Farmers Decry Effort to Halt Coca Planting

When Ilia Garcia signed up for a U.S.-backed program to eradicate her coca bushes eight months ago, she thought Uncle Sam had answered her prayers for a better life. She promised to uproot all her coca shrubs, the raw material used to make cocaine, in return for a government gift of two healthy cows.

The cows haven’t arrived. Nor have the fertilizer and pigs promised to her neighbors. Then, last month, U.S. spray planes appeared on the horizon, raining down powerful pesticides that would transform her farm of coca and vegetables into a wasteland of brittle stalks and scrolled leaves.

“We’re going to be without food,” said Garcia, bending over the yellowing leaves of a squash plant. “These were worth $1.30 each. Now they aren’t worth anything. It’s over.”

Garcia is one of 35,000 farmers in the cocaine-rich Putumayo basin who have signed pacts to destroy their own coca bushes under Plan Colombia, a $1.3-billion U.S. anti-narcotics initiative passed by Congress last year. While the plan’s largest outlays were earmarked for military hardware and training, its strongest selling point was a promise to help Colombia’s impoverished farmers replace their drug crops with less lucrative legal ones.

Locals Say Promises Haven’t Been Kept

But a year after the first farmers began signing up for the crop replacement programs in the southern province of Putumayo, Plan Colombia is faltering. Rebel violence and bureaucratic delays have paralyzed aid distribution in many sectors, so that only 12% of coca growers have received the livestock and seeds promised them.

Perhaps more seriously, the price of cocaine on the streets of America has not significantly changed since the plan began. One of the selling points of the U.S. infusion of aid was driving up the price of cocaine by restricting supply.

For instance, in June 2000, a gram of cocaine was worth $80 to $100 in Los Angeles, and $75 to $100 in Chicago, according to Drug Enforcement Administration figures. At the end of last month, drug dealers were selling a gram of coke in Los Angeles for between $80 to $100, the same as 18 months earlier. In Chicago, the price actually dropped to between $60 and $80.

In the meantime, a new round of aerial spraying in Putumayo as part of Plan Colombia has infuriated locals. According to government estimates, 10% of the farmers who signed the crop replacement pacts have already given up, slashing and burning their way into Putumayo’s dense rain forests to sow new lots.

As a result, the coca is still flourishing in this remote, lawless region. Lime-green coca bushes sprout along every dirt road, and between lines of freshly hung laundry. Weed cutters, used to chop up coca leaves before processing, hang from the ceiling of every feed store.

“People aren’t going to abandon a crop that provides them with something to eat in order to watch their children die of hunger,” said Mario Cabrera, an engineer in the dusty frontier town of La Hormiga, where gaudy bordellos, visited by itinerant coca harvesters, open for business at breakfast time.

Coca More Profitable Than Other Crops

Describing the eradication pacts as “a Band-Aid measure,” he added, “As long as the gringos are consuming cocaine, it will always be produced.”

The economics of the cocaine trade bear him out. After paying for fertilizer and farmhands, a typical farmer with two hectares (about 5 acres) of coca turns a profit of roughly $600 a harvest, or $3,000 a year. If the same farmer were to take a sack of yucca to market, he would probably spend more on transportation costs than he could make selling it.

With coca, the buyer comes right to the door, be it a rebel soldier or a drug cartel middleman. The product has no expiration date. Start-up loans are easy to come by.

Besides the allure of high coca prices, agricultural aid agencies have to contend with an entrenched rebel army that relies heavily on drug profits to fund its insurgency. The 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said early on it would permit voluntary eradication projects in areas under its control, but in September the guerrilla group kidnapped two project managers and accused them of spying for the military. Their bullet-ridden bodies were dumped on back roads several days later.

Since then, the FARC has ordered all nongovernmental organizations to replace their technical staff with local farmers, setting the schedules for aid distribution back still further.

According to Juan Carlos Espinosa, president of the Fundaempresas company that oversees 6,000 families enrolled in eradication pacts, staggering bureaucracy also has taken a toll.

“It seems ridiculous that the government should take eight months to approve a $300 transfer” to purchase relief supplies, he said. With funds trickling in so slowly, Espinosa added, “people are angry, skeptical. Our credibility is on the line.”

But the biggest obstacle by far, local officials say, is the return of U.S. crop-dusters to Putumayo after a nine-month hiatus. Flying low with helicopter gunships at their side, the planes unload glyphosate weedkiller over the region’s coca shrubs, leaving scorched earth in their paths.

The government says farmers who have signed eradication pacts are fair game if they plant new coca crops. Local officials say spraying has been haphazard at best.

“The government has failed us,” said Maria Pastora Guzman, who left her coca bushes to languish after the last round of spraying. “I signed the pact. I wanted to keep my promise to the government, but now look: My land is covered in plantain and corn, and they’re spraying again.”

Hoping to shore up confidence, the government has changed the terms of the pacts, extending the 12-month period that farmers are given to eradicate their coca crops.

Nonetheless, government envoy Gonzalo de Francisco estimates that thousands of Putumayo farmers have thrown in the towel, planting 10,000 to 15,000 hectares (about 25,000 to 37,000 acres) of new coca in the last four months alone.

“Putumayo has been characterized as a zone with very little state presence,” De Francisco said of the long delays in administering farm aid. “We practically had to start from zero.”

Local officials say they would prefer that the United States take its war on drugs somewhere else, somewhere closer to home. Consultants to the U.S. Treasury Department have estimated that American banks annually receive as much as $24 billion in deposits stemming from the cocaine trade.

Even with sophisticated controls in place, Treasury investigators are able to detect only about 10% of these ill-earned proceeds, meaning that the banks may inadvertently act as money launderers for drug traffickers. Interdiction efforts also have a low rate of success.

“The small producers are just one link in the drug trafficking chain. They may be the weakest and the easiest to detect, and the easiest to attack,” said Puerto Asis Mayor Manuel Alzate, “but the traffickers and the consumers are hardly touched.”

As long as a kilogram of cocaine sells for $1,000 in Putumayo and $100,000 on the streets of Los Angeles, he added, drug traffickers will be in business.