COCA CULTIVATION UP SHARPLY

Senator Urges Bush To Fire U.S. Drug Czar

BOGOTA Aerial spraying of illegal, drug-producing crops in
Colombia, an expensive linchpin of the U.S.-backed war on drugs, is
failing, key members of Congress and drug policy specialists said Tuesday.

Despite a record fumigation last year of almost 550 square miles of
coca, the latest U.S. government survey found 26 percent more land
dedicated to the plant used to make cocaine.

The White House attributed the meteoric rise from 2004 to an 81
percent increase in the satellite sampling area, which skewed an
otherwise 8 percent drop in coca production in areas previously surveyed.

But the nuances have largely fallen on deaf ears.

From Congress to the editorial page of Bogota's main newspaper,
criticism of the U.S.-backed anti-drug effort known as Plan Colombia,
which has cost American taxpayers $4 billion since 2000, is growing.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Caucus on
International Narcotics Control, called on President Bush last week
to fire the nation's drug czar, John Walters.

In a letter to Walters, Grassley called the drug czar's touting of
the drug war's achievements as "premature and perhaps even unfounded."

The letter took aim at Walters' claims in November that Plan Colombia
had helped reap a 19 percent increase in price and a 15 percent
decrease in the purity of cocaine found on U.S. streets, data
Grassley called misleading and based on a six-month snapshot.

"Plan Colombia has been an important part of our strategy to stop
illegal drugs from entering the United States, and we need to know if
it's really working," Grassley told The Associated Press in an
e-mail. He said he hoped Walters' office "stops spinning the numbers."

A spokesman said Walters was unavailable for comment Tuesday.

James O'Gara, deputy director of supply reduction for the Office of
National Drug Control Policy, said the hard work traffickers are
doing to replant confirms that the current strategy is effective.

"The new coca estimate shows just how much the spray program is
forcing traffickers to react, but we're getting better intelligence
and our methods are sound," he said.

In the report Grassley questioned, the drug office estimated that
Colombia, the world's largest cocaine producer, had over 550 square
miles under cultivation in 2005, an area 25 times the size of Manhattan.

The amount exceeds by 17 percent the coca measured in 1999, the year
before Congress funded Plan Colombia to stamp out the drug trade,
which has fueled Colombia's civil bloodletting. Legislators say the
development shows Plan Colombia is nowhere close to meeting its goal
of halving coca production in five years.

Moreover, 2005 estimates show that, for the first time in a decade,
coca production is on the rise in all three coca-producing, Andean
nations -- Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.

In Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe's two main challengers in this
month's elections have used the report's findings to reopen a debate
over decriminalization of drug use.

In a Sunday editorial, the generally pro-government newspaper, El
Tiempo, called the war on drugs a failure.

Colombia's anti-narcotics police say drug traffickers are using more
sophisticated methods to grow coca, hiding it among smaller, canopy-
covered plots and planted among traditional crops.

They have also successfully shifted production to remote, largely
ungovernable areas like the state of Vichada, on the Venezuelan border.

"Fumigating an area is no substitute for governing it," said Adam
Isacson of the Center of International Policy in Washington.