Pubdate: Sun, 11 Mar 2007
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2007 The Dallas Morning News
Contact:  http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Author: Todd J. Gillman, The Dallas Morning News
Note: William Fernando Martinez, Special Contributor
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/walters.htm (Walters, John)

COCAINE CONFOUNDS ERADICATION EFFORTS

America's 6-Year, $6B Effort To Eradicate Drug In Colombia Has Mixed Results

Soacha, Colombia - Maria Ayara lives with her children and other 
relatives near Bogota. She had lived and grown coffee in the 
countryside with her husband until coca-growing militia usurped their 
land. The men came in the night, men from the militias that prowl 
Colombia's lawless coca-growing regions. They were there to grab 
control of the coca zone. They took away her husband, and a hundred 
others. Some were butchered. Hers disappeared. She fled with their 
four children and the clothes on her back. Now she makes $6 a week, 
working every day at a small store in a slum near Bogota.

A priest whispers comfort as she tells the story in the church 
office. It's been six years, and two weeks. Her husband is dead.

"I'm sure," Ms. Ayara said softly. "It was chaos." The U.S. has 
pumped $6 billion into a six-year effort to slash Colombia's coca 
crop and curb the upheaval it has wrought, here and on the streets of 
America. President Bush will visit Sunday, promising billions more. 
And Colombia embraces the aid.

"Where would we be without the United States?" said Bishop Daniel 
Caro Borda, whose flock includes Ms. Ayara and thousands of others 
forced from their homes in the crossfire of civil war and 
narco-trafficking. It's a double-edged question. Colombia needs help. 
Yet American addictions pour fuel on the violence that the U.N. says 
has created 3.6 million refugees, more than any country but Sudan.

"Colombia is the great humanitarian disaster no one's heard about," 
said Baylor University political scientist Victor Hinojosa, who 
studies the drug trade in Colombia. "It's the place where the war on 
drugs and the war on terror overlap."

Colombia supplies 90 percent of cocaine that ends up in the U.S. 
Under President Alvaro Uribe, there has been some success. Crop 
destruction has hit records. Seizures are up. Murder and kidnapping 
aren't quite the epidemics they once were. Yet on the streets of 
Dallas and other American cities, cocaine is just about as abundant 
and cheap as ever. It's a frustration for policymakers, police and 
drug counselors. Also Online Q&A John Walters, U.S. drug czar "It 
hasn't changed much over the years," said F. "Monty" Moncibais, a 
Dallas police narcotics investigator. "Are we winning the war against 
drugs? We are making tremendous gains. And it continues to be a major 
problem in any large city."

Big plan Colombia receives the biggest share of U.S. aid to Latin 
America, mostly to support a project called Plan Colombia, a 
multi-tiered push begun six years ago to step up eradication and 
anti-smuggling efforts, entice coca farmers to switch to lawful 
crops, beef up the army and police, reform the judiciary and weed out 
corruption. Critics in both countries say there's too little emphasis 
on social reforms and aid to the poor.

Colombia's Anti-Narcotics Police say that last year alone, 
eradication kept 1.6 tons of cocaine from the world market and cut 
drug traffickers' revenue by $41 billion. Some 68,000 Colombian 
families make a living from illicit crops, some under death threat by 
one armed group or another. Left-wing insurgents have been trying to 
overthrow the government for 40 years. The Revolutionary Armed Forces 
of Colombia, known as FARC, is the biggest rebel group, and it relies 
heavily on drugs for financing. The U.S. government calls it a 
"violent narco-terrorist guerrilla group" and credits it with control 
of 70 percent of the country's drug trade. U.S. law enforcement 
officials say Mexican cartels pay FARC up to $1 billion annually for cocaine.

Right-wing militias also claim a piece of the drug trade. These 
brutal paramilitaries have staged numerous massacres, including the 
one in Ms. Ayara's village.

"The money is very seductive. It corrupts. It's pretty prevalent. 
It's not going away any time soon. It's just such a major source of 
funds," said Mary DeLorey, a Latin America policy coordinator at 
Catholic Relief Services, adding that the link between the drug trade 
and the massive displacements is often overlooked.

