COCAINE CONFOUNDS ERADICATION EFFORTS

America's 6-Year, $6B Effort To Eradicate Drug In Colombia Has Mixed Results

Soacha, Colombia - Maria Ayara lives with her children and other
relatives near Bogota. She had lived and grown coffee in the
countryside with her husband until coca-growing militia usurped their
land. The men came in the night, men from the militias that prowl
Colombia's lawless coca-growing regions. They were there to grab
control of the coca zone. They took away her husband, and a hundred
others. Some were butchered. Hers disappeared. She fled with their
four children and the clothes on her back. Now she makes $6 a week,
working every day at a small store in a slum near Bogota.

A priest whispers comfort as she tells the story in the church
office. It's been six years, and two weeks. Her husband is dead.

"I'm sure," Ms. Ayara said softly. "It was chaos." The U.S. has
pumped $6 billion into a six-year effort to slash Colombia's coca
crop and curb the upheaval it has wrought, here and on the streets of
America. President Bush will visit Sunday, promising billions more.
And Colombia embraces the aid.

"Where would we be without the United States?" said Bishop Daniel
Caro Borda, whose flock includes Ms. Ayara and thousands of others
forced from their homes in the crossfire of civil war and
narco-trafficking. It's a double-edged question. Colombia needs help.
Yet American addictions pour fuel on the violence that the U.N. says
has created 3.6 million refugees, more than any country but Sudan.

"Colombia is the great humanitarian disaster no one's heard about,"
said Baylor University political scientist Victor Hinojosa, who
studies the drug trade in Colombia. "It's the place where the war on
drugs and the war on terror overlap."

Colombia supplies 90 percent of cocaine that ends up in the U.S.
Under President Alvaro Uribe, there has been some success. Crop
destruction has hit records. Seizures are up. Murder and kidnapping
aren't quite the epidemics they once were. Yet on the streets of
Dallas and other American cities, cocaine is just about as abundant
and cheap as ever. It's a frustration for policymakers, police and
drug counselors. Also Online Q&A John Walters, U.S. drug czar "It
hasn't changed much over the years," said F. "Monty" Moncibais, a
Dallas police narcotics investigator. "Are we winning the war against
drugs? We are making tremendous gains. And it continues to be a major
problem in any large city."

Big plan Colombia receives the biggest share of U.S. aid to Latin
America, mostly to support a project called Plan Colombia, a
multi-tiered push begun six years ago to step up eradication and
anti-smuggling efforts, entice coca farmers to switch to lawful
crops, beef up the army and police, reform the judiciary and weed out
corruption. Critics in both countries say there's too little emphasis
on social reforms and aid to the poor.

Colombia's Anti-Narcotics Police say that last year alone,
eradication kept 1.6 tons of cocaine from the world market and cut
drug traffickers' revenue by $41 billion. Some 68,000 Colombian
families make a living from illicit crops, some under death threat by
one armed group or another. Left-wing insurgents have been trying to
overthrow the government for 40 years. The Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia, known as FARC, is the biggest rebel group, and it relies
heavily on drugs for financing. The U.S. government calls it a
"violent narco-terrorist guerrilla group" and credits it with control
of 70 percent of the country's drug trade. U.S. law enforcement
officials say Mexican cartels pay FARC up to $1 billion annually for cocaine.

Right-wing militias also claim a piece of the drug trade. These
brutal paramilitaries have staged numerous massacres, including the
one in Ms. Ayara's village.

"The money is very seductive. It corrupts. It's pretty prevalent.
It's not going away any time soon. It's just such a major source of
funds," said Mary DeLorey, a Latin America policy coordinator at
Catholic Relief Services, adding that the link between the drug trade
and the massive displacements is often overlooked.

Human rights groups counted 172,000 Colombians forced from their
homes in the first nine months of 2006 alone. They typically end up
in the "misery belts" around major cities, such as Soacha, a
community south of Bogota. Still, Mr. Uribe is widely popular. Some
31,000 right-wing militia members have demobilized. Security along
highways and in cities has improved dramatically. He won re-election
by a landslide last May. U.S. officials say that Plan Colombia may
not be perfect but that illicit drugs would flood the market without it.

"In terms of narco-trafficking, the first thing the United States can
do is convince our people to stop using drugs," Mr. Bush said last
week. "Colombia has changed to the better as a result of the Plan
Colombia. There's still bad activities going on, but it's a lot less
than it was before." Mr. Uribe's foreign minister quit last month
when her brother, a congressman, was linked to the right-wing militias.

Shift in control "What this paramilitary scandal shows is that this
country went from having two large cartels and an industry controlled
by drug lords, to an industry that is now controlled by war lords.
It's a very dramatic shift in 10 years," said Francisco Thoumi,
director of the Center for Studies and Observatory of Drugs and Crime
at the University of Rosario in Bogota. "We have been fighting this
thing for how many years now, 37? This is not a winnable war." Not,
he said, until Colombian society stops tolerating corruption and
embraces the rule of law.

The Colombian government claims it has cut in half the amount of land
used to grow coca. U.S. estimates show a much smaller drop. But there
is no dispute that eradication has put an end to plantation-scale
production - dispersing both the cultivation and the violence it
attracts to nearly every region. It has also complicated operations
for Colombia's many armed groups. "They were all supercharged by
income from drug money. They became a state within a state," said
Peter DeShazo, former deputy assistant secretary of State for Western
Hemisphere Affairs, and head of the Americas program at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies.

In the last six months, Dallas police seized about 376,000 grams of
cocaine - a minor dent in the river that flows from the Andes.
Cocaine arrests in Dallas are second only to those involving
marijuana. A 2006 Texas School Survey found that about three of every
100 middle and high school students in Texas reported using cocaine
in the previous month. The rate was double that among adults aged 18
to 25 - giving Texas one of the highest rates.

"There's a strong view in many circles that we've been pouring money
down a rat hole and that those resources could be better spent," said
David Scott Palmer, a Boston University professor who has written
extensively on drugs and Latin America.

In Dallas, cocaine - in rock or powder form - comes in $10, $15 or
$20 doses. The latest craze is "cheese," a combination of black tar
heroin from Mexico and Tylenol PM. Doses cost $2.

Mike Hathcoat, director of Phoenix House, a drug treatment facility
in Dallas, called cheese a "big, big factor," but said cocaine and
other traditional threats persist.

"They have peaks and valleys. They're always out there in the
community," he said. Soacha, Bogota's biggest suburb, is a magnet for
the displaced. At the Roman Catholic archdiocese, refugees gather to
share their woeful brushes with the drug war. Until May 18, 2004 -
how could she forget the date? - Derli Maria Grisares Cardona lived
in a remote area in Cesar state, growing coffee, corn, yucca,
plantains. There were skirmishes between guerrillas, the army, and
FARC. One day, she was returning from town with three months'
groceries. Right-wing militia members had blockaded the isolated
road. They confiscated the supplies. They pulled men from cars and
gathered 50 witnesses. They shot three men, including the husband of
her niece - an act of intimidation, to prod farmers into growing
amapola, the opium poppy used to make heroin. Ms. Cardona and her
family fled. Now she ekes a living selling breakfast from her tiny
home in Soacha. Her husband has no work, so he helps. "The guerrillas
give you a choice: You produce this, or you leave your land," she
said. "We're not going back."

It saddens Bishop Borda. "The money from the drugs from here - what
are the benefits for Colombia? Has it paved roads? Built new airports
or universities? No. Nothing," he said. And when does he think the
violence will subside? The reply is a question: "When is consumption
going to go down?"

Staff writer Alfredo Corchado contributed to this report.