LEGAL CROPS' DAMAGE

CANA BRAVA, Colombia - Surveying his charred landscape that once contained
a promising harvest of "lulo," a pulpy, orangelike tropical fruit,
Victoriano Mora admits that he used to grow coca like thousands of other
farmers in Putumayo province. Top Stories

But after the first U.S.-financed aerial sprayings destroyed his coca crops
last winter, Mr. Mora said, he, like many other farmers in Putumayo, began
eradicating his coca plants and cultivating legal crops such as lulo,
plantain and yucca on his 12-acre farm deep in the Colombian Amazon.

But on Aug. 10, five U.S.-provided spray planes came anyway, turning his
food crops into a scorched-earth nightmare. "There is nothing of coca," Mr.
Mora said of his current farm. "I feel tricked."

Mr. Mora is one of 37,000 farmers who signed voluntary eradication pacts in
Putumayo with the Colombian government in exchange for help growing legal
crops and marketing them. But in recent interviews with dozens of farmers
in that province, the heart of Colombia's coca growing region, they say
that their legal crops are being sprayed in the most ambitious U.S.-driven
effort to date.

"Here the majority of the people complied with the pact," Mr. Mora said of
the voluntary eradication. "There are some that have tiny [coca] crops, but
with one plant, they damage the rest of us."

However, the reality of the Putumayo situation is more complex. On a tour
of his farm, Mr. Mora pointed to an intact coca plant, which he said had
long since been abandoned. But sophisticated U.S. technology, which is able
to distinguish coca plants from other crops by detecting the light their
leaves reflect, is designed to target all coca to radically reduce the
amount of drugs grown in the region by 2004.

Under the auspices of Plan Colombia, the United States has spent $584
million on drug-eradication efforts in southern Colombia. Most U.S.
officials concede that the effort has yet to produce the intended results.

American officials blame the failure on the policies of former Colombian
President Andres Pastrana, who halted spraying in Putumayo for what they
term "political considerations." But with a nod from Colombia's President
Alvaro Uribe Velez and an additional half-million dollars from the Bush
administration, aerial crop destruction in Putumayo began again at the end
of July, and U.S. officials believe that with a sustained effort it will
succeed.

"By 2004 you're going to see cultivation has gone down significantly," said
one U.S. official involved in the spraying efforts. He indicated that it
will take one more year of intense spraying to eliminate most of the coca
in Putumayo.

Coca farmers "can sustain their losses once. Some of them can sustain them
twice, but none of them can sustain them three times," he said.

Mr. Uribe said, "The goal is to destroy 100 percent of the coca crop. We
will not stop. We will spray and spray."

U.S. and Colombian authorities waited exactly a year from the date the last
voluntary-eradication pact had been signed in July 2001 before embarking on
their latest efforts. In an aggressive operation that will involve 16 U.S.
aircraft by the end of the year, the goal is to destroy 300,000 acres of
coca in 2002, up 30 percent from last year.

As for farmers like Mr. Mora, the American official said, "Nobody gets an
amnesty."

Human rights ombudsman Eduardo Cifuentes is demanding a halt to the U.S.
sprayings after 6,533 complaints from farmers.

"With one hand, they give us resources, and with the other they fumigate,"
he told El Tiempos newspaper, referring to the United States.

Mr. Cifuentes said there have been 318 complaints of spraying legal crops,
affecting 6,076 families and 12,500 acres in Puerto Asis, Orito and the
Valle del Guamez.

The governor of Putumayo, Ivan Gerardo Guerrero, also wants the aerial
spraying stopped and says 5,000 acres have already been manually cleared of
coca plants. According to statistics provided by Plan Colombia, more than
100,000 acres have been sprayed this year in middle and southern Putumayo
province.

In Puerto Asis, a frontierlike town where the war against drugs is based,
Edison Trujillo, the Colombian army's anti-narcotics chief for the region,
said the farmers who say they have eradicated their coca crops are lying.

"They are not complying with the pacts," Mr. Trujillo said.

He believes that fumigation with a controversial substance called
glysophate - the active chemical in the herbicides Roundup and Rodeo -
which the State Department recently certified did not pose "unreasonable
risks" to human health, is winning the war on drugs.

"It is working," Mr. Trujillo said in an interview at his office. "We are
not even seizing a gram of coca."

