Colombia coca spreads despite U.S. plan

PENSILVANIA, Colombia – Julian, a peasant farmer in this mountainous region of Colombia, wants to stop growing coca but says leftist guerrillas won’t let him. If they catch you pulling up any coca plants, he says, they give you 12 hours to leave your land or they kill you.

Under Washington’s multibillion-dollar “Plan Colombia,” much of the drug-fighting money has gone to pay for the eradication of 1.8 million acres of coca, which is used to produce cocaine.

But the pressure faced by Julian, who was afraid to give his last name, is just one factor making Colombia’s coca industry difficult to combat with a single-minded focus on aerial spraying.

Other key factors are the lack of economic alternatives for poor farmers such as Julian; the Colombian government’s weak presence in rural areas; and the lethal networks that control the coca market, many of them run by guerrillas or right-wing paramilitary militias that use drug profits to finance their mayhem.

The stubbornness of the problem was made clear in June when the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime released its annual survey of Colombian coca cultivation. It showed that coca acreage last year increased 8 percent from 2004 despite record levels of aerial fumigation and manual eradication, largely financed by the United States.

In fact, ever-increasing levels of fumigation are pushing coca farming to more remote areas inhabited by farmers such as Julian. In the U.N.’s latest satellite-based survey, 44 percent of the coca fields detected did not register in the 2004 study.

“That suggests a high mobility of coca cultivation in Colombia,” said Sandro Calvani, head of the U.N. drugs office in Bogotá, the Colombian capital.

Experts say guerrillas began making inroads here after the spraying of the vast industrialized plantations in Colombia’s seven Amazon basin states. Traffickers target smaller farms, experts say, because they figure the coca plants are less detectable when mixed among subsistence crops.

“Under the pressure of fumigation, coca plantations aren’t halting, they are dispersing,” said John Walsh, a drug policy expert with the Washington Office on Latin America and a critic of Plan Colombia. “Fumigation does nothing to address the economic reasons for people persisting in planting coca.”

The war on drugs has not been without success. The cultivation of poppies used to make heroin is down by half. Coca cultivation measured by acreage in Colombia is also down by nearly half since Plan Colombia began six years ago, according to survey figures.

But the statistic is undercut by new U.N. findings that the average coca plant is 40 percent more productive than previously thought. That may account for the fact that cocaine prices have not risen appreciably nor purity fallen in the U.S. drug market since 2000, which would be the expected result from reducing cultivation by half.

Colombia is by far the largest supplier of U.S. cocaine, accounting for 70 percent of shipments. Bolivia and Peru together supply 30 percent, according to U.N. estimates.

Calvani, the head of the Bogotá drugs office, is not opposed to spraying, but he used the survey’s findings as a basis to renew a call for more international aid to Colombia’s farmers, saying the war on coca will never be won with just the stick of eradication. The carrot of large-scale economic assistance such as crop substitution programs for poor farmers is also needed.

Julian said he would gladly take advantage of a crop-substitution program to replant coffee if one were available. But none has materialized in Pueblo Nuevo, his remote hamlet about 15 miles from here.

Julian had never seen a coca plant until five years ago when armed members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, offered him free seeds to begin a crop.

In 2001, coca plants were rare in Caldas, Colombia’s leading coffee-growing state. But coffee prices then were so depressed that Julian spent more money producing the beans then he earned selling them. So he and many of his neighbors planted thousands of coca bushes, enticed by promises of easy profits.

Julian says he regrets his decision.

Coca has brought only bloodshed and sadness to him and his neighbors – and little of the promised cash.

One elected official in this town, who asked not to be identified, said the advent of coca farming in Pensilvania over the last five years has only brought “widows, death and blood in the street.”