PEASANT COCA GROWERS SUSPICIOUS OF BOGOTA'S 'MARSHALL PLAN'

SAN JOSE DEL GUAVIARE, Columbia---The optimism of a fresh start. The sweet
talk of reconciliation. The promise of a respectable way to make a living
instead of growing coca. Dagoberto P. has heard it all before. And this
year, he is not buying.

Dagoberto, who owns 40 hectares (100 acres) planted with coca, remembers
"crop substitution " proposals that went by the names of "alternative
development" and "crop substitution." They never materialized. And now the
new president of Colombia, Andres Pastrana, is calling for a "Marshall
Plan" to bring the coca-growing hinterlands of Colombia into the present.

"It wasn't crop substitution at all," Dagoberto recalled of an earlier
administration's pledge. "It was forced fumigation."

There is still no highway from here to Bogota, a 440-kilometer (275-mile)
journey that takes a truck eight days, so vegetables are rotten by the time
they reach market.

Mr. Pastrana's modernization plan is part of an ambitious array of ideas he
has formulated to curtail drug trafficking and reclaim a nation reeling
from decades of war.

With government coffers empty, the new administration would like to raise
money by selling a new kind of bond. The money would bring electricity,
water, roads and technical expertise to forgotten rural areas where poverty
and government indifference have allowed coca-growing and rebel movements
to thrive.

Here in the coca-growing heartland, where the U.S.-backed war on drugs is
fought with herbicides and helicopter gunships, coca growers remain
skeptical. Any plan's first obstacle might well lie with the growers
themselves, embittered by years of fumigation and confrontation with
government authorities.

"In one way or another, they've been saying that for years, and we've been
asking for it," said Antonio R., another coca grower and father of five.
"But all we've ever had are expectations." Like other growers interviewed,
he asked that his full name not be published out of fear for his safety.

The Pastrana administration is asking for international help, and U.S.
administration officials appear willing to listen. Peter Romero, acting
assistant secretary of state for interAmerican affairs, said Washington had
"several hundred million dollars on the table for Colombia," some of which
could be available for alternative development.

"What Colombia has to do is put together a strategy," Mr. Romero said on a
recent visit here. "We're just waiting to see that strategy, to evaluate it."

Mr. Pastrana has also made a priority of negotiating with rebels who
protect coca growers. He acceded to their demands that government security
forces temporarily withdraw from five municipalities in an area twice the
size of El Salvador as a condition for beginning peace talks by early
November. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia is believed to number
15,000 combatants. Ten times as many quiet supporters provide logistic help.

The president vows that he will personally lead the talks with the insurgents.

The rebels are suggesting they would be willing to abandon their drug
revenues, which some analysts estimate at $100 million a year, as part of a
peace agreement that would provide other ways for coca-growing peasants to
make a livmg.

U.S. officials are skeptical about whether the rebels will actually give up
the coca revenues.

"There'd have to be some powerful reward and punishment algorithm to make
that happen," General Barry McCaffrey, the White House anti-drug chief,
said just before Mr. Pastrana's inauguration.

But Mr. Pastrana, who eluded his security guards to meet secretly with the
guerrillas' top commander last month, seems willing to take the rebels at
their word.

The potentially fatal stumbling block lies in the price for signing a peace
accord and pledging to control the drug trade. This would be a demand by
the rebels for local autonomy and control over the government budget in
their regions.

Although U.S. officials publicly contend they are interested in Colombia's
civil conflict solely because of the drug trade, privately they admit they
are also concerned about the conflict spilling over Colombia's borders and
causing regional instability. Officials in Bogota and Washington also balk
at the notion of funding a rebel state within Colombia.

"In the past, there hasn't been sincerity on the part of either side," said
Alejandro Ovalles, a restaurant owner who runs a local business association.

"War is a business in any part of the world," he said. "There's lots of
mistrust on all sides."

Nevertheless people here say that the insurgents are the only actors with
the necessary presence, muscle and local respect to put a rapid end to coca
growing. They say that at one time the rebels banned commercial fishing at
a local river that was being rapidly depleted, and fishermen obeyed.
Another time, the insurgents forbade coca growers to cut down trees in a
part of the rain forest, and again nobody dared to defy them.

"It's about educating people," the local Roman Catholic parish priest, the
Reverend Jorge Vargas, said. "But it's based in fear."

Though their lives are intimately affected by U.S. policies, the growers
complained of feeling invisible to decisionmakers in Washington.

When General McCaffrey visited the antinarcotics base here recently, they
said, the town became "militarized" and people stayed shut in their homes.

"We're not the kind of people you like to deal with, but we're human
beings," Antonio said.

And though Washington this year doubled the pace of chemical fumigation to
kill coca crops, the governor of Guaviare, Hernando Gonzalez Villamizar,
does not expect results.

"After seven years of fumigating, there's more coca than ever," he said.

Growers say they would be eager to give up coca growing if they could earn
a livelihood elsewhere.

Since many of them started growing and processing coca 1 S years ago, the
cost of processing coca has soared, while the prices paid for cocaine have
stayed the same.

It takes 220 liters (55 gallons) of gasoline to process 1 kilogram (2.2
pounds) of cocaine, which Dagoberto said earns a grower $1,000.

Upon hearing that a gram of cocaine sells for $100 by the time it reaches
New York, he looked at the flocr and shook his head.

The state secretary of culture, Pedro Arenas, said that the rain forest
could not sustain the estimated 20,000 growers living in it.

The growers, many of whom came here to escape violence and hopelessness in
other parts of Colombia, should be sent back home and given land, he said.

"The Marshall Plan here would be called agrarian reform," Mr. Arenas said.

The jungle is scarred, burned and polluted with the astonishing quantities
gasoline and other materials involved in the 240,000 kilograms of coca
paste produced in Guaviare each year.

"The white man," Dagoberto said, "doesn't know how to live in the jungle."

Checked-by: Pat Dolan