COLOMBIA COCAINE INCREASES DESPITE ANTI-DRUG OFFENSIVE

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 an anti-drug offensive called Plan Colombia, the program has succeeded
in shifting some 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 failed to stop the flow of drugs to the United States.
The White House estimates that the number of acres planted in coca has
actually increased since the program began.

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

Protected by U.S.-supplied helicopters and U.S.-trained soldiers,
crop-dusting planes have sprayed the coca fields around La Hormiga with
herbicide twice since the U.S. aid began.

The soldiers have also targeted labs that convert coca into cocaine and
have raided the traffickers who move the drugs out of the region and the
country.

Mariela, 32, still tends her family's coca fields carved from jungle
outside La Hormiga, even though they were sprayed.

The hardest-hit field is 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 re-sprouted.

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

In a wooden shelter, the family lab is stocked with the gasoline necessary
to turn coca leaves into paste, the first step in making cocaine.

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 estimated that 70 percent of his business had disappeared
since the spraying started.

But the country's total coca crop actually increased last year by 82,992
acres, the White House says. The Colombian government says coca acreage has
declined slightly.

In the United States, the price of cocaine - almost all of which is
produced in Colombia -is unchanged, the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration says. That suggests no change in supply.

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 last year, followed by a "dramatic reduction"
this year.

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

An embassy official said on condition of anonymity that the operation
already had 12 crop-spraying aircraft - enough to eradicate the coca as
quickly as it is replanted - and that eight more 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.

For the U.S.-trained Colombian soldiers, the first year of Plan Colombia -
last year - 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.

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.

In the past, they have found cocaine stuffed inside squash and hidden in
diapers. But they acknowledge a lot gets past them. "I'd say that maybe 90
or 95 percent gets through," said Lt. Ivan Munoz.

His commander, Col. Dario Diaz, insists the amount being produced in this
region had declined since Plan Colombia started. But he also figures that
many of the growers and processors have simply moved.