COLOMBIA FARMERS STUCK WITH DRUGS

Funds to Switch Crops Unavailable

POPAYAN, Colombia---At first, nothing could have been easier for these
struggling rural hamlets than getting into the drug business. Up and down
the Valle del Cauca, these scattered villages climbed on the coca bandwagon
early, enjoying a fiveyear joyride that is still referred to here as La
Bonanza

But as more and more farmers grew coca instead of food, prices for coca
leaf dropped and the cost of the food they had to buy soared.

Crop dusters financed by U.S. anti-drug efforts poisoned the harvest. And
gradually, the problems that cocaine has fueled in urban
ghettos---violence, shattered families and an addiction to easy
money---reached back to the valley like a curse returning to its roots.

As life unraveled, the coca growers learned that although Colombia was
spending $1.1 billion a year fighting drug trafficking and Washington was
pouring more than $100 million a year into Colombia's anti-narcotics
police, hardly any of that money was available to help communities stop
growing illegal crops.

Washington's strategy in Colombia, where about 80 percent of the cocaine
sold in the United States originates, never included the kind of highly
effective programs in Bolivia and Peru that have helped peasarits raise
alternative crops.

Indeed, while drug crops in Bolivia and Peru---where fumigation is
banned---have continued to fall, the world's leading producer of coca last
year was Colombia, where fumigation is Washington's weapon of choice.

"It's ironic and disturbing that the one country where you have massive
aerial eradication is the one where you ' ve got an increase in coca
production,"- said Coletta Youngers, a senior associate at the Washington
Office on Latin America, a nonprofit policy research organization. "There's
something funda mentally wrong there."

Alter two years of Imposing sanctions on Colombia for failing to enforce
drug laws, the Clinton administration announced Thursday that it would
grant a waiver to Colombia this year as an acknowledgment of progress in
destroying crops.

But the results have not been encouraging.

Last year, Colombian pilots poisoned 40,000 hectares (100,000 acres) of
coca crops, and yet the total area under coca cultivation rose nearly 20
percent.

While Washington fommulates policies to reduce drug trafficking by
poisoning crops, attacking bridges and blowing up labs, the strategy's
limited successes are trumpeted widely. Less well known is the way the
policy affects the peasants who took up illegal crops in a Faustian bargain
to join the middle class.

"They confuse us with the Cali or Medellin cartel," said Eider Gironza
Marnian, a coca grower whose community is weighing the prospects of ending
coca cultivation. "Maybe they think we're rich, too, but in reality, we're
poor. And our children go hungry. "

Under President Ernesto Samper, whose relations with Washington have been
plagued with accusations that Cali drug dealers bankrolled his election,
the Colombian government has tried to promote crop substitution with aid
from the European Community and the United Nations. But the dearth of help
from the United States has sown deep bitterness among Colombians.

Indeed, U.S. officials at the Bank for Inter-American Development recently
voted against a $90 million loan to increase crop substitution in Colombia,
an automatic consequence of Washington's decertification of Colombia over
the past two years in the fight against drug trafficking.

At the same time, the U.S. anti-narcotics funding for Latin America's
military and police more than,tripled between 1996 and 1997, according to a
a report by the Washington Office on Latin America.

Still, the seizure of tens of thousands of tons of heroin andcocainebetween
1988 and 1995 and the destiilction of about 54,000 hectares of coca had
"made little impact on the availability of illegal drugs in the United
States," according to a 1997 report by the General Accounting Office.