COLOMBIAN COCA CROPS INCREASE DESPITE U.S. EFFORTS

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 five-year joyride that is still referred to here to 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 American 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 some 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 peasants 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 fundamentally wrong there."

(After two years of imposing sanctions on Colombia for failing to enforce
drug laws, the Clinton administration announced on Thursday that it would
grant a waiver to Colombia this year as an acknowledgment that it is making
progress in destroying crops. But the results have not been encouraging.
Last year, Colombian pilots poisoned 40,000 hectares of coca crops in the
most intense program ever, and yet the total area under coca cultivation
rose nearly 20 percent.)

Far from the hardscrabble roads where peasants live all but forgotten by
their government, Washington formulates policies to reduce drug trafficking
by attacking bridges, blowing up labs and poisoning crops. The strategy's
limited successes are trumpeted widely.

But 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
Mamian, 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 boost crop
substitution in Colombia, an automatic consequence of Washington's
decertification of Colombia over the past two years as a partner 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
report by the Washington Office on Latin America. Most of the money goes
for shooting down planes transporting coca leaves or paste to Mexico and
Colombia from Bolivia and Peru, destroying crops and seizing drugs bound
for the United States.

Still, the seizure of tens of thousands of tons of heroin and cocaine
between 1988 and 1995, and the destruction of about 135,000 acres of coca
had "made little impact on the availability of illegal drugs in the United
States and on the amount needed to satisfy U.S. demand," according to a
1997 report by the General Accounting Office.

One State Department official said that in the 1980s the Bush
administration offered the Andean nations crop-substitution programs along
with military and police aid to battle drug smuggling. While Peru and
Bolivia were interested in the alternative-crop idea, the Colombian
military and police traded agricultural aid for increased military
assistance, the official said.

Officially, the U.S. government has no plans to switch tactics in Colombia.
In a statement, Randall Beers, acting assistant secretary for international
narcotics and law enforcement affairs, defended fumigation as "the most
cost-effective way to reduce narcotics substances, particularly in areas
not under control of the central government."

One State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the
emphasis on fumigating crops was likely to intensify. "The feeling is very
strong to push on in Colombia, regardless of what the results are," the
official said.

The rationale was that fumigation could succeed if applied more thoroughly,
and neither the Colombian nor the U.S. government wanted to shower
agricultural programs on regions believed to be under guerrilla influence.

For the Colombian military, the resumption of U.S. anti-drug aid is being
eagerly awaited as a boost in the undeclared war against leftist
guerrillas, the chief of the combined armed forces, Gen. Manuel Jose
Bonnet, said in an interview.

In recent years, the political breakdown in Colombia has weakened the
traditional ties of peasants to the land. Civil strife pitting the army and
landowner-financed paramilitary groups against leftist guerrillas, and the
purchase of vast tracts of farmland by drug barons, has displaced an
estimated 1.2 million Colombians from rural areas, according to
human-rights organizations here.

Since the country's economic opening in the early 1990s, promoted by the
United States, thousands of small farmers in Colombia have gone out of
business, unable to compete with the world prices for corn, rice, and other
grains, said Juan Manuel Ospina, president of the Colombian Farmers'
Society. Many families displaced by the upheaval have drifted to remote
frontiers and grow coca where the lack of roads is not a problem. For coca
and poppy, traffickers fly into clandestine airstrips.

Abigail Velazco, a 41-year-old Guambiare Indian who grew poppy in the
mountains outside Popayan, said drug dealers first appeared after a disease
had destroyed the tribe's potato and onion harvest.

If the importance of an agriculture extension service in the remote
mountains of the Guambiare had not occurred to the government, the same
could not be said of the drug dealers. Velazco said the first trafficker, a
North American who went by a name that sounded like Don Ever, supplied
seeds, fertilizer, four months of groceries and a pledge to buy the harvest
for a set price.

"It started out with only a few people growing wild poppies," said
Francisco Muelas, the tribal chief's agricultural adviser. "After that,
flowers started appearing everywhere." Before long, 70 percent of the
13,500 Guambiare had given up raising food crops to grow poppy for the
traffickers, cutting down forest to do so. Like the lowland Colombians
growing coca, the Guambiare saw the fabric of their culture -- respect for
nature, families and the head of the tribe -- fray amid the influx of
money, strangers and violence.

"The community said: 'Look, we're destroying ourselves. Why don't we pick
up our traditions, recover our way of life?' " Muelas said. Pushed by their
leader, the community presented the government with a "Plan of Life" to
help the Guambiare give up drugs.

It was not easy, admitted Muelas. Some tribesmen threatened the leader's
life, and a letter purporting to be from the local commander of the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's oldest Marxist
guerrilla group, warned the tribe not to stop growing poppy.

But the tribe's reaction was an unusual demonstration of its conviction and
courage: It selected a group to trek up the mountain and explain the "Plan
of Life." After talking, the guerrillas denied having made any threat, and
pledged not to interfere in the tribe's switch to legal crops.

Though officials in Washington said guerrillas in Colombia are an
impediment to government crop-substitution efforts, Juan Carlos Palou, the
director of Plante, Colombia's crop-substitution program, said no farmer
has ever been killed for giving up illicit crops.

Now the Guambiares' program, backed by some financing from the Colombian
government, is a showcase for crop substitution. Fields where poppy had
been growing are planted with corn, onions and beans. The tribe is raising
500 chickens. The Guambiares built an aqueduct to divert water from a
nearby river to a fish hatchery, where they are raising trout from eggs
imported from California. They have cleared the forest around a highland
lake where they plan to build a fishing resort. A rudimentary factory makes
concrete blocks to build houses.

Measuring the success is tricky, because crops abandoned in the Valle may
pop up under the Amazon canopy where they are harder to eradicate. It is
slow work turning around a community's decay against a continuing increase
in both coca production and fumigation.

"Nobody ever calls the hard line into question on the basis of results,"
Palou said. "But people are always asking for results when you take a mild
line." Success comes slowly, measured in a region's permanent switch to
legal crops as the government builds credibility among its citizens.