Police Antidrug Team Was Slain By Soldiers

BOGOTA -- The suspicious killings last week of all 10 members of Colombia's most elite antinarcotics police team by soldiers have raised questions about the possible infiltration of the military by drug lords. The police unit, trained by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, had smashed 15 drug rings; captured 205 traffickers, including 23 wanted for extradition to the United States; and seized nearly 4.4 tons of cocaine in the past two years, Brigadier General Oscar Naranjo, director of the judicial police, said in an interview.

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Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, one of Washington's closest allies in Latin America, is a heavy favorite to win re-election Sunday, which would break a string of victories by populist candidates elsewhere in the region. The latest polls give Mr. Uribe, who pushed through an amendment to Colombia's constitution last year to permit presidential re-election, 56% of the vote against 24% for his closest rival, Sen. Carlos Gaviria, the candidate of the left-wing Alternative Democratic Pole party.

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Six years and $4 billion into the US-backed campaign to wipe out cocaine at its source, Colombia appears to be producing more coca than when the campaign started, according to US government estimates.

As Congress opens debate this month on another $640 million for next year for Washington's most ambitious overseas counternarcotics effort, a growing number of critics say the costly program has neither dented the cocaine trade nor driven down the number of American addicts. Two of the program's major missions -- to dramatically reduce coca growing in Colombia and provide alternative livelihoods for drug farmers -- have fallen far short of hoped-for goals.

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Senator Urges Bush To Fire U.S. Drug Czar

BOGOTA Aerial spraying of illegal, drug-producing crops in Colombia, an expensive linchpin of the U.S.-backed war on drugs, is failing, key members of Congress and drug policy specialists said Tuesday.

Despite a record fumigation last year of almost 550 square miles of coca, the latest U.S. government survey found 26 percent more land dedicated to the plant used to make cocaine.

The White House attributed the meteoric rise from 2004 to an 81 percent increase in the satellite sampling area, which skewed an otherwise 8 percent drop in coca production in areas previously surveyed.

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More Land In Colombia Is Under Coca Cultivation, The U.S. Says, But Cultivation Is Down. It Depends On How You Look.

No one likes to trumpet failure. But was the White House drug czar's office trying to hide something this month?

For the second year in a row, the office released its annual survey of coca cultivation (the plant used to make cocaine) using what skeptics might call a touch of creative accounting.

Oddly, the survey found 26 percent more land under coca cultivation last year than in 2004. This comes after Washington has spent more than $4-billion since 2000 on an antidrug program known as Plan Colombia, which was supposed to cut coca cultivation in half within six years.

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Colombia Leader Treats Detractors As Traitors, Refuses To Debate His Rivals

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - Rather than taking the high road as he marches toward re-election, President Alvaro Uribe has come under fire for delivering a series of low blows to his detractors.

Bolstered by a double-digit lead in the polls heading into next month's election, Uribe often treats his critics as traitors and acts as if a second term is his birthright, many analysts say.

He has refused to take part in debates with rival candidates. He has bashed the media, provoking a sharp rebuke from Human Rights Watch.

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The White House Said The Anti-Drug Campaign Is Working In Colombia, Despite Recent Results From A Survey That Indicated Otherwise

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is denying that the drug war in the Andes is going badly, despite a U.S. survey showing that far more Colombian acreage is planted with coca than previously reported.

The 2005 coca cultivation survey for Colombia, issued Friday evening by the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), estimated acreage at 356,000, a 26 percent increase over 2004.

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U.S. Downplays Negative Figures

BOGOTA, Colombia -- In a blow to the United States' antidrug campaign, new White House estimates indicate that Colombia's coca crop expanded nearly 21% last year.

Figures released Friday by the Office of National Drug Control Policy indicate Colombian farmers grew 355,680 acres of coca, the raw material for cocaine. That's up nearly 74,000 acres from 2004, even though U.S.-funded crop dusters destroyed record amounts of coca plants in 2005.

The United States has provided Colombia with more than $4 billion, mostly in antidrug aid, since 2000 for Plan Colombia, which was supposed to cut coca cultivation by half within six years. Yet according to the new figures, more coca is being grown than when the program started.

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BOGOTA, Colombia - The United States will give three additional planes to Colombia this year to help its fleet of 21 aircraft already spraying defoliants on plants used to make cocaine, a top U.S. official said on Monday.

The planned move follows a report showing an increase in coca crops in the Andean country and a request from Colombian President Alvaro Uribe for more anti-drug assistance.

The U.S. government's 2005 survey of Colombia's coca crop found 26 percent more land dedicated to coca cultivation than in 2004 after nearly doubling the area surveyed.

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The CIA Finds Colombian Acres Grew 21% During Eradication Effort Costing Billions

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - In a blow to the United States' anti-drug campaign here, which cost more than $4 billion, new White House estimates indicate that Colombia's coca crop expanded by nearly 21 percent last year.

Figures released late Friday by the Office of National Drug Control Policy indicate Colombian farmers last year grew 355,680 acres of coca, the raw material for cocaine. That represents a jump of nearly 74,000 acres from 2004 even though U.S. funded crop-dusters destroyed record amounts of coca plants in 2005.

