U.S. DOUBTS EFFECTS OF COCA PLAN

Alternative Program Fails to Win Over Colombian Farmers

CAIRO, Colombia -- As the civil war in Colombia persists, U.S. officials
have become increasingly pessimistic about whether a popular U.S.-sponsored
program that pays farmers to uproot coca and replace it with legal crops
will have any lasting success against the drug industry.

The alternative development program is the most socially oriented element
of a $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package Congress approved almost two years
ago with the goal of cutting Colombia's coca production in half by 2005.
Although it is only a small fraction of a package tilted heavily toward
military assistance, alternative development has long been seen as the most
politically acceptable part of a U.S. anti-drug strategy frequently
criticized as a war plan targeting Colombia's Marxist insurgency.

A number of U.S. officials are rethinking the program less than a year
after it began here in southern Colombia's coca fields. Security concerns,
unfavorable economics and a history of mistrust between the Colombian
government and coca farmers who produce 90 percent of the cocaine arriving
in the United States have complicated the program in ways that U.S.
officials now believe could be insurmountable.

Following two critical recent reviews of the program, U.S. officials have
decided to shift its focus from helping individual farmers to creating
public works jobs in coca-growing regions, tailor development projects by
community and begin development efforts in areas less fraught by civil war
than this one 350 miles south of the capital, Bogota. Even so, U.S.
officials acknowledge, funding the $42.5 million program beyond this year
is in question.

Here in the southern province of Putumayo, the heart of Colombia's coca
trade, only a tiny fraction of farmers who agreed to uproot their coca
plants by the end of July have done so. That resistance, rooted mostly in a
legacy of failed government promises in this remote patch of pasture and
jungle, was reflected in a recent U.S. Embassy study that found that few of
the 37,000 small-scale farmers who signed up for government aid last year
in return for abandoning coca crops intend to comply.

Congressional auditors recently concluded that the program was failing,
mostly because of a lack of security in coca-growing regions heavily
contested by the two largest irregular armies in Colombia's nearly
four-decade civil war. But farmers and town officials say the problems stem
more from the long delays in deliveries of aid and a U.S.-backed herbicide
spraying campaign that has at times targeted farmers who have agreed to
pull up their coca voluntarily.

"Some of these people had started the process of pulling up their coca.
They were getting ready with corn, yucca, and then the fumigation started,"
said Leandro Romo, the human rights ombudsman in the nearby town of La
Hormiga, referring to spraying late last year. "We're not arguing with the
goal, just the methods. This has been indiscriminate. And until now the
farmers have received virtually nothing."

Alternative development in Colombia dates back more than a decade. The
notion of helping coca farmers develop a legal economy through subsidies
and technical assistance has been embraced by interests as diverse as
European countries and Colombia's largest guerrilla insurgency. But it has
never had much effect on a multibillion-dollar coca trade that pays
peasants significantly more than they earn with legal crops.

Recently released figures compiled by the CIA showed that coca cultivation
jumped 25 percent in 2001 to 419,000 acres.

U.S. officials blame the substitution program's problems on the
government's inability to secure coca-growing regions. Those areas are
fiercely contested by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC
as the largest guerrilla insurgency is known, and the United Self-Defense
Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary group that fights the guerrillas
alongside Colombia's military.

Both groups profit enormously from coca cultivation by exacting "taxes" at
various stages of the cocaine production process.

Earlier this year, a General Accounting Office audit recommended that
Congress end funding for alternative development in Colombia until the
government could provide security for alternative development officials
working in southern war zones. Last year, four alternative development
workers were kidnapped in Putumayo. Two were killed, and two are missing
and presumed dead, although Colombian officials dispute whether they were
killed because of their alternative development work.

About $4.4 million of the $42.5 million in U.S. aid set aside last year for
alternative development programs was actually spent. The Colombian
government intends to spend $40 million on alternative development in
coca-growing regions this year, about 40 percent less than in 2001. Most of
that money comes from European donors.

The plan in southern Colombia, where the bulk of U.S.-sponsored alternative
projects are based, is to give farmers with less than seven acres of coca
roughly $800 worth of seeds, fertilizer and animals to turn small land
holdings into pig, cow or fish farms. Some 37,000 farmers with more than
80,000 acres of coca agreed last summer to pull up the crops by the end of
July 2002 in exchange for aid -- or risk being hit by aerial herbicide
spraying. The Colombian government also pledged to build several major new
highways to help farmers move legal crops and livestock to markets that
today can take up to 10 hours to reach along dirt highways.

But only about 150 acres of coca had been pulled up voluntarily by the end
of January, according to U.S. officials. "What happened was that the
Colombian government kind of oversubscribed," said an official with the
U.S. Agency for International Development. "Plante [the Colombian agency
managing the program] didn't have the capacity."

Maria Ines Restrepo, the director of Plante, said the program was in part a
victim of its own ambitious plans. In a recent interview, Restrepo said
successful alternative development programs in Peru and Bolivia, which were
carried out under far less complicated conditions, took years to show
results. She suggested that "an overly ambitious timeline" was developed in
Colombia to help secure U.S. aid.

"This was a political decision, not a technical one," said Restrepo, who
says she believes the project is working.

But viewed from the small farms of Cairo, where almost every peasant family
has at least several acres of coca alongside corn, yucca and plantain
crops, alternative development appeared destined to fail from the start.

The small subsidies started arriving in late November, months after most
farmers had signed contracts with the government. By then, most farmers had
forgotten about their end of the agreement or had started planting coca
again. When a small ceremony was held in La Hormiga to pass out the first
batch of farm aid, a sense of too-little too-late pervaded the event.

"These villages still don't have much confidence in the government," said
Alejandro Ardila, a 52-year-old farmer picking up an aid package. "Instead
of the spraying they do, they should have been giving us credits. This may
help our confidence a little, but not much."

The $800 assistance package amounts to a small fraction of what most
farmers make in a single coca harvest. About two acres of coca will yield a
kilogram of coca base worth about $800, and coca can be harvested as many
four times a year.

"There is no way the farmers will comply because they cannot support a
family on what the state gives them," said Carlos Palacios, the former
development secretary for the county of La Hormiga that includes this
village. "No one is going to comply."

Jaimec Aguirre Gomez, who like many Putumayo coca farmers arrived in the
last decade from Colombia's declining coffee region, has a typical farm for
these parts: Five rolling acres split evenly between coca and food crops to
feed his wife and two sons. He left another four acres of coca to wither
after a round of fumigation a year ago prompted him to sign up for the
alternative development program.

In preparing for aid he hoped would help him start a pig farm, Aguirre
invested $400 to build animal pens and plant crops that would provide
animal feed. But in November, the day he received his first visit from
government alternative development technicians, spray planes flew over his
house and killed the beans and vines he had planted in preparation.

"This pretty much ended my confidence in the program," Aguirre said. "They
told us they were going to organize credit, new markets, all of this. But
now nothing."

Aguirre and others from Cairo have been receiving about $800 per kilo of
coca base, which makes cocaine, from men who visit his farm. He does not
ask who they are, but town officials said the men were from the
paramilitary force that over the past year has driven guerrillas from coca
fields near town centers and now act as the area's sole coca dealers.

"The plan here so far has been fumigation, nothing else," said Enrique, the
regional paramilitary commander. "The government would have had a lot more
success if they said, 'We as the state will buy all the legal crops you
produce.' Now there is no market."

Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.