Two U.S.-made Black Hawk gunships dot the sky as Edelberto Narvaez strips leaves from coca bushes in the jungle-covered mountains of Colombia’s Putumayo province.
“That means the crop sprayers are coming,” says Narvaez, 37, who has four hectares (10 acres) planted with bushes that yield the raw material for cocaine. “We have to work quickly,” he tells his four workers.
The U.S. has spent more than $4 billion over six years to supply crop-spraying planes, helicopter escorts, arms and advisers to help Colombia combat the production of cocaine, marijuana and heroin by farmers like Narvaez. Plan Colombia, as the program is known, is taking a toll on coca growers, slashing output in Putumayo, according to United Nations estimates. Yet farmers are learning to adapt to fumigation, and production is rising in Peru and Bolivia.
John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, says the plan is saving lives in the U.S. and in Colombia. Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos says that while progress has been made, results have fallen short of the target.
“We have been very aggressive against drug traffickers and drugs, but we may have underestimated their ability,” says Santos, 41. “The results, which haven’t been bad, aren’t what we expected.” Area Halved From 2000 to 2004, the area under coca cultivation in Colombia was halved to 80,000 hectares as bushes were destroyed and farmers took up Plan Colombia grants to switch to other crops, according to the latest UN figures. In the same period, the area in Bolivia has increased to 27,700 hectares from 14,600 hectares, and in Peru to 50,300 hectares from 43,400 hectares, the UN says.
In southern Colombia’s Putumayo, the area planted with coca dropped to 4,386 hectares by 2004 from 66,022 hectares in 2000, when the province accounted for half the nation’s coca output.
The stakes for both the U.S. and Colombia are substantial.
Colombia intends to destroy a drug trade that has financed guerrillas who for four decades have waged war on the government and made Colombia one of the world’s most violent countries in terms of kidnappings, murders and terrorist attacks. For its part, the U.S. seeks to reduce supplies of drugs on its streets that contribute to crime and addiction.
Walters says the U.S. aid is paying off. A 19 percent increase in the U.S. street price of cocaine between February and September last year and a 15 percent decline in its purity over the same period are evidence that supplies of the drug have contracted, he says.
‘Saving Lives’ “Our strategy is working,” Walters, 53, says. “The reality on the ground is that the hard work and the sacrifice, of Colombians in particular, is saving lives, not only in Colombia, but on the streets of the United States.” U.S. President George W. Bush, 59, told journalists Aug. 4 that he remains committed to helping Colombia, which supplies about 80 percent of the cocaine sold in the U.S., fight the drug trade. The U.S. Congress has approved about $600 million for Plan Colombia this year.
“The big challenge that remains is to follow through, not to quit before the job is done,” Walters says. “Not to move onto something else but to finish the job of making this beast less of a threat in this hemisphere.” Switching to legitimate crops isn’t easy in places such as Putumayo, where the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and paramilitary groups fight for control of the drug trade and kill and threaten farmers who want to give up coca growing, says Sandro Calvani, head of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Colombia.
Makeshift Bridges Those who do switch to other crops face more difficulties, including the challenge of transporting their produce to market over makeshift bridges and along the province’s few, poorly maintained roads, says Calvani, 52, who is based in Bogota.
Adding to their hardships, Putumayo’s 379,000 residents spent 34 days without power in 2005 after guerrillas blew up electricity pylons. Villagers are regularly forced to leave their homes as bombs explode around them. Night travelers on the 50- kilometer (31-mile) pot-holed road from Puerto Asis, one of the province’s biggest towns, to Orito, a town in a coca-growing area, are forced from their cars every few kilometers by armed troops searching for drugs and weapons.
“This is a battle of will,” says William Wood, 55, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia. “It is critically dependent on the commitment and perseverance of a difficult program to not simply attack the drug threat but to change the culture that the druggers have worked 30 years to create – corruption, weak government and of a sense of hopelessness.” Pigs, Handouts Maria Ruth Diaz, 57, switched out of coca after her 50- hectare plantation was sprayed two years ago. Now she raises pigs with four other families on the outskirts of Orito.
She and her family of 11 receive about 600,000 pesos ($263) every two months from the government’s forest ranger program, which provides aid to those who give up coca production.
