DRUG WAR'S ELUSIVE TARGETS

Nineteen years ago, the Peruvian government launched a police and
military operation called Verde Mar - "Green Sea." According to the
U.S. officials who paid for it, the operation was aimed at wiping out
the "green sea" of coca plants growing in Peru's Huallaga Valley.

Coca is use to make cocaine; drug control officials argued that
eradicating drug plants like coca "at the source" was the most
efficient way of solving the U.S. "drug problem." Verde Mar was the
first such operation aimed at coca.

Since then, the U.S. has paid many millions of dollars for coca plants
to be cut down, dug up or doused with herbicides. Has the policy worked?

In 1979, some 10,000 hectares of coca were growing in the Huallaga
Valley. When I first visited there a decade later, there was eight
times as much.

More importantly, eradication had led valley farmers to support the
virulent Shining Path guerrilla movement. By 1989, the region had
became an insurgents' stronghold and U.S. officials, who had earlier
contended that drug control and counterinsurgency could be separated,
were offering to assist the Peruvian military in its anti-guerrilla
war.

Since then, the U.S. has had a low profile but significant role in
supporting Peru's military, despite that group's continually dismal
human rights record. For the last two years, however, the State
Department has cited Peru as an eradication success story, estimating
in a March 1998 report that "Peru now cultivates 68,800 hectares of
coca, just slightly more than half of the estimated 129,100 hectares
identified in the peak year of 1992."

But the report also admits that coca cultivation in neighboring
Columbia has simultaneously increased from insignificant amounts to
nearly 80,000 hectares in 1997. Such transfers, in fact, have always
been the main result of coca eradication programs.

When, for example, Verde Mar destroyed easily accessible Huallaga coca
fields, farmers moved to more remote parts of the valley and to other
regions of Peru. And while coca production for the illegal cocaine
industry was, in 1979, limited to Peru and Bolivia, forced eradication
now threatens to spread illicit coca, and related problems of violence
and even insurgency, to large parts of South America.

In Bolivia, coca farming was completely legal until 19888 and
succeeding governments resisted U.S. pressure to forcibly eradicate.
But the current government has militarized the Chapare coca growing
zone.

Over the past few months, at least three people have died in
confrontations between farmers and eradicators. Columbia's long-active
guerrilla groups are already entrenched in coca zones there.

The U.S. Congress recently approved a three-year $200 million aid
package for Columbia's police, with much of the aid earmarked for drug
control. As in Peru, however, U.S. officials have recognized that no
firewall can be built between counterinsurgency and drug control.

Critics fear that if coca production continues to grow in Columbia so
will social conflict, and so will U.S. involvement. But even if the
Columbian government, at U.S. behest, does stem coca production, there
is no reason to think that the coca wave will end there.

Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela have large regions appropriate for coca
growing. And so does the United States. Hawaii is as well suited for
coca as it is for coffee.

A U.S. sponsored research project - for which Congress recently
approved another $23 million - aimed at producing a lethal coca fungus
was begun on a high security legal coca plantation on the island of
Kauai. Does it sound farfetched to think that the island could also
become home to an illicit coca crop?

In the 1970s, eradication of Columbia's marijuana crop spurred
production in Hawaii -- and California. Before coca, too, "comes home"
- - or merely continues to generate conflict abroad - perhaps we need
to rethink the premises of our international drug control policy.