Pubdate: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 Source: Regina Leader-Post (CN SN) Copyright: 2007 The Leader-Post Ltd. Contact: http://www.canada.com/regina/leaderpost/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/361 Author: Reuters Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine) COLOMBIAN FARMERS TURN TO MACHETES, SPADES IN COCA WAR EL PENOL, Colombia -- With a machete and a long-handled spade, Colombian farmers like Claudio Gualtero are trying to succeed where seven years of aerial coca fumigation struggled in the battle to slash the country's drug exports. After receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid to spray coca crops from the air, Colombia is shifting strategy to intensify manual eradication on the ground to attack the leaves used to make cocaine that ends up on U.S. and European streets. Once a small-time coca farmer, Gualtero now captains a work gang uprooting illicit crops along the dry hillsides of southern Narino province, where guerrillas, traffickers and paramilitaries battle over cocaine routes to the Pacific. "This is what creates so much chaos," the 52-year-old farmer said as his team, including four of his sons, dug up coca bushes speckled with red seeds under heavy police guard. "Every plant we destroy is another problem gone." Critics say the U.S.-backed fumigation plan has failed to live up to its promise to slash cocaine output or provide sufficient alternatives for farmers who have learned how to protect coca crops after pilots dump trails of withering herbicides. While U.S. military and counter-narcotics aid helped Colombia reduce violence from its 40-year conflict, cocaine production remains stubbornly above 600 tons a year, or more than 60 percent of the world's total production, the United Nations says. Last month President Alvaro Uribe acknowledged mistakes made with fumigation after farmers complained legal crops were hit by herbicides, and he said the three-year-old eradication program was more efficient in killing coca at the root. But the shift came after U.S. Democrats, critical of the results of aerial herbicides, pushed to cut military and fumigation aid in favor of more funding for development programs to ween farmers away from the lucrative drug crop. Spray planes will still buzz over dangerous areas, but the government sees eradication teams more permanently rooting out coca, creating jobs for poor farmers and bolstering state presence in areas under rebel influence. "A hectare eradicated by hand is 100 percent eradicated," said Victoria Restrepo, head of the presidential illicit crop program. "When you spray a hectare, that doesn't mean 100 percent will be eradicated." From a makeshift camp of tents and black plastic sheeting near the impoverished town of El Penol in Narino, work gangs hike out with a police patrol shortly after dawn to destroy coca sown among a patchwork of maize and plantain plots. Many are poor farmers struggling for work and most are shipped in from other parts of Colombia for two-month contracts to guard against guerrillas or paramilitaries seeking revenge on the local population for lost coca. Narino, with its easy access to the Pacific coast, has become a major center for coca production and turf wars among rival armed groups looking to secure control of smuggling. Colombia sprays more than 320,000 acres of land each year, but the U.N. estimates the country still has about 200,000 acres of coca. Washington puts that figure higher. Authorities hope more than 100 work gangs hacking up an average of 3 acres a day nationwide can destroy 120,000 acres in 2007. But the program has risks. Six eradicators were killed last year when they set off a bomb attached to a coca plant and rebels killed 13 soldiers assigned to protect workers. Rebels often lay home-made land mines. Rafael Nieto, an analyst and former deputy justice minister, said eradication would effectively compliment spraying, but other experts questioned the long-term impact on coca output. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman