COLOMBIA BECOMES MAIN SOURCE OF U.S. HEROIN

As Coffee Prices Drop, Farmers Turn To Poppies

MANAURE, Colombia - Delicate red, pink and lavender poppies decorate the
steep mountainsides above this village, vivid evidence of what U.S. drug
agents say is a deadly trend.

Colombia, better known as the world's primary source of cocaine, has become
the main supplier of heroin to the United States in the past few years. And
the Colombian drug is so much more powerful than its Asian cousin that it
is causing an increase in overdoses.

The brilliantly colored flowers mark the start of "the heroin trail," high
in the mountains in northeastern Colombia's Cesar state.

At 10,000 feet above sea level and four hours by a rocky track from the
provincial capital of Valledupar, five peasants tend a small, fog- shrouded
plot of poppies. Leftist rebels and rightist paramilitaries, who protect
and "tax" Colombia's drug industry, roam the nearby hills.

Jesus, a former coffee bean picker, says he began growing poppies to put
food on his family's table. Record low coffee prices worldwide have thrown
Colombia's largest legal agricultural export into crisis and will probably
increase the unemployment rate, already more than 15 percent.

Field hands who tend the poppy crops, scraping the seed pods for the resin
that will later be converted to heroin, make 15,000 pesos (about $6.50) a day.

"We have to make a living," Jesus says. "With poppies, I can even save a
little bit."

The farmers say poppies became a popular crop in Cesar, formerly a major
marijuana-producing area, five years ago. The state now has some of
Colombia's largest poppy plantations. Others are in Huila and Tolima states
in central Colombia and Narino in the southwest.

U.S.-backed efforts to crush heroin production in Colombia with aerial
fumigation of poppy plants and seizures of drug shipments have had little
effect.

Clouds that often hug the mountains hide the poppy fields from U.S.-
financed crop-dusting planes, and the rugged terrain makes spraying
missions dangerous.

Spraying has dropped off this year, with pilots covering only 5,414 acres
through Nov. 7, compared with 22,867 acres last year. The U.S. Embassy says
many poppy fields are in areas where spraying is prohibited, such as Indian
reservations.

Even if the pilots do manage to spray herbicide, the peasants say they
quickly replant. The growing cycle for poppies is only three to four
months, meaning the planes must spray the same areas again and again.

U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson says the surge in poppy cultivation in this
Andean country is a big issue for the United States.

"There is more out there than we can find right now," Patterson recently
told journalists.

In the next step along the heroin trail, middlemen buy the poppy resin,
either trekking to the mountain plots themselves or doing their business at
clandestine village markets.

Chemists then purify the resin into heroin. Their labs are small, mobile
and easy to hide. One was found last year across the street from a police
station in the city of Medellin.

The amount of heroin Colombia exports is still dwarfed on a global scale by
Asian producers, but Colombian traffickers - using years of experience
producing and smuggling cocaine - control 70 percent of the U.S. heroin market.

They smuggled an estimated eight to 10 tons of heroin into the United
States last year, most of it carried aboard commercial airliners by
small-time smugglers, known as "mules," who transport the drug in their
stomachs or hidden in suitcases. Smugglers are also reportedly using
courier mail services to ship the drug.

In a rare bust, Colombian and U.S. drug agents shut down a heroin pipeline
this year, arresting more than 50 people in Colombia, New York and
Philadelphia.

Agents found brokers were collecting the heroin in the western Colombian
town of Pereira and recruiting mules there. The mules often swallowed
balloons or condoms filled with heroin, traveled to third countries in
Latin America or the Caribbean, then boarded flights to New York.