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Colombia's Curse

SANTA MARTA -- Of the thousand shades of green that wash the hills of Tayron national park, the lightest is the coca leaf.

Seen from the air, mud trails spread like yellow veins into the forest, each ending in burnt black scars. These clearances give way to dense coca fields as the growers move deeper into the primary forest, hacking and slashing as they go.

Cocaine labs speckle the high ground, hoisted on stilts and wrapped in black polythene against the rain.

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Coca-Sek, Bottled by a Colombian Tribe, Gets Its Kick From Coca Leaves. The Not-So-Soft Drink Has Stirred Debate About Drugs and Sovereignty.

INZA, Colombia -- Call it the "Real Thing."

Indians in this remote mountain village in southern Colombia are marketing a particularly refreshing soft drink that harks back to Coca-Cola's original formula, when "coca" was in the name for a reason.

Advertising posters here describe the carbonated, citrus-flavored Coca-Sek as "more than an energizer" -- a buzz that just might be provided by a key ingredient, a syrup produced by boiling coca leaves.

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Five years and $7.5 billion later, Plan Colombia is still struggling to solve the puzzle of how to shift Colombians away from illegal crops.

The story of Plan Colombia -- the U.S.-funded, $7.5 billion strategy launched to smash the cocaine traffic in this country -- may be best understood by studying a project to grow an ingredient for fancy salads near this once formidable coca-growing area.

Planting acres of the palm trees that produce hearts of palm was one of many projects launched under the plan in late 2000 -- a means by which the hundreds of families that grew coca, the raw material for the cocaine sold on U.S. streets, were going to make a legal living.

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BOGOTA, Colombia - Active and retired police and army officers working for one of Colombia's largest cocaine cartels used commercial cargo planes to ship drugs to the United States, authorities said Tuesday.

U. S. officials, who are seeking the extradition of the seven, said the case illustrates the reaches of Colombia's notorious drug rings and the danger posed by corruption among the country's security and transportation workers. Among those arrested are a retired police major and captain, a former army lieutenant, two police officers and an employee of Colombia's national airline, Avianca.

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The United States has launched a fresh offensive in its Latin American war on drugs by putting a $75m (UKP 43m) bounty on the heads of 50 alleged leaders of the Colombian rebel group they accuse of running half of the world's cocaine trade.

Announcing the move against a group whom Washington calls "narco-terrorists", the US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, said it was "the largest drug trafficking indictment in US history".

The announcement raised the prospect of US troops being sent into Colombia to pursue the rebels, a move that Mr Gonzales refused to rule out, although he insisted that there were other "effective options".

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FARC Leaders Accused Of Trafficking More Than $25 Billion In Cocaine

WASHINGTON - The United States charged 50 leaders of Colombia's largest guerrilla group with sending more than $25 billion worth of cocaine around the world to finance their fight at home, a federal indictment that depicts the rebels as major narco-terrorists.

The indictment made public Wednesday in U.S. District Court said the leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, ordered the killings of Colombian farmers who did not cooperate with the group, the kidnapping and killing of U.S. citizens and the downing of U.S. planes seeking to fumigate coca crops.

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Progress Against Coca In Colombia Is Threatened By The Perilous Politics Of The Drug War And, As Always, By Market Forces

LA MACARENA National Park is a dramatic mountain ridge that cuts like a serrated knife through the tropical grasslands of Colombia. It is a refuge for dozens of species of wildlife found in few other places on earth. But recently it has become a new front in the war on the cocaine industry that the United States and its allies have now been waging for a generation in the Andean states of South America.

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A Clear-Cut Victory Over Growth Of The Drug Is Impossible. It Can, Perhaps, Be Contained.

La Macarena National Park is a dramatic mountain ridge that cuts like a serrated knife through the tropical grasslands of Colombia. It is a refuge for dozens of species of wildlife found in few other places on earth.

But recently it has become a new front in the "war" on the cocaine industry that the United States and its allies have now been waging for a generation in the Andean states of South America.

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Colombia has it in for Hollywood's ultimate tough guy.

Andres Pastrana, the country's ambassador in Washington, has scolded actor Bruce Willis for suggesting the United States should consider invading Colombia as part of its war on drugs.

At a media event in New York to promote his new film, 16 Blocks, Willis said the United States should weigh "going to Colombia and doing whatever it takes to end the cocaine trade".

Willis's comments, on screen and off, have landed him in trouble before.

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PIVIJAY, Colombia - As some 23,000 paramilitary fighters have disarmed here over the last two years, their top commanders have declared their intentions to play a role in politics.

But signs are emerging that the role is a dark one, as commanders use bribery and intimidation to control local lawmakers and even blocs of representatives in the Congress while they reshape their militias into criminal networks that traffic in cocaine, extort businesses and loot local governments.

Warnings of these activities have come from sources as varied as Colombian politicians, the United Nations, Western diplomats and human rights groups. Colombia's Supreme Court has begun investigating ties between paramilitaries and Congress, and some parties have begun expelling representatives with links to the groups.

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