Pubdate: Thu, 10 May 2001
Source: South Florida Sun Sentinel (FL)
Copyright: 2001 Sun-Sentinel Co & South Florida Interactive, Inc
Contact: http://southflorida.sun-sentinel.com/services/letters_editor.htm
Website: http://www.sun-sentinel.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1326
Author: Luis Jaime Acosta, Reuters
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

TOO HOT IN COCAINE KITCHENS

BARRANCOMINAS - Until three months ago, bars in this jungle town were 
overflowing with whiskey, local cockfights were famous for miles around, 
and those who did not pay for purchases in dollars did so in grams of cocaine.

If Colombia's army is right, then for five short years up until February 
this down-at-the-heels little collection of wooden houses with zinc roofs 
by the slow-moving River Guaviare was the secret cocaine capital of the world.

The army says it was the base of a secret jungle drug empire run by Latin 
America's oldest and most powerful Marxist guerrilla movement, the 
17,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish 
initials FARC.

Deep in the almost impenetrable jungles of Guainia Province near the 
borders of Brazil and Venezuela, the town did its business far from prying 
eyes. A deep forest canopy hid cocaine "kitchens" from spy planes.

With no roads leading out, locals get around by river and the nearest big 
town, Villavicencio, is more than two days' journey, so word of what was 
going on was slow to ooze out.

Today, Barrancominas feels like a ghost town. The dark jungle seems to have 
closed in around it, only a few people still wander along its dusty 
streets, and those who are left are feeling the pinch of empty stomachs.

Life began to fall apart in February with "Operation Black Cat" when the 
army sent 3,800 troops backed by planes, helicopters and river launches to 
destroy FARC-run laboratories turning coca leaves from local fields into 
cocaine.

The army thinks FARC then sold the drug for guns and cash to Brazilian 
trafficker Luis Fernando da Costa, providing major fuel for carrying on a 
37-year-old war that cost 40,000 mainly civilian lives in the past decade 
alone.

Coca business bust

A wounded Da Costa, known by his Portuguese nickname of Fernandinho 
Beira-Mar (Freddy Seashore), was hunted down by the army in late April. 
Authorities say he told them he was buying 200 tons of cocaine a year from 
FARC. If that is correct, it works out to about a third of all world 
production.

"The army arrived and the coca business finished. We stopped seeing 
dollars. The tough nuts, the drug traffickers who had the money, all ran 
away and Barrancominas is dying," said one local man, his skin leathery 
from constant exposure to the tropical sun. He preferred not to give his name.

A shopkeeper said his sales have dropped by two thirds since February and 
people who are still buying have to scrape together all their coins for a 
few cups of rice.

People around here -- tough colonists and native Indians -- used to live by 
growing cocoa, bananas and sweet corn, supplemented by river fish. But 
almost everyone dropped these traditional activities once they realized how 
much money they could earn from cocaine.

Now they do not know what to do.

"People are leaving Barrancominas because there is no work here," said Luis 
Fernando Guzman, 34, as he loaded sticks of furniture, a television set and 
other belongings onto a flat-bottomed river launch.

"I'm going to look for something better. Seventy percent of the population 
has gone. It's my turn now. I've got to leave my old house because if we 
don't we're going to go hungry."

Guzman, father of two children, lived here for two years. He admits the 
town's economy was based on cocaine but says he was not a trafficker or 
coca harvester himself.

The population of Barrancominas grew to 3,000 from 800 when the drug 
business set up shop in the mid-1990s. Most of the newcomers were 
traffickers, people who worked in the rustic cocaine "kitchens" or coca 
leaf harvesters.

The army said it found and destroyed five cocaine laboratories, which each 
produced four tons of cocaine a month. Soldiers also destroyed 20,000 acres 
of coca leaf, cocaine's raw material. Regular flights brought dollars and 
weapons into the town's airstrip of beaten dirt and clumps of grass, then 
flew out with cocaine bound for Brazil.

Guerrilla on the run

Gen. Arcesio Barrero, commander of the army's fourth division, said he 
thought the FARC got as much as 80 percent of all its income from the 
Barrancominas operation. The FARC commander in charge of the area, Tomas 
Medina, known as "Black Acacio," is still on the run.

The army was ecstatic about Operation Black Cat, which did not use the $1 
billion in mainly military U.S. aid for President Andres Pastrana's "Plan 
Colombia," a massive anti-drug offensive in southern Colombia, in the 
Putumayo region on the border with Ecuador.

Until the army found the massive plantations near the borders of Venezuela 
and Brazil, they thought Putumayo was the center of the country's drug trade.
- ---
MAP posted-by: GD