NEW ANTI-DRUG WEAPON: BRAS AND THONGS

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - They have tried aerial assaults and stiff jail
sentences. Now Colombian officials have a new and unlikely weapon to combat
the cocaine trade: push-up bras and thongs.

Some 900 peasant women in Colombia are set to make racy lingerie and sell it
to French supermarket chain Carrefour under a U.N.-backed program aimed at
encouraging impoverished farmers and their families to stop growing drug
crops.

"We thought it was a very original idea. These are regions where there are
drug crops and people need legal jobs," said Thierry Rostan of the U.N.
Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Bogota.

Despite a fierce U.S.-backed campaign to spray drug crops with herbicide and
impose longer jail terms, Colombia remains the world's No 1. producer of
cocaine. Poor farmers, many of them coffee growers gone broke, have turned
to drug crops to make a living.

The lingerie, which includes bras and lacy panties, will be made at clothing
and shoe plants in the southern coffee-rich province of Cauca, which has
seen a spike of cocaine crops due to the collapse of world coffee prices.

Colombia's National Federation of Coffee Growers, which helped build the
plants some 30 years ago to assist coffee growers, is participating in the
lingerie project along with the French Embassy in Bogota.

Fernando Pomez, general manager of the factories, said he hoped the
Carrefour deal, finalized last week, would generate up to $141,000 in sales
next year.

The lingerie label, named Tex, will be sold at Carrefour's 12 stores in
Colombia. Pomez said the items may be exported later.