He dismissed complaints by farmers that the spray-plane pilots commit
errors, saying that the "strategy" of the farmers is to grow smaller plots
of coca within larger fields of legal crops, hoping they are not detected
by the spray planes.

Mr. Trujillo estimated that as many as 80 percent of the farmers who agreed
to voluntarily stop growing coca were cheating.

Another measure of the U.S. strategy's success, according to Mr. Trujillo,
is the city's declining economy. Rubber boots, worn by farmers working
their fields, are in short supply, as is liquor in the bars and
discotheques. Crime is up, including murders and robberies.

"There is going to come an economic crisis," Mr. Trujillo said. "There is
no money because the coca is gone. There is nothing to buy because there is
nothing to produce. The land is sick."

Nevertheless, Mr. Trujillo backs widespread aerial spraying of herbicides
as a way to get out of the "labyrinth" of narco- trafficking, and free up
his anti-narcotics forces to go after the Marxist Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, which occupies the countryside, and the anti-Marxist
paramilitaries who dominate towns such as Puerto Asis.

"For me, it is a good strategy because the fumigation attacks the problem
at the source," he said.

Despite disagreement on whether coca production rose or fell in the past
year, there is no question that aerial spraying in Putumayo is having a
devastating effect. Interspersed with green hillsides where cattle graze
are seared patches of brown landscape with neither coca nor any legal crop.

Farmers in the area say it takes about eight days for green hillsides to
turn brown after fumigation. They say that spraying herbicide has effects
other than destroying the coca crops. It leaves cattle with little but
contaminated grass to graze on and nothing of legal crops that provide food
for people.

They say the chemicals used in the spray, glysophate and a surfactant used
to help it stick to the coca leaves called Cosmo Flux-411, cause illnesses
including skin and eye irritation, respiratory problems and fever.

A recent Environmental Protection Agency report found no conclusive
evidence linking sickness in Putumayo to aerial spraying efforts.

In Buenos Aires, on the road from Puerto Asis to Orito, Jesus Eduardo Gomez
was tending his yucca crops when the spray planes arrived at 2:30 p.m. Aug. 1.

He said he was sick with fever for a month after the mist enveloped his
110-acre farm - which is made up of mostly palmetto trees that would have
yielded hearts of palm, a food crop.

"Here we don't have coca. They fumigated food. We don't know what we're
going to do," Mr. Gomez said.

Like Mr. Mora, Mr. Gomez said he stopped a decade of coca-growing after the
first fumigation, in 2001. But his farm had had five to seven acres in
coca, which he said is dead and abandoned, and this may be the reason the
spray planes still target him.

No matter what, Mr. Gomez said, he won't return to coca farming.

"If there is a way, we have to move forward," he said. "With this damage,
we aren't going to return" to cultivating coca.

Mr. Gomez doesn't blame the government as much as he does his neighbors,
who he said have not pulled up their coca to plant legal crops.

He said the spray from the fumigation planes then drifts down to his farm,
leaving his 25 cattle to graze on dry grass and destroying his papaya,
yucca and palmetto.

In Orito, the offices of Fundacion Huairasachac, a nongovernmental
organization that is helping farmers manually eradicate coca, was filled
recently with angry farmers complaining that their legal crops had been
destroyed in the latest round of aerial spraying.

Manuel Meneces, the president of a farmers association in Las Americas that
has promised to do away with coca, said his land has been fumigated three
times, twice in 2001 and once this year.

He said he quit growing coca two years ago and now harvests only corn and
plantain.

"The animals have died from the poison," he said. "The government of the
United States has to put its hand over its heart. They are fumigating us
like rats."

Like many other farmers, Mr. Meneces can think of no other reason the
government has fumigated his land than to force him to leave it. "If the
government of the United States doesn't help us find work in another way,
the coca won't go away. The people have to survive."

Unlike most people, who are skeptical of whether they will ever be
compensated, Mr. Mora, the lulo farmer, has filed a formal complaint with
the Colombian government about the damage to his crops.

But the complaint was filed Aug. 20, and nobody has arrived to determine
its veracity, citing the dangers from armed groups in the area.

Looking down at a mud road that is soon to be paved with the same American
dollars that sprayed herbicide on his land, Mr. Mora said with irony that
the road is the "reward that they are giving us for the fumigations."

But like other farmers, Mr. Mora said he doesn't plan to go back to his old
way of life, even though his new one is in jeopardy.

"If you grow coca three times, three times it will be fumigated," he said.