COCAINE CAMPAIGN MILDLY AFFECTING OUTPUT

LA HORMIGA, Colombia -- The cocaine trade that brought prosperity to this
remote frontier town is proving as tough to wipe out as the hardy coca bush
that produces the drug. In the year and a half since the United States
began funneling $1.7 billion to Plan Colombia, an anti-drug offensive, the
program has succeeded in shifting some of the business out of La Hormiga,
once the center of the country's cocaine heartland. And traffickers still
working here have been forced deeper underground.

But the blitz has not stemmed the flow of drugs to the United States. The
White House estimates the number of acres planted in coca has actually
increased since the program began.

State Department officials say it's too soon to judge Plan Colombia and
insist that in the next year or so they will turn the tide on drug
production here.

Crop-dusting planes, protected by U.S.-supplied helicopters and
U.S.-trained troops, have sprayed the coca fields around La Hormiga with
herbicide twice since the U.S. aid began, and the region will be sprayed
again this month, President Andres Pastrana has announced. The troops have
also targeted labs that convert coca into cocaine and have raided the
traffickers who move the drugs out of the region and out of the country.

Mariela, a 32-year-old mother of three, still tends her family's coca
fields a few miles outside La Hormiga, even though they were sprayed.

The hardest-hit field is now choked with weeds. The coca plants all
withered and died a few days after the chemicals rained down. But several
plots escaped the worst. There, plants have resprouted, spindly and anemic,
but still producing the valuable leaves.

"With this little bit, we'll maintain the family," she said. "But if they
fumigate again, the plants won't recover. I don't know what we'll do."
Maiela and other poor farmers say no other crop can earn enough to provide
for their families.

In a raised wooden shelter, the family lab is stocked with the gasoline
necessary to turn coca leaves into paste, the first step in making cocaine.
Outside, the sun beats down on children running through the coca field that
the family has carved out of the jungle.

Mariela's neighbors cleared more jungle after the fumigations and planted
more coca. The plants are now waist-high and almost ready to harvest.

But fearing more aerial spraying, many coca growers have left. A shopkeeper
in La Hormiga who sells pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer estimated 70
percent of his business had disappeared since the spraying started and
people began leaving town.

But despite the spraying in parts of southern Colombia, the country's total
coca crop actually increased last year by 82,992 acres, according to the
White House. The Colombian government disputes that estimate, claiming the
number of coca acreage has declined slightly.

In the United States, the price of cocaine, almost all of which is produced
in Colombia, hasn't changed, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says,
indicating no change in supply.

"There is nothing they can point to in terms of actually fighting drugs,"
said Adam Isacson at the Center for International Policy, an advocacy group
in Washington. "All they can point to is increased fumigations and more
raids on drug labs."

When Plan Colombia was in the planning stages, Randy Beers, the State
Department's top counter-drug official, said coca production was expected
to level off by the end of 2001, followed by a "dramatic reduction" a year
later.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota agree the results are slower in
coming, but insist the program is going to work once all the planned U.S.
equipment arrives and spraying can be conducted across the entire country.

An embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the operation
already has 12 crop-spraying aircraft, enough to eradicate the coca as
quickly as it is replanted, and eight more aircraft would be delivered by
next April.

Plan Colombia is intended to slow the flow of drugs from Colombia, and
remove a source of revenue for leftist rebels and their right-wing
paramilitary foes, both of whom "tax" cocaine production.

The Bush administration is now asking Congress to shift the priority for
U.S. aid away from a strict drug fight and toward helping Colombia's
military battle the rebels and paramilitaries. Both are on the State
Department's list of international terrorist groups, and since Sept. 11,
Washington has put increased emphasis on defeating them.

For the U.S.-trained Colombian soldiers, the first year of Plan Colombia,
2001, was easy. That was before the processing labs were moved deeper into
the jungle and the traffickers found new ways to move their product out of
the country, rank-and-file soldiers say.

On a recent Sunday, an army unit manned a roadblock in Puerto Asis, a river
port four hours from La Hormiga. The post was near a dock which the
soldiers suspect is used by traffickers to move cocaine.