DRUG WAR FAILS TO BRING PEACE

EL TIGRE -- Jose Efrain Mora lived in a house on the steep bluffs above the
River Guamuez for 30 years until the night last month when a stranger's
hands shook him awake.

Members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's
largest guerrilla insurgency, ordered him to get up, and he quickly awoke
his wife and three children. Outside more than a dozen men, working quietly
in the darkness, laced dynamite to the 350-foot bridge spanning the wide
river below their house.

The resulting explosion toppled the bridge from the bluffs, severing the
economic lifeline that joined hundreds of farmers in southern Putumayo
province with markets, food, and families. The roof of Mora's home caved
in. Heavy seasonal rains have since left the detritus of a humble life --
two children's backpacks, a lady's worn white pumps, a shabby purse --
swimming in pools of water in the ruined bedroom.

"They didn't want us dead, and in that sense I view them well," said Mora,
48, a farmer. "But just look at my house. I had nothing else."

After more than a year of relative calm, Putumayo province is enduring a
severe spike in violence, defying national trends. The war is rising
despite a sharp decline in Putumayo's drug crops, reduced 93 percent after
three years of intensive U.S.-financed aerial herbicide spraying.

Colombian and U.S. authorities have long said that coca production provides
the motivation and financial fuel for the country's nearly four-decade
civil war. But the mixed results in a province that has been the chief
venue of U.S. anti-drug assistance challenges that notion. It also shows
the differences in what constitutes success, which the Bush administration
measures as a swift reduction in drug crops, and the Colombian government
envisions as a lasting peace.

The FARC is an 18,000-member guerrilla group that promotes a Marxist
solution to Colombia's economic imbalances. It has recently attacked oil
wells, roads and bridges, military posts and police stations across
Putumayo. Fighting for Puerto Asis, the province's commercial capital 25
miles east of this river town, left at least 30 people dead in November,
including a 14-month-old boy killed by a bullet after it passed through his
father's head. The death toll amounted to more than half the murders
reported over the first 10 months of the year.

The United States has delivered $2.4 billion in mostly military assistance
to Colombia since 2000 in the hopes of crippling the drug trade. Colombian
trafficking accounts for 90 percent of the cocaine reaching U.S. shores and
funds two irregular armed groups -- the FARC and a rival paramilitary force
that works alongside the army against the FARC.

Coca, the key ingredient in cocaine, covered 163,000 acres of Putumayo in
2000 when the U.S. Congress approved the first phase of the aid package
known as Plan Colombia. By the end of July 2003, fewer than 12,000 acres
remained. Nationwide coca cultivation has dropped from 403,000 acres to
169,000 acres over that time, according to Colombian National Police figures.

But less coca has not translated into less violence, the long-term
Colombian objective, in Putumayo. Neither a new economy nor a stronger
local government have taken hold, as envisioned by the anti-drug plan, and
the military is still struggling to keep down a potent guerrilla force.

Coca farmers who once expected sustained U.S. help to begin legal farms
have instead moved into remote corners of the lightly governed region to
replant illegal ones.

Coca cultivation has increased in the Amazon River basin, south along the
Ecuadoran frontier, and west bordering Nariqo province, which has replaced
Putumayo as Colombia's biggest coca producer, according to national police
figures.

Much of the expansion has been directed by the FARC, now trying to shore up
support in southern Colombia, where it has long derived much of its money
and recruits, as it loses ground in other regions. Meanwhile, it is
stepping up its defense of what little coca remains: Guerrilla groundfire
has struck 94 spray planes this year, more than twice as many as in 2002,
and brought down four of them.

"It's a last stand," said Col. Carlos Malaver, director of planning and
strategy of Colombia's National Police anti-narcotics division. "Once we
get rid of all the coca, which we will, they must find new places to go.
They'll have to move farther away from their markets and their territory,
so there is resistance."