Pubdate: Sun, 27 Jul 2008
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2008 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Simon Romero
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Colombia
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia

COCAINE SUSTAINS WAR IN RURAL COLOMBIA

Eradication Efforts Elsewhere Have Pushed Coca Cultivation into Rural 
El Rosario, Where Workers Processed Coca Leaves Recently.

PASTO, Colombia -- Along with Colombia's successes in fighting 
leftist rebels this year, cities like Medellin have staged remarkable 
recoveries. And in the upscale districts of Bogota, the capital, it 
is almost possible to forget that the country remains mired in a 
devilishly complex four-decade-old war.

But it is a different story in the mountains of the Narino 
department. Here, and elsewhere in large parts of the countryside, 
the violence and fear remain unrelenting, underscoring the difficulty 
of ending a war fueled by a drug trade that is proving immune to 
American-financed efforts to stop it.

Soaring coca cultivation, forced disappearances, assassinations, the 
displacement of families and the planting of land mines stubbornly 
persist, the hallmarks of a backlands conflict that threatens to drag 
on for years, even without the once spectacular actions of guerrillas 
in Colombia's large cities.

For those caught in the cross-fire, talk of a possible endgame for 
the war seems decidedly premature, even given the deaths this year of 
several top guerrilla leaders, the desertion of hundreds of rebels 
each month and the rescue of prized hostages like the former 
presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

"The armed groups are like malaria, evolving to resist eradication 
and killing with efficiency," Antonio Navarro Wolff, governor of 
Narino and a former guerrilla from the defunct M-19 group, said in an 
interview. "If anything, Narino shows the guerrillas may have lost 
their chance for victory but not their ability to cause suffering."

Today, a dizzying array of armed groups lord over the farmlands of 
Narino. These include not only leftist guerrillas from the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, but also right-wing 
militias operating under names like the Black Eagles or the Peasant 
Self-Defense Forces of Narino.

Their presence reflects the symbiotic nature of the armed groups and 
the drug trade, each drawing strength from the other.

In Narino, flanked by the Pacific Ocean on the west and Ecuador on 
the south, coca growers have nimbly sidestepped almost a decade of 
fumigation efforts by reorganizing industrial-size farms into smaller 
plots that are much harder to find and spray from the air. They are 
taxed and protected by forces on the various sides of the conflict.

The United Nations reported in June that coca cultivation in Colombia 
surged 27 percent in 2007 to 244,634 acres, the first significant 
increase in four years. Narino had the largest increase of any 
Colombian department, an administrative district, up 30 percent to 
50,061 acres.

The expansion has allowed Colombia to remain by far the world's 
largest coca producer and the supplier of 90 percent of the cocaine 
consumed in the United States.

It has also made the drug-fueled conflict a resilient virus in large 
pockets of the country, with double-digit increases in coca 
cultivation in at least three other departments, Putumayo, Meta and 
Antioquia. In Narino, almost every week, government officials, Roman 
Catholic leaders or aid workers report actions by the rebels or 
paramilitary groups.

In the last week of June, four schoolteachers in remote areas of the 
province were killed by a FARC column called Mariscal Sucre, one of 
three units of the FARC that are active in the area. The rebels 
claimed that the schoolteachers, all of them recently posted to 
remote schoolhouses by Roman Catholic officials, were army informants.

"The guerrillas left the bodies of two of the teachers in front of 
their schoolhouses, preventing their families from giving them a 
Christian burial" because the families were too afraid to collect the 
bodies, said Eduardo Munoz, human rights director at Simana, the 
Narino teachers union.

Just weeks before, in April, the FARC knocked out power for 300,000 
residents along the Pacific coast with an attack on an electrical 
station. Colombian soldiers also found eight fuel-processing depots 
- -- holding 77,000 barrels of oil -- used by the guerrillas for fuel 
and to process coca into cocaine in makeshift labs.

Nationwide, the FARC still collects $200 million to $300 million a 
year by taxing coca farmers and coordinating cocaine smuggling 
networks, according to Bruce Bagley, a specialist on the Andean drug 
war who teaches at the University of Miami.

That is down from $500 million earlier this decade, Mr. Bagley said, 
but it is still enough to finance the FARC after recent desertions 
and killings that have thinned its ranks to about 9,000 from 17,000.

Similarly, while the FARC's share of the cocaine trade has declined, 
Colombia's share of the world cocaine production has remained stable 
at about 60 percent. That means opportunities for new players like 
Colombia's resurgent right-wing militias and small-scale armed gangs 
taking the place of disassembled cartels.

