PEASANTS SLOW TO DESTROY PLAN COLOMBIA DRUG CROPS

BOGOTA, Colombia, Nov. 26 -- Just a few of the 35,000 peasant families from
Colombia's cocaine heartland who promised to destroy drug crops in return
for "Plan Colombia" aid have done so, a senior government official said.

But Gonzalo de Francisco, in charge of distributing aid under the
multi-billion-dollar Plan Colombia in the steamy jungles of Putumayo in the
country's lawless south, hopes that suspicious farmers will soon realize
promised money is on its way and keep their side of the bargain.

Plan Colombia is a carrot-and-stick strategy promising poor farmers money
to switch to other crops and threatening them with U.S.-backed military
spray operations if they do not. But, a year into the plan in the key
Putumayo region, only the stick part of the equation has so far made
progress in reducing drug crops, de Francisco said.

"I am convinced that there have to be results in the next three months," de
Francisco told a small number of foreign reporters. "Results in which the
social (aid) element begins to hit the number of sown hectares."

Under the voluntary eradication pacts, farmers should have torn up their
coca by mid-2002 at the earliest.

The struggle to reduce Colombia's drug crop is made more complicated by the
country's 37-year-old war, and illegal armed groups have a strong presence
in Putumayo. Both the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, and right-wing paramilitaries have admitted to taking
drug money.

Although reliable data, based on time-consuming interpretation of satellite
photographs, is still not available, de Francisco estimates that Putumayo
currently has 125,000-138,000 acres (50,000-55,000 hectares) currently sown
with coca leaf -- the raw material of cocaine. It is a little under half of
total production in Colombia, which is the world's largest cocaine producer.

PUTUMAYO PEOPLE STILL DON'T TRUST GOVERNMENT

This is down from about 165,000 acres (66,000 hectares) before a massive
spraying campaign began last December, but almost none of the reduction has
been due to peasants pulling up their own crops.

"The main problem we have in the Putumayo is that, despite all we have
done, we still haven't been able to get the community to fully trust us,"
said de Francisco.

In some cases, drug traffickers have prevented peasants from giving up
coca, and have funded new plantations, he said.

About $50 million has been assigned to luring the peasants of Putumayo away
from coca. Under pacts first signed a year ago, peasant families promise to
pull up their crops in return for about $850, agricultural supplies, and
advice on setting up a new, fully legal farm.

But government workers are finding it takes time to put farm plans into
practice and aid is taking time to arrive.

After a long break, government planes started spraying operations in the
Putumayo earlier in November. Targets include 25,000-38,000 acres
(10,000-15,000 hectares) of freshly planted coca and 7,500 acres (5,000
hectares) of coca belonging to peasants who did not sign pacts.

Some peasants in the area say that they signed pacts and were sprayed
anyway. The campaign is set to continue for several weeks.

The government is also spending about $100 million on roads and other
infrastructure to break the historical isolation of the jungle region on
the border with Ecuador. Peasants say that without roads they cannot send
legal crops to market.

Ironically, it was the Putumayo's remoteness which attracted many of the
small farmers in the first place. The isolation and lack of government
control made it a perfect place to plant drug crops when Colombia's cocaine
boom began in the late 1970s and big time traffickers offered lucrative
rewards to farmers from other parts of the country.