SAN MIGUEL AMOLTEPEC VIEJO, Mexico - For years, two young brothers, like many other farmers in their poor, mountainous region of southwest Mexico, found salvation in the opium poppy. They bled the milky latex from its pods and the profits made their hard lives a little easier. The fact that this substance was the raw material for most of the heroin consumed in the United States was of little concern to the family, if they even knew it at all. But then changes in that distant market for illegal drugs made the price of the dried opium latex plummet. [continues 1405 words]
Against the backdrop of the earthquake in Haiti, dozens of protesters gathered outside a Greenwich Village detention center on Thursday to demand the release of Jean Montrevil, a Haitian immigrant rights advocate and a community leader in New York who has been detained since December while awaiting deportation. The rally came a week after two other demonstrations for Mr. Montrevil led to the arrests of 19 people, many of them clergy members, who blocked traffic in an effort to step up their pressure on federal authorities and draw more attention to their cause. Organizers said the protests appeared to be the first time in recent years that local immigration demonstrators had turned to civil disobedience. [continues 611 words]
KHWAJA GHOLAK, Afghanistan - Amid the multiplying frustrations of the fight against narcotics in Afghanistan, the northern province of Balkh has been hailed as a rare and glowing success. Two years ago the province, which abuts Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, was covered with opium poppies - about 27,000 acres of them, nearly enough to blanket Manhattan twice. This year, after an intense anti-poppy campaign led by the governor, Balkh's farmers abandoned the crop. The province was declared poppy free, with 12 others, and the provincial government was promised a reward of millions of dollars in development aid. [continues 952 words]
KABUL, Afghanistan - After the biggest opium harvest in Afghanistan's history, U.S. officials have renewed efforts to persuade the Afghan government to begin spraying herbicide on opium poppies, and they have found some supporters within President Hamid Karzai's administration, officials of both countries said. Since early this year, Karzai has repeatedly declared his opposition to spraying the poppy fields, whether by crop-dusting airplanes or by eradication teams on the ground. But Afghan officials said that the Karzai administration was now re-evaluating that stance. Some proponents within the government are pushing a trial program of ground spraying that could begin before the harvest next spring. [continues 353 words]
KABUL, Afghanistan -- After the biggest opium harvest in Afghanistan's history, American officials have renewed efforts to persuade the government here to begin spraying herbicide on opium poppies, and they have found some supporters within President Hamid Karzai's administration, officials of both countries said. Since early this year, Mr. Karzai has repeatedly declared his opposition to spraying the poppy fields, whether by crop-dusting airplanes or by eradication teams on the ground. But Afghan officials said that the Karzai administration is now re-evaluating that stance. Some proponents within the government are even pushing a trial program of ground spraying that could begin before the harvest next spring. [continues 1480 words]
SAN FRANCISCO, Peru - Though only 250 miles from the Peruvian capital, this plunging jungle valley seems just out of the government's reach. Isolated, impoverished, and connected to the rest of the country by treacherous dirt roads cut into vertiginous mountain slopes, this lush region has for decades enticed drug traffickers and coca growers. Maoist Shining Path rebels arrived in the 1980s, feeding off the cocaine trade. The region's fiercely independent peasants then formed self-defense groups and drove the rebels back into the chilly highlands. [continues 1185 words]
Economic Woes, Political Unrest Raise Anxieties BOGOTA - A convergence of political and economic upheavals in recent weeks has plunged South America into turmoil, threatening to undermine two decades of progress toward democracy and market liberalization. Financial meltdowns in Brazil and Uruguay have prompted huge bailouts by the International Monetary Fund. Antiprivatization protests have erupted in Paraguay, Ecuador, and Peru. The political and social schisms in Venezuela have widened, and rumors abound of another coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez. Colombian rebels launched a mortar attack this month at the inauguration of President Alvaro Uribe, killing at least 19, and the government declared a state of emergency. To the south, Argentina slid further into economic ruin. [continues 1302 words]
BOGOTA - Amid a renewed ban on opium trading in Afghanistan, and close international scrutiny of the new Afghan government, US and international drug-control officials are expecting a shift in the world's opium trade away from central Asia and toward Colombia. Afghanistan, despite the ban, is still believed to be the world's largest supplier of opiates. An edict this month by the US-backed interim Afghan government, prohibiting the cultivation of opium poppies and the sale of their derivatives, including heroin, renewed a Taliban decree in 2000. [continues 827 words]
For Small Farmers In Isolated Settlements, La Coca Is The Only Viable Cash Crop - And Leftist Guerrillas Are The Only Government. THE DUSTY VILLAGES along the banks of the Caguan River are among scores of settlements in Colombia's sparsely populated southern reaches that have been thrown together with wood planks and tin roofs. These frontier towns serve as home to the campesinos who make their living from coca, the raw material for cocaine. Most arrived within the past decade in search of land and economic opportunity, fleeing the fighting that has splintered the country for 37 years. As coca cultivation shifted from Peru and Bolivia to the hinterlands of Colombia, settlers cleared swaths of virgin rain forest in the Caqueta province, and remote outposts along the region's main rivers now bustle with life and commerce. [continues 526 words]
Way up in the Andes and 440 miles from the sea, suspected drug runners in Colombia built a most unlikely vessel to transport their wares. The neighbors didn't see a thing. Last July, eavesdroppers for the Colombian national police intercepted a series of radio conversations that Col. Jaime Enrique Bonilla describes as "very strange." "They were saying things like, 'Bring the flour for the party tonight,' and 'The foreigners are ready,"' recalls Bonilla, who oversees the division of the police force that operates in the mountainous central state of Cundinamarca, which includes Bogota. "They didn't use names. Lots of farmers communicate with one another using radios, but they always use names. [continues 2100 words]
For Community Workers On Colombia's Cocaine Frontier, The War On Drugs Is Getting Personal. Community organizer Eder Sanchez pulls away from a breakfast of liver, rice, and plantains and uncaps his pen. He's sitting in a roadside cafeteria near the farming pueblo of La Hormiga in the southern Colombian state of Putumayo. Groves of plantain and yucca cut into the tropical forest here alongside fields covered with bushy coca plants. Putumayo is the world's cocaine frontier, the source of 50 percent of Colombia's coca crop. Sanchez is here to talk to local farmers about a new, U.S.-funded anti-narcotics offensive targeted primarily at this remote region. He knows that they fear for their future-and he's concerned about his own. [continues 960 words]
Efforts To Curtail The Production And Distribution Of Cocaine In Colombia For community workers on Colombia's cocaine frontier, the war on drugs is getting personal. Community organizer Eder Sanchez pulls away from a breakfast of liver, rice, and plantains and uncaps his pen. He's sitting in a roadside cafeteria near the farming pueblo of La Hormiga in the southern Colombian state of Putumayo. Groves of plantain and yucca cut into the tropical forest here alongside fields covered with bushy coca plants. Putumayo is the world's cocaine frontier, the source of 50 percent of Colombia's coca crop. Sanchez is here to talk to local farmers about a new, U.S.-funded anti-narcotics offensive targeted primarily at this remote region. He knows that they fear for their future--and he's concerned about his own. [continues 954 words]
A Crackdown On Contraband Leaves The Economy Of A Formerly Bustling Region Hurting PUERTO NUEVO, Colombia -- On the foredeck of the freighter Leba II, moored just yards off the barren coastline here in the northeast comer of Colombia, 400 tons of new household electronics have baked for a week under a plastic tarp while the ship's crew has grown bored beyond distraction. The seamen's day, according to helmsman Carlos Cardenas, consists of sleeping, eating, drinking liquor and dancing with the prostitutes who have taken up residence on the ship during the wait. Mainly, though, they just sit around. [continues 836 words]
BOGOTA - When rebel dynamite blew a hole in Colombia's second-largest petroleum pipeline on July 23, oil officials here did not think much about it. After all, this was a typical rebel protest against what the insurgents regard as excessive multinational presence in the oil sector. But that explosion turned out to be the beginning of the longest sustained bombing blitz against the Cano Limon-Covenas pipeline since it was built in 1986. In the past eight weeks, the leftist National Liberation Army has punctured the line at least 23 times and has paralyzed the operations at the Cano Limon wellfield, which is operated by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum. The line was attacked again Tuesday, and the pipeline remained out of service until late Thursday. [continues 779 words]
TRES ESQUINAS, Colombia - On this military base deep in Colombia's muggy southern jungle, on the world's cocaine frontier, the air feels thicker than usual with tension and the fear of death. It could also just be the imagination at work, because the fact is that nothing much is going on here these days: no helicopters clattering overhead with rebels in their sights, no heavily armed soldiers stomping in and out of transport planes with war smeared on their faces. [continues 510 words]
(Puerto Asis, Colombia)---If President Andres Pastrana has his way, this rough-and-tumble jungle town in southern Putumayo state will be transformed from a center of Colombia's cocaine industry to a model of a new, law-abiding economy based on hearts of palm, fish farming and rubber-tapping. But first, he has to confront some formidable foes, including leftist rebels, right-wing paramilitaries, distrustful locals and the law of supply and demand. Putumayo state, a sparsely populated slice of jungle about the size of Vermont, lies near the border with neighboring Ecuador and Peru. Its biggest town, Puerto Asis, is the hub of a coca-producing area that provides an estimated 50 percent of Colombia's coca leaf and is home to the nation's major warring parties. [continues 1382 words]
Millions Urge Quick End to Violence BOGOTA, Colombia, Oct. 24--Millions of Colombians marched today in anti-war protests as long-awaited peace talks began between the Colombian government and the country's largest rebel group. The event involved at least 10 million protesters across Colombia, according to Francisco Santos, news editor of the Bogota daily El Tiempo. Thousands more were involved in parallel demonstrations around the world in an astonishing display of unified anger in a country battered by nearly four decades of armed conflict that has killed at least 30,000 people. Marchers are hoping that the protests will spur negotiators to reach a quick resolution to the violence. [continues 425 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia, Oct. 13 - Thirty-one alleged drug traffickers, including a co-founder of the notorious Medellin cartel and a high-tech smuggling magnate, were arrested today in an international dragnet that officials described as one of the biggest blows ever against the drug trade. Colombia's national police chief, Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, pledged that the main suspects will be extradited to the United States, a promise that U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno welcomed in Washington. No Colombian national has been extradited to the United States to stand trial since 1991. [continues 1635 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia, Oct. 13 - Thirty-one alleged drug traffickers, including a co-founder of the notorious Medellin cartel and a high-tech smuggling magnate, were arrested today in an international dragnet that officials described as one of the biggest blows ever against the drug trade. Colombia's national police chief, Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, pledged that the main suspects will be extradited to the United States, a promise that U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno welcomed in Washington. No Colombian national has been extradited to the United States to stand trial since 1991. [continues 767 words]
BOGOTA - If Latin America were a neighborhood, Colombia would be the house that always seemed to have cop cars and social-service vans parked outside. The country is analogous to a big, colorful family going through a very rough time - beset by drug trafficking, armed conflict and economic problems. But the neighbors appear to be getting fed up. In recent days, Colombia's troubles have once again spread across its borders and into adjoining countries, reigniting long-standing charges that the Andean nation - which touches Panama, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador - is a threat to regional stability. [continues 858 words]