"A few battles won is not a war won," Mr. Bagley said. "The FARC and 
other groups will survive as long as there are safe havens, the flow 
of drug money and large, remote regions unconnected to the broader economy."

One such area is El Rosario, a municipality three hours from Pasto, 
the capital of Narino, by four-wheel drive on winding switchbacks 
along the spine of the Andes.

A decade ago, coca was a rare crop in the area, farmers in El Rosario 
said. Then, eradication efforts under Plan Colombia, the $5 billion 
counterinsurgency and antinarcotics effort financed by the United 
States, forced the migration of coca cultivation here from other 
parts of the country.

To them, the eradication effort has simply pushed the coca -- and the 
groups that feed off it -- into ever-more isolated parts of the 
country. Now that coca has become their livelihood, too, the farmers 
are determined to hold on to it.

At one remote spot, a 45-minute hike from a section of the dirt road, 
Liborio Rodriguez maintains a small coca field on a slope that has 
been subjected to aerial spraying and direct eradication efforts in 
recent years.

"I know nothing is eternal, but I am not leaving this land," said Mr. 
Rodriguez, 41, while he and half a dozen laborers harvested leaves 
off coca bushes under the hot sun, pausing to sip chicha, an 
alcoholic drink made from corn. "After everything we have been 
subjected to, I feel that I can survive here."

He and the other farmers say they have developed strategies to 
protect their coca bushes, planting smaller plots under canopies of 
trees and coating their leaves with sugar cane juice, thought to 
prevent phosphate-based herbicides from sticking.

In an example of unintended consequences, the phosphates repelled 
from coca bushes may soak into the ground and serve as a fertilizer, 
some botanists say, helping increase coca yields.

Other coca farmers have developed hybrid varieties of coca that grow 
lower to the ground and can be harvested four to six times a year, 
almost double previous levels.

Faced with the unexpected surge in coca cultivation in Narino and 
other areas, Colombian officials take comfort in findings by the 
United Nations that cocaine production in the country is believed to 
have remained stable in 2007, at about 660 tons.

And they say cultivation could have been much larger than the 543,630 
acres measured last year were it not for the aerial spraying and 
manual eradication efforts, combined with strides in intercepting 
cocaine shipments and military victories against the FARC in numerous 
rural redoubts.

Yet while interdiction levels are promising, the growth of coca 
cultivation also promises the FARC and rival groups new opportunities 
to profit from the cocaine trade.

One paramilitary group, the Black Eagles, has so terrified residents 
of El Rosario that they will hardly utter the militia's name when 
discussing how it extorts payments from them each month.

Elsewhere in Narino, residents similarly report that paramilitary 
groups are thriving, despite government efforts to demobilize more 
than 30,000 paramilitary combatants in recent years.

These militias, sometimes in camouflaged uniforms -- bearing the 
letters A.C.N., the initials in Spanish for Peasant Self-Defense 
Forces of Narino, or O.N.G., for New Generation Organization -- have 
uprooted villagers near the Pacific coast, according to testimony 
collected by aid workers, as paramilitary groups, guerrillas and 
small-scale drug gangs struggled for control of cocaine smuggling routes.

Government figures suggest that displacements are declining in 
Narino, with about 7,500 people forced from their homes so far this 
year in comparison with almost 30,000 in all of 2007. But other 
agencies paint a more distressing picture.

Codhes, a leading human rights group, said overall displacements in 
Colombia climbed 38 percent last year to more than 300,000, with 
Narino emerging as "the center of Colombia's humanitarian crisis," 
said Jorge Rojas, the group's director.

Seemingly marginal organizations persist in pockets of rural 
distress. Another leftist rebel group, the National Liberation Army, 
or E.L.N., has at least 100 combatants in the area, local officials 
and aid workers said.

A FARC rival that has been vastly diminished in recent years, the 
E.L.N. normally avoids involvement in the cocaine trade. But its 
riches are so tempting, community leaders say, that a rogue column of 
the group in Narino, Comuneros del Sur, has secured a new lease on 
life by financing itself through drug deals.

In June, three boys from the Awa indigenous group walked into a rural 
area planted with land mines by the E.L.N., community leaders said. 
The boys, ages 8, 12 and 15, were instantly killed, placing them 
among 31 victims of land mines in Narino this year, a grim figure 
that includes 19 civilians, according to Colombia's government.

"Our view is that all sides are not weakening but getting stronger," 
said an Awa leader, asking not to be identified out of fear of 
retribution from the rebels. "Where else in the world can the 
authorities claim to be winning when their opponents continue 
planting both coca and mines?" 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake