COCA IS DIFFICULT TO ROOT OUT IN COLOMBIA

Acreage Has Increased Despite Record Levels of Aerial Spraying Under
a U.S. Eradication Plan.

Julian, a peasant farmer in this mountainous region of Colombia,
wants to stop growing coca but says leftist guerrillas won't let him.
If they catch you pulling up any coca plants, he says, they give you
12 hours to leave your land or they kill you.

Under Washington's multibillion-dollar "Plan Colombia," much of the
drug-fighting money has gone to pay for the eradication of 1.8
million acres of coca, which is used in the production of cocaine.

But the pressure faced by Julian, who was afraid to give his last
name, is just one factor making Colombia's coca industry difficult to
combat with a single-minded focus on aerial spraying.

Other key factors are the lack of economic alternatives for poor
farmers such as Julian; the Colombian government's weak presence in
rural areas; and the lethal networks that control the coca market,
many of them run by guerrillas or right-wing paramilitary militias
that use drug profits to finance their mayhem.

The stubbornness of the problem was made clear in June when the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime released its annual survey
of Colombian coca cultivation. It showed that coca acreage last year
increased 8% from 2004 despite record levels of aerial fumigation and
manual eradication, largely financed by the United States.

In fact, ever-increasing levels of fumigation are pushing coca
farming to more remote areas inhabited by farmers such as Julian. In
the U.N.'s latest satellite-based survey, 44% of the coca fields
detected did not register in the 2004 study.

"That suggests a high mobility of coca cultivation in Colombia," said
Sandro Calvani, head of the U.N. drugs office in Bogota, the Colombian capital.

Experts say guerrillas began making inroads here after the spraying
of the vast industrialized plantations in Colombia's seven Amazon
basin provinces. The traffickers target smaller farms, the experts
say, because they figure the coca plants are less detectable when
mixed among subsistence crops.

"Under the pressure of fumigation, coca plantations aren't halting,
they are dispersing," said John Walsh, a drug policy expert with the
Washington Office on Latin America and a critic of Plan Colombia.
"Fumigation does nothing to address the economic reasons for people
persisting in planting coca."

The war on drugs has not been without success. The cultivation of
poppies used to make heroin is down by half, and the anecdotal
evidence in the U.S. market reflects a scarcer drug. Coca cultivation
measured by acreage in Colombia is also down by nearly half since
Plan Colombia began six years ago, according to survey figures.

But the statistic is undercut by new U.N. findings that the average
coca plant is 40% more productive than previously thought. That may
account for the fact that cocaine prices have not risen appreciably
nor purity fallen in the U.S. drug market since 2000, which would be
the expected result from reducing cultivation by half.

Colombia is by far the largest supplier of U.S. cocaine, accounting
for 70% of shipments. Bolivia and Peru together supply 30%, according
to U.N. estimates.

Calvani is not opposed to spraying, but he used the survey's findings
as a basis to renew a call for more international aid to Colombia's
farmers, saying the war on coca will never be won with just the stick
of eradication. The carrot of large-scale economic assistance such as
crop substitution programs for poor farmers is also needed.

"We need a change in tactics toward sustainable instruments and
greater assistance to farmers," Calvani said. The $80 million being
spent this year on such initiatives, most of it provided by the
United States, is only a fraction of what's needed, he said.

Calvani said opium eradication efforts in Southeast Asia over the
last 20 years were "colossally" successful, thanks in part to massive
farmer aid programs largely financed by the European Union. A
sustainable equivalent in Colombia would cost more than $400 million
a year, he estimated.

Similar European aid has not been forthcoming to Colombia, he said,
except for small-scale programs such as those funded by the Italian
Embassy and the French supermarket chain Carrefour, which guarantees
a market for honey, beans and other alternative crops.

Julian said he would gladly take advantage of a crop-substitution
program to replant coffee if one were available. But none has
materialized in Pueblo Nuevo, his remote hamlet about 15 miles from
Pensilvania.

Such a program would have to be coupled with a government-sponsored
manual eradication program, for which the guerrillas don't hold the
farmers responsible, Julian said, because they see it as being beyond
the peasants' control.

Julian said that 40 or 50 neighboring farmers had been shot dead in
recent years for a variety of reasons, including reprisals for trying
to bypass the guerrilla monopoly of the market for coca paste, the
crudely refined form in which the drug is delivered to designated
middlemen by farmers. One elected official in this town, who asked
not to be identified, said the advent of coca farming in Pensilvania
over the last five years had brought only "widows, death and blood in
the street."

"Farmers are now trying to shake loose from coca because they know
where it leads," he said.

Julian had never seen a coca plant, much less grown one, until five
years ago, when members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
offered him free seeds.

In 2001, coca plants were rare here in Caldas, Colombia's leading
coffee-growing province. But coffee prices then were so depressed
that Julian spent more money producing the beans than he earned
selling them. So he and many of his neighbors planted thousands of
coca bushes, enticed by promises of easy profits.

But the guerrillas controlled the market by prohibiting sales to any
middleman except their designated agents, who enforce their monopoly
at gunpoint. They also have cornered the market for chemicals that
Julian and other farmers use to produce coca paste from raw leaves.

"Typically in the new areas where coca is cultivated, the rules are
much tougher. Unlike in the Amazon basin, where there is a free
market in which farmers can sell to the highest bidder, the
guerrillas oblige a captive market," said Ricardo Vargas, director of
Accion Andina, a drug policy think tank in Bogota.

Julian says he regrets his decision; coca has brought only bloodshed
and sadness to him and his neighbors and little of the promised cash.
Making matters worse, Julian's farm and others in his valley were
sprayed in July by Plan Colombia pilots, who missed most of his coca
plants but killed the beans and papaya trees that fed him and his family.

Pensilvania is eager to help start alternative crops of cocoa and
citrus, but there is no money, the unnamed local official said. "It's
a trap from which they can't escape," the official said of the farmers.

Julian doesn't dare uproot the plants.

"The guerrillas pay low prices, but you have no choice," he said. "If
you try to sell to someone else, they kill you."