RANDOM VIOLENCE LEAVES 3 MILLION HOMELESS

Colombia's Curse

SANTA MARTA -- Of the thousand shades of green that wash the hills of
Tayron national park, the lightest is the coca leaf.

Seen from the air, mud trails spread like yellow veins into the
forest, each ending in burnt black scars. These clearances give way
to dense coca fields as the growers move deeper into the primary
forest, hacking and slashing as they go.

Cocaine labs speckle the high ground, hoisted on stilts and wrapped
in black polythene against the rain.

These hills that rise out of the Caribbean Sea near Santa Marta in
northern Colombia are the latest front in a losing battle to stop the
"white stuff" that's washing up in ever greater quantities on the
shores of North America, Europe and beyond.

While Europeans are turning in record numbers to cocaine for
recreational purposes, Colombia's environment and its people are
paying the price.

The country has been left with three million internal refugees from
drug-fuelled conflicts; a rapidly diminishing rainforest; the worst
landmine problem in the world; and indigenous tribes driven from
their homelands deep in the Amazon.

Eradication campaigns have driven the narco-traffickers deeper into
the protected national parks, where the spraying planes are barred
from going.

Thirty-five years into the U.S.-funded War On Drugs, the supply of
the industrial world's favourite stimulant remains steady.

In Bogota, Sandro Calvani, head of the United Nations Drugs and
Serious Crime unit, said eradication is simply making the traffickers
better at farming.

"In the last five years there's been a significant reduction in
hectorage ... But the narco-traffickers have responded by caring for
the coca plant better. They're treating them like tea plants."

The logic of Washington's war is to limit demand by choking the
supply line.

Billions of White House dollars have been spent every year on
spraying tens of thousands of hectares with pesticides. But there has
been little or no impact on the street value of cocaine, according to
this year's U.S. State Department narcotics report.

"This is a global problem," says Colombia's vice-president, Francisco
Santos Calderon. "On the supply and the demand sides, there is a
shared responsibility."

Despite its relative stability -- Colombia has avoided the coups and
dictatorships rife in Latin America -- the country has been blighted
by four decades of internal conflict.

The "white stuff" has complicated efforts to find a peace.

Today, fighting still rages between the right-wing government and the
leftist guerrillas, the Farc. A third force of right-wing
paramilitaries, the AUC, is in a flawed process of demobilization
that has been heavily criticized by human rights groups.

In the background of each of these battles, paying for the weapons
and fuelling the fighting is cocaine.

Colombia's rich earth is also its curse.

The mix of nutrients and minerals allow it to grow four of the five
variants of the coca plant -- the raw material for the "dandruff of
the Andes."

For centuries, the indigenous people chewed its green leaves to
combat everything from toothache to altitude sickness. That was until
a German scientist, Friedrich Gaedcke, isolated the cocaine alkaloid
in 1855.

There seemed briefly to be a bright future for the new wonder drug
with applications ranging from soft drinks to anesthetics.

Its fans included Sigmund Freud and Pope Leo XIII, purported to carry
a hip flask of cocaine-based Mariani wine with him. That came to an
end with a moral panic in pre-First World War America.

On the streets of Europe, the cost of "blow" can be counted in used
notes.

It might mean an addiction, a lost job or, worse, a lost loved one.
In Colombia, which produces 80 per cent of the world's supply, it has
helped to pay for a conflict that kills as many as 3,000 every year.

Colombia is home to a disproportionate percentage of the world's
biodiversity. But satellite images taken this year show that coca
plantations have cut into 13 of Colombia's 51 national reserves.

"They know we're not allowed to spray in the parks," says anti-
narcotic police's Major Fernando Lopez. In La Macarena reserve south
of Bogota, the biggest manual eradication effort is underway.

The work is arduous and dangerous. The military has assigned 3000
personnel to guard 70 workers. "We thought it would take 130 days to
do it but after a month we have cleared just 1000 hectares," said
Major Lopez.

In the last three weeks alone, more than a dozen police have been
killed by guerrillas. The Farc has taken to booby-trapping coca
plants with landmines.

Turf wars between the government, cartels, guerrillas and
paramilitaries mean there is an epidemic of land mines.

There have been nearly 5,000 people killed or mutilated by these
explosives since 1990, according to Luspiedad Herrera, the director
of Colombia's landmine observatory "Many of them are made of plastic
to avoid detection and are disguised as toys," she said.

This random violence and territorial conflict has driven entire
communities out of rural areas and into Colombia's cities.