COLOMBIA TAKES DRUG WAR TO PLANT LEVEL

Workers Uproot Coca Crop In Park, Know To Drop At Sound Of Gunfire

SIERRA MACARENA NATIONAL PARK, Colombia - The war on drugs doesn't
get more hands-on than this.

Nearly a thousand government workers descended on this
rebel-controlled nature preserve Thursday to begin manually uprooting
some 11,000 acres of coca plants used to make cocaine.

About 3,000 soldiers provided security for the risky operation -- a
slow and costly program reflecting the difficulty of winning the
U.S.-funded war on drugs. Authorities said they expect the
eradication teams to finish the job in three months.

Uniformed peasants hired from across the South American country set
out Thursday, small shovels in hand under a blaring sun, into the
chest-high, verdant coca fields.

"When we hear gunfire we know what to do: Stop, don't run, and drop
to the ground face down," said Jose Luis Aristizabal, 53, who
traveled across from Colombia's coffee growing region to take the
job, which pays $12 a day.

President Alvaro Uribe ordered Operation Macarena last month after 29
soldiers were killed in an ambush just outside the park's boundaries
by the country's main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC.

Uribe vowed to remove "every last coca plant" from the park, because
he said the rebels were getting rich trafficking cocaine.

For decades, Colombia's guerrillas have enjoyed free run of the 1.6
million-acre park, 105 miles south of Bogota, using the threat of
violence to force an estimated 5,000 farmers living inside to grow
coca for their increasingly lucrative drug trade, according to the government.

The FARC has not commented on the operation. Analysts said the rebels
may have retreated higher into the mountains to avoid direct confrontation.

Military officers left nothing to chance.

"We have a specialized military unit, advancing step by step, looking
for mines and making sure eradication crews can work safely,"
National Police chief Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro said shortly before
bending over and uprooting the first coca plant.

The 40-men crews were also accompanied by a team of minesweepers and
bomb-sniffing dogs. The campaign is being overseen by 11 observers
from the United Nations.

Aerial spraying, common elsewhere in Colombia, could complete the job
faster than the three months allotted for the task.

But despite urgings of the United States, Colombia has refused to
chemically fumigate any of its 49 national parks and protected areas,
11 of which are believed to contain coca. Castro cited environmental
concerns, noting the parks contain dozens of species that exist
nowhere else on the planet.

In 2005, the government manually eradicated a record 72,000 acres of
illegal drugs, including some in other national parks.

The United States has provided Colombia with more than $4 billion
since 2000 -- mostly for counternarcotics operations -- in an effort
to reduce cocaine supplies on U.S. streets by curbing production. But
prices for the drug have actually declined in the past six years,
which some analysts say shows that supplies remain plentiful.