Government spending cuts have led to a 27 percent reduction in the amount she receives, and she says there’s no guarantee that payments will continue.
“I can’t say for sure we will stay out of coca if the money stops coming,” Diaz says as she hoses down the 30 pigs she rears with four other former coca-growing families. “Without the forest ranger money we wouldn’t have any income unless we go back to coca.” Maria del Carmen Flores, 80, replaced her four hectares of coca with 10,000 Araza bushes, which produce a tart fruit traditionally used for its juice. Her son Alvaro, 37, has lobbied local Plan Colombia officials for help preserving the harvest.
Fruit ‘Rotting’ “The fruit is just rotting on the trees because we can’t sell it,” he says.
Agroamazonia SA has solved transport and preserving difficulties of some farmers by using a grant from Plan Colombia to set up a plant to can and bottle hearts of palm in what was once a coca-growing area on the outskirts of Puerto Asis.
The plant receives produce from 330 families and employs 40 children of former coca growers. The daily output of 6 tons is sold to supermarket chains, including the Colombian unit of Paris-based Carrefour SA and Colombia’s biggest retailer, Medellin-based Almacenes Exito SA. There are plans to double output and start exporting to France, Mexico, the U.S., Spain, and Chile, says plant manager Alberto Castillo.
“Alternative development will allow farmers to move into something that over the long term will provide a future for them and their families,” says Ambassador Wood.
‘No Option’ Ten kilometers to the east, Maria Ortensia Benavides isn’t so fortunate. Benavides says her cattle and fruit trees don’t provide enough income to maintain her family of six and she has no option but to grow coca.
“I have a few cows and I have plantain, but so does every farm for hundreds of kilometers around, so I can’t sell it,” says Benavides, who calculates her age as in the mid-fifties.
“Coca sells. I have no alternative.” Benavides’s income from coca has taken a dip because drug eradication workers sprayed her bushes. Still, 20 days later, the withered plants are already sprouting green leaves.
Bushes take three to six months to recover from fumigation and produce leaves ripe for harvest, says Julian Vallejo Martinez, a local agronomist.
Farmers like Narvaez have found ways to outsmart the eradication campaign. He and his brother Harvey, who has 8 hectares of coca, plant bushes closer together and hide them among legal crops. They also use a variety of bush that needs less sun than others, allowing them to grow in the shade of jungle trees, where they can’t be spotted by U.S. satellites.
Criminals Adapting “Every smart criminal adapts to the situation,’ says the UN’s Calvani.
Narvaez’s bushes produce enough leaves every three months to prepare between 3 and 4 kilograms (6.6 and 8.8 pounds) of coca paste, which later is turned into cocaine. He processes the leaves in a laboratory – a structure of four wooden poles supporting a corrugated roof – hidden in the jungle 3 kilometers from his plants.
Narvaez sells the paste to unidentified middlemen for about 8 million pesos, of which he spends as much as 4 million pesos to pay his workers, and to buy gasoline, herbicides and other materials to grow and process the leaves.
His profits are meager compared with those made by those higher up the drug-trafficking chain, says Narvaez, who has a wife and three children.
“I’ve been doing this 20 years and I am still poor,” he says.
‘Worth the Danger’ Narvaez pays John Palma Ortega 400,000 pesos a month for working nine hours a day, six months a year on his plantation.
That’s 66 percent more than he would earn working in legal farming.
“It’s worth the danger,” says Palma Ortega, 21, who can strip a bush of coca leaves in 30 seconds and protects his fingers by wrapping them in bandages. “When the guerrillas come by looking for coca, we hide in the jungles or pay them off.” Narvaez says the eradication program and the constant threat of violence from guerrillas and paramilitaries tempts him to follow in the footsteps of his brother, who is preparing to quit the coca trade.
Five years ago, Harvey Narvaez started to turn his 75- hectare farm into pasture and now has 30 head of cattle. He says he plans to quit growing coca altogether next year.
“It has become too risky, we could lose everything,” says Harvey Narvaez, 35, who estimates the cattle business will bring in 30 percent less income than farming coca. “Most people don’t see a way out of this.”
Contact Helen Murphy in Bogota at 571 313-7662 or at hmurphy1@Bloomberg.net
