the latest round: The worldwide chief of the U.N. Drug Control Program said
he sides with Colombia. The U.N. official, Pino Arlacchi, said CIA methods
fall short because the agency relies almost exclusively on satellite
images, rarely checking on the ground to see if coca plants are, indeed, dead.

"Satellite observation alone is not enough. You must also have ground
observation and aerial photography," Arlacchi said.

"We are very sorry about this discrepancy of data. The national police have
very good data, very good expertise, and we entirely trust this data," he
added.

In dispute is how much of the coca fumigated with herbicide by Colombian
police actually has been killed. Police say they sprayed 160,615 acres of
coca crops in 1998, killing 85 percent of coca bushes. With the aggressive
spraying, they say the amount of coca in Colombia has remained constant in
the past two years.

But CIA analysts, in a meeting with Serrano and other senior police
officials March 2, disputed Colombia's "kill ratios." They said barely 25
percent of the aerial fumigation effectively killed coca bushes.

"[The Colombians] were indignant," said a participant at the meeting.

They whipped out aerial photos and their own satellite images -- obtained
in a $1 million contract from a subsidiary of the French space agency -- to
show why they think CIA analysts counted fields littered with dead coca
bushes as unaffected by the spraying.

"When coca is killed, the jungle regenerates quickly," said Luis Eduardo
Parra, the environmental auditor retained by the police, as he gave a
visitor a slide show of dead coca fields. "See this. This isn't coca. It is
grass, herbaceous plants, shrubbery."

Two months after coca plants are killed, jungle vegetation crops up anew,
and optical satellite images can be fooled, he said. Ground checks must be
made to see if the vegetation is grass or coca.

State Department officials, who finance much of Colombia's coca spraying
program, are keeping a low profile in the dispute.

"I am trying to stay out of . . . this controversy," said a senior
department official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"I'm trying to resolve it. I'm not in a position to disavow the CIA estimate."

On Feb. 11, White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey released CIA figures
during a speech at the University of Miami showing that coca production in
Colombia had "skyrocketed," by 26 percent in 1998. According to his
CIA-supplied figures, the total area of coca cultivation in Colombia is
251,500 acres.

"They spent a lot of time and effort to give their process as high a level
of confidence as possible. I'm not going to argue with that estimate," said
the State Department official.

The CIA keeps its satellite images secret, and the agency declined to offer
details about how it reaches its estimates.

A U.N. drug control program official based in Colombia, Klaus Nyholm, said
he suspects the CIA began to assess new areas of Colombia last year,
finding coca that had actually existed before -- but had not been counted.

"It has dawned upon them that there is coca in more departments that the
usual four or five," Nyholm said.

What especially raised Colombian suspicions over the CIA estimates was a
north central mountainous region known as the Sierrania de San Lucas, which
has never been subject to aerial fumigation. In 1991, the CIA spotted
around 12,600 acres of coca there, Parra said, but now reports only about
half that acreage.

"How can that be? How do you explain that?" Parra asked. "The figures can't
go down if there hasn't been a plague or disease in the coca bushes."

He said coca growers never voluntarily cut back on their acreage, given the
profitability of coca, unless they come under pressure from the police.