Human rights groups counted 172,000 Colombians forced from their 
homes in the first nine months of 2006 alone. They typically end up 
in the "misery belts" around major cities, such as Soacha, a 
community south of Bogota. Still, Mr. Uribe is widely popular. Some 
31,000 right-wing militia members have demobilized. Security along 
highways and in cities has improved dramatically. He won re-election 
by a landslide last May. U.S. officials say that Plan Colombia may 
not be perfect but that illicit drugs would flood the market without it.

"In terms of narco-trafficking, the first thing the United States can 
do is convince our people to stop using drugs," Mr. Bush said last 
week. "Colombia has changed to the better as a result of the Plan 
Colombia. There's still bad activities going on, but it's a lot less 
than it was before." Mr. Uribe's foreign minister quit last month 
when her brother, a congressman, was linked to the right-wing militias.

Shift in control "What this paramilitary scandal shows is that this 
country went from having two large cartels and an industry controlled 
by drug lords, to an industry that is now controlled by war lords. 
It's a very dramatic shift in 10 years," said Francisco Thoumi, 
director of the Center for Studies and Observatory of Drugs and Crime 
at the University of Rosario in Bogota. "We have been fighting this 
thing for how many years now, 37? This is not a winnable war." Not, 
he said, until Colombian society stops tolerating corruption and 
embraces the rule of law.

The Colombian government claims it has cut in half the amount of land 
used to grow coca. U.S. estimates show a much smaller drop. But there 
is no dispute that eradication has put an end to plantation-scale 
production - dispersing both the cultivation and the violence it 
attracts to nearly every region. It has also complicated operations 
for Colombia's many armed groups. "They were all supercharged by 
income from drug money. They became a state within a state," said 
Peter DeShazo, former deputy assistant secretary of State for Western 
Hemisphere Affairs, and head of the Americas program at the Center 
for Strategic and International Studies.

In the last six months, Dallas police seized about 376,000 grams of 
cocaine - a minor dent in the river that flows from the Andes. 
Cocaine arrests in Dallas are second only to those involving 
marijuana. A 2006 Texas School Survey found that about three of every 
100 middle and high school students in Texas reported using cocaine 
in the previous month. The rate was double that among adults aged 18 
to 25 - giving Texas one of the highest rates.

"There's a strong view in many circles that we've been pouring money 
down a rat hole and that those resources could be better spent," said 
David Scott Palmer, a Boston University professor who has written 
extensively on drugs and Latin America.

In Dallas, cocaine - in rock or powder form - comes in $10, $15 or 
$20 doses. The latest craze is "cheese," a combination of black tar 
heroin from Mexico and Tylenol PM. Doses cost $2.

Mike Hathcoat, director of Phoenix House, a drug treatment facility 
in Dallas, called cheese a "big, big factor," but said cocaine and 
other traditional threats persist.

"They have peaks and valleys. They're always out there in the 
community," he said. Soacha, Bogota's biggest suburb, is a magnet for 
the displaced. At the Roman Catholic archdiocese, refugees gather to 
share their woeful brushes with the drug war. Until May 18, 2004 - 
how could she forget the date? - Derli Maria Grisares Cardona lived 
in a remote area in Cesar state, growing coffee, corn, yucca, 
plantains. There were skirmishes between guerrillas, the army, and 
FARC. One day, she was returning from town with three months' 
groceries. Right-wing militia members had blockaded the isolated 
road. They confiscated the supplies. They pulled men from cars and 
gathered 50 witnesses. They shot three men, including the husband of 
her niece - an act of intimidation, to prod farmers into growing 
amapola, the opium poppy used to make heroin. Ms. Cardona and her 
family fled. Now she ekes a living selling breakfast from her tiny 
home in Soacha. Her husband has no work, so he helps. "The guerrillas 
give you a choice: You produce this, or you leave your land," she 
said. "We're not going back."

It saddens Bishop Borda. "The money from the drugs from here - what 
are the benefits for Colombia? Has it paved roads? Built new airports 
or universities? No. Nothing," he said. And when does he think the 
violence will subside? The reply is a question: "When is consumption 
going to go down?"

Staff writer Alfredo Corchado contributed to this report.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman