THE AMERICAS

Colombia disputes CIA report on coca crops

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.