WITH US HELP, COLOMBIA CRACKS DOWN HARD ON COCA

BOGOTA - On US advisers' cues, Colombia has carried out a month-long
crackdown on coca and opium-poppy growing, fumigating crops in a
strife-torn region along the borders with Ecuador and Peru but local
farmers say the spraying is harming health and legal crops.

"We have stepped up spraying in the Putumayo (department) towns of San
Miguel and Valle del Guamuez," a government official who works on fighting
drug trafficking told AFP privately.

Anti-narcotics police said the heavier fumigation has been under way for
four weeks -- since President Alvaro Uribe took office -- and that US
agents are advising Colombian forces handling the spraying.

Putumayo Governor Ivan Guerrero slammed the government's crackdown
Wednesday as heavy-handed and unhealthy, arguing it could make farmers sick
and undercuts manual crop eradication program they do as part of a drugs
crop-substitution program.

"This is not about fumigating with small planes; it's about taking human
beings into account," Guerrero said ahead of a governors' meeting with Uribe.

Uribe, who took office August 7, announced August 23 that the drug crops
fumigation would be intensified, adding that he was seeking international
aid to fund a crop substitution program for the estimated 50,000 families
who live off the crops.

"We are going to spray wherever we have to spray, wherever there is a coca
bush or poppy" Uribe said at the time, referring to the raw materials from
which cocaine and heroin are made. "There is no room for negotiation on that."

"If Colombia does not defeat drugs, they will destroy our the rule of law
and our environment," Uribe said.

Rural leaders from Putumayo told AFP by phone the spraying was hurting
their health and legal crops.

"They are spraying us like cockroaches. Our children are suffering from
respiratory and skin ailments, and our corn and yucca crops and water
springs are being harmed, but the 'gringos' could care less," one farmers'
union leader said on condition of anonymity.

He said the spraying, for all its volume, often ends up completely missing
its mark.