'Flying here is the biggest rush,' says a Texas crop-duster who now dodges bullets and trees to kill coca plants in Colombia.

By Chris Kraul, Reporting from Tumaco, Colombia

Spraying 800 pounds of herbicides on coca over treacherous terrain while getting shot at is not everyone's idea of a good time. But for Dave, a 35-year-old crop-duster from Texas turned "top gun" of Tumaco, it's a "kick in the pants."

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Two summers ago, drug gangs, leftist rebels and right-wing militias traded mortar and machine-gun fire daily as they vied for control of this steamy port city.

Teens were paid $200 a month -- a king's ransom in this impoverished community -- to act as lookouts for narcos. Armed groups fought it out in the neighborhoods and trash-strewn inlets from which 60-foot speedboats departed for Central America and Mexico with illicit drug loads.

With an average of three killings a day, Buenaventura's homicide rate was among the highest on the planet.

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BOGOTA - Colombia's Supreme Court ruled that possession of illegal drugs for personal use is not a criminal offense, citing a 1994 decision by the country's Constitutional Court, Caracol Radio said Wednesday.

Drug consumption "generates in a person problems of addiction and slavery that turn one into a sick, compulsive individual deserving of therapeutic medical treatment instead of a punishment," the judges said.

Their ruling came in a case involving a man prosecuted for possession of 1.3 grams (.04 ounces) of cocaine. The court overturned his conviction and ordered him immediately released.

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Just as the Obama administration is stepping up its anti-narcotics effort in Mexico, there's some good news from Colombia's coca fields.

The United Nations says Colombia's cocaine production in 2008 dropped the most in a decade, down 28 percent. Seizures of cocaine, totaling a staggering 200 tons, were also up 57 percent in Colombia, a sign of how police efforts have improved radically in recent years.

All of this may sound like extraordinary progress. Until you hear that production of cocaine is rising in Peru and Bolivia again — 4 percent and 9 percent, respectively — partially erasing the gains in Colombia.

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Mangrove Boatyards Build To Order For Traffickers Supplying US Market

Slