Colombia Drug War Gains Disputed

The amount of cocaine being produced in Colombia dropped significantly last year, anti-narcotics officials announced Thursday, making a controversial claim to success in the joint U.S.-Colombia drug war.

An aggressive U.S.-backed fumigation program resulted in the elimination of about 46,000 acres of coca plants, the source of cocaine, according to a detailed satellite analysis performed under U.N. and Colombian auspices. That would be an 11% decline.

Stepped-up attacks against drug-processing labs and programs with local farmers to uproot coca crops cut by a third the country’s annual production of nearly 640 tons of cocaine, the officials estimated.

“The reduction in the areas under cultivation is a clear demonstration of the success of the eradication program,” Justice Minister Romulo Gonzalez said in a meeting with reporters here Thursday.

The Colombian police numbers are backed up by a State Department analysis that found that coca cultivation peaked in Colombia around 1997, at nearly 500,000 acres.

The numbers have been declining since then but dropped sharply last year as the spraying program wiped out about 191,000 acres of the plants, mostly in Putumayo and Caqueta, in southern Colombia.

Coca growers replanted many of those crops, leading to a net reduction of about 74,000 acres. A third analysis, by the U.S. Army, found the spraying highly effective, destroying most of the coca crops in fumigated areas.

“We have confidence in Colombia National Police figures that indicate that there has been a net reduction in coca acreage in Colombia,” said a U.S. government official involved in the eradication program.

But a CIA analysis, expected to be released today, will show the opposite of the Colombian figures, sources said: a massive increase in the amount of coca cultivated between 2000 and 2001.

The CIA numbers are expected to show that Colombia’s coca growth jumped for the seventh straight time, from 336,000 acres in 2000 to 417,000 acres in 2001--enough to produce 800 tons of cocaine.

Colombian drug officials dismissed the reports of the increase and said they were prepared to defend their estimates.

“Our figures correspond to the truth,” Gonzalez said.

The new numbers are likely to continue a controversy over the White House’s drug policy in Colombia, which produces 90% of the cocaine consumed in the United States.

They also offer a possible bright spot after Colombia’s internal conflict widened this month as peace talks collapsed. The government declared a large southern swath of the country a war zone where the army had near total control to combat leftist rebels.

For the last few years, the U.S. has pursued its eradication program through Plan Colombia, providing nearly $2 billion to the country and surrounding regions in an effort to halve cocaine production by 2005.

Part of that money was used to hire a private contractor, Virginia-based DynCorp, to fly crop dusters over Colombia’s vast coca fields. Colombia now has more such planes flying more missions than at any time in its history.

The idea is that by drastically reducing the supply of drugs, the price of cocaine on U.S. streets will soar and availability will drop, making the drug much less attractive.

After a year of spraying, the central question is the effectiveness of the fumigation program: How many acres of coca have been wiped out and how has the price of cocaine changed in the U.S.?

“In the end, what matters is price and availability,” said a second U.S. official with knowledge of the fumigation program.

The amount of coca fumigated in Colombia has become the subject of intense debate.

The CIA numbers, compiled by the Crime and Narcotics Center, have long been the standard for measuring coca growing in the Andes. But some involved in the fumigation program worry that the numbers are skewing the debate, saying the agency has long underestimated the amount of Colombian coca.

Thus, the perceived increases in cultivation are instead coca crops that have long been there but are only now being discovered, critics say. The CIA analyzes only a small portion of the country, using images from high-resolution satellites, then projects data for the rest.

That’s in contrast to the Colombian system, which analyzes satellite photos of the entire country, though of a lower resolution. The State Department, in turn, bases its analysis on high-resolution images taken from a plane, then backs it up with ground visits.

“It would be very hard to believe that there has been a major increase in coca cultivation after a full year of spraying on an unprecedented scale,” said the first U.S. government official.

The picture is further obscured by the regional outlook. Though most of the analyses indicate a drop in coca production in Colombia, CIA figures from last year showed that the total amount of coca in the Andes stayed constant.

This year, there are already signs of an upturn in coca cultivation in Peru as Colombia has cracked down.

“Fumigation can move coca growth. But it can’t remove it from a whole continent,” said Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank.

To muddy things further, there is also conflict over the end result: prices on the street.

Drug Enforcement Administration statistics from December show little or no change in the street price of cocaine in major cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, comparing June 2000 to December 2001. In some places, the price dropped.

But a recent study by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy found that nationwide, the cost for a street user to obtain a gram of pure cocaine had risen sharply over the year, from about $175 a gram to more than $225 a gram by mid-2000.

Even given the price increase, there are still no signs of a significant drop in the number of people who use cocaine.

“If people need to spend more to get the same amount, they will,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group that favors the legalization of marijuana.