OPIUM FARMS DEFY U.S.-BACKED EFFORTS

Interdiction Has Hurt Coca Farmers, But Colombia's Poppy Cultivation
Has Kept Stable, Boosting Chicago's Status As America's Heroin Capital

EL CONGRESO, Colombia -- High in the lush Colombian mountains,
Francisco Pelaez is scratching out a living growing opium poppies.

For a decade, the 33-year-old farmer has cultivated the delicate
flower whose green bulb oozes a sticky latex that is processed into
the potent heroin wreaking havoc in Chicago and much of America.

"Opium is bad for people, but what am I going to do?" asked Pelaez,
standing in a jungle clearing dotted with bright pink poppies. "If
there was something else to grow, I wouldn't touch it."

For Pelaez, cultivating opium in this isolated sliver of Huila
province is the only way to feed his wife and children. But for the
United States, it stands as a direct challenge to an aggressive
anti-narcotics program that has achieved remarkable success.

In Colombia, a huge U.S.-funded aerial fumigation program backed by
President Alvaro Uribe cut the cultivation of coca--the plant from
which cocaine is derived--by 21 percent in 2003.

Overall, coca production in the key Andean nations of Colombia, Peru
and Bolivia is at its lowest level since estimates began in 1986,
according to U.S. officials.

Yet experts say sustaining the success in coca eradication will be
difficult as traffickers adopt new measures to counter the cadre of
U.S. contractors flying herbicide-spraying missions across this vast
South American nation.

The challenges are even more daunting in the effort to destroy the
opium crop in Colombia, which along with Mexico now dominates the U.S.
heroin market--even though the two nations represent only a fraction
of worldwide production, according to law-enforcement
authorities.

Opium production

John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy,
told a U.S. congressional subcommittee in March that Colombian opium
production has "remained relatively constant" in the past five years
despite fumigation and other anti-narcotics programs.

"Colombian heroin dominates the heroin supply in the Northeast and
Southern United States, while Mexican heroin predominates in the
West," Walters said.

Unlike coca, a lowland crop traditionally grown on large tracts,
Colombian opium is cultivated on plots of 1 acre or less, along steep
mountainsides that often are treacherous to fumigate, experts say.

Interdiction also is difficult as traffickers smuggle the processed
heroin into the U.S., 1 or 2 kilograms at a time, aboard commercial
aircraft or in trucks or automobiles.

Many traffickers wrap the heroin in latex packets and swallow them to
avoid detection. By comparison, cocaine frequently is smuggled in
multi-ton shipments aboard speedboats and other vessels.

"Think of where you can put a large shipment of heroin--it's the size
of a bag of flour," said one U.S. Embassy official in Colombia.

Chicago Police Sgt. Joseph Del Pilar, a member of the High-Intensity
Drug Trafficking Areas task force, said heroin busts of a kilogram or
more are rare, and Colombian heroin is increasingly common in the
metropolitan area.

Del Pilar said the heroin--transported by Mexican cartels and hawked
in open-air markets by Chicago street gangs--is far more potent than
it was years ago, enabling users to snort rather than inject the drug
and creating new demand among suburban youths and others less likely
to try the drug if it were injected.

In Chicago, a kilogram of white heroin from Colombia or Asia sells for
$90,000 or more--about five times the value of cocaine, the officer
said. Colombian farmers like Pelaez get about $4,000 for the raw
material to make 1 kilogram of heroin.

"Chicago is the hub, and from here it's distributed to Milwaukee,
Detroit, the collar counties and rural areas," Del Pilar said. "You
get a dime bag [$10 worth] of heroin and snort it, and you are a
heroin addict."

According to federal statistics, Chicago is the heroin capital of the
United States, leading the nation in heroin-related emergency room
visits for five consecutive years.

Nationally, the number of heroin users remains small compared with
those of other drugs such as marijuana and cocaine. Yet about 40,000
Americans younger than 18 tried heroin for the first time in 2001,
compared with just 8,000 in 1993, according to the most recent
national survey.

The number of Americans 18 and older trying heroin also jumped, from
24,000 in 1990 to more than 100,000 a decade later.

"Heroin has raised its not-so-pretty head," said Leah Young,
spokeswoman for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, a federal agency that conducts a nationwide drug abuse
survey.

Overshadowed by cocaine

Opium has long been overshadowed in Colombia by cocaine, which drug
lords such as Pablo Escobar turned into a multibillion-dollar global
enterprise.

Colombia produces 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S., but
aerial fumigation--financed under the $2.5 billion anti-narcotics
program known as Plan Colombia--has all but eliminated large-scale
production, experts say.

Nonetheless, success has brought new challenges.

Fumigation has become more difficult as farmers turn to growing the
bright-green coca bushes in smaller plots of several acres, often in
remote areas.

Armed insurgents who control much of Colombia's narcotics trade also
are aggressively targeting the spraying missions--hitting the crop
dusters 400 times with ground fire last year, double the number of
hits the year before.

In 2003, four spraying planes crashed, and two pilots were killed,
including a Costa Rican whose aircraft was shot down. Only one spray
plane crashed the year before.

"It's a dangerous business in terms of security," the U.S. Embassy
official said. "They are always changing, and we are forced to adapt."

The same official said traffickers have adjusted to fumigation by
moving 10 percent of Colombia's coca crop inside the nation's national
parks--a figure that the top UN drug expert in Colombia said is
exaggerated.

So far, the Colombian government has not permitted fumigation inside
the parks because of concern among some Colombians and international
experts about the harmful effects of the herbicide glyphosate on the
environment.

U.S. officials support fumigation in the parks, as does Colombian Vice
President Francisco Santos, who argued that the damage caused by coca
growers razing parkland to plant illicit crops far exceeds the
potential harm of the defoliant.

"If we don't spray the parks, they will be so full of coca that they
will be gone within two years," Santos said in an interview.

Fumigating opium is even more problematic because the plant is grown
in tiny plots, often hidden among legal food crops. Opium grows only
in mountainous regions, which are buffeted by high winds and offer
poor visibility.

The herbicide will miss its target if the wind is too strong. Cloud
cover can close in the mountains for days and prevent the crop dusters
from taking off.

"There are weeks that we can only fumigate one or two days," said
Colombian National Police Capt. Delfin Murillo, a veteran helicopter
pilot who flies security missions with the spray planes.

Still, Walters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy told
lawmakers that 7,410 acres of opium in Colombia were sprayed last
year, along with an additional 2,470 acres that were voluntarily
eradicated through programs that pay opium farmers to switch to legal
crops.

He said the combined efforts in Colombia and Mexico destroyed more
than 70 percent of the potential opium crop and helped keep production
in check.

In El Congreso, a smattering of wood shacks along a dusty mountain
road about 200 miles southwest of Bogota, community leaders say many
farmers have abandoned opium not because of fumigation but because the
price of opium latex has fallen by more than half in recent years.

Yet they warned that opium cultivation will increase sharply if the
price of latex rebounds and farmers are not provided an alternative
way to make a living.

Pelaez, the opium farmer, is not waiting for a higher price to expand
his production, which brings in several thousand dollars annually.
Walking along a soggy jungle path, the peasant stopped next to a
twisted pile of felled trees along a riverbank.

"I cut the trees to grow more opium," he said, gazing at the scarred
landscape. "What else can I do?"