COLOMBIAN FARMERS TURN TO MACHETES, SPADES IN COCA WAR

EL PENOL, Colombia -- With a machete and a long-handled spade,
Colombian farmers like Claudio Gualtero are trying to succeed where
seven years of aerial coca fumigation struggled in the battle to
slash the country's drug exports.

After receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid to spray coca crops
from the air, Colombia is shifting strategy to intensify manual
eradication on the ground to attack the leaves used to make cocaine
that ends up on U.S. and European streets.

Once a small-time coca farmer, Gualtero now captains a work gang
uprooting illicit crops along the dry hillsides of southern Narino
province, where guerrillas, traffickers and paramilitaries battle
over cocaine routes to the Pacific.

"This is what creates so much chaos," the 52-year-old farmer said as
his team, including four of his sons, dug up coca bushes speckled
with red seeds under heavy police guard. "Every plant we destroy is
another problem gone."

Critics say the U.S.-backed fumigation plan has failed to live up to
its promise to slash cocaine output or provide sufficient
alternatives for farmers who have learned how to protect coca crops
after pilots dump trails of withering herbicides.

While U.S. military and counter-narcotics aid helped Colombia reduce
violence from its 40-year conflict, cocaine production remains
stubbornly above 600 tons a year, or more than 60 percent of the
world's total production, the United Nations says.

Last month President Alvaro Uribe acknowledged mistakes made with
fumigation after farmers complained legal crops were hit by
herbicides, and he said the three-year-old eradication program was
more efficient in killing coca at the root.

But the shift came after U.S. Democrats, critical of the results of
aerial herbicides, pushed to cut military and fumigation aid in favor
of more funding for development programs to ween farmers away from
the lucrative drug crop.

Spray planes will still buzz over dangerous areas, but the government
sees eradication teams more permanently rooting out coca, creating
jobs for poor farmers and bolstering state presence in areas under
rebel influence.

"A hectare eradicated by hand is 100 percent eradicated," said
Victoria Restrepo, head of the presidential illicit crop program.
"When you spray a hectare, that doesn't mean 100 percent will be eradicated."

From a makeshift camp of tents and black plastic sheeting near the
impoverished town of El Penol in Narino, work gangs hike out with a
police patrol shortly after dawn to destroy coca sown among a
patchwork of maize and plantain plots.

Many are poor farmers struggling for work and most are shipped in
from other parts of Colombia for two-month contracts to guard against
guerrillas or paramilitaries seeking revenge on the local population
for lost coca.

Narino, with its easy access to the Pacific coast, has become a major
center for coca production and turf wars among rival armed groups
looking to secure control of smuggling.

Colombia sprays more than 320,000 acres of land each year, but the
U.N. estimates the country still has about 200,000 acres of coca.
Washington puts that figure higher.

Authorities hope more than 100 work gangs hacking up an average of 3
acres a day nationwide can destroy 120,000 acres in 2007.

But the program has risks. Six eradicators were killed last year when
they set off a bomb attached to a coca plant and rebels killed 13
soldiers assigned to protect workers. Rebels often lay home-made land mines.

Rafael Nieto, an analyst and former deputy justice minister, said
eradication would effectively compliment spraying, but other experts
questioned the long-term impact on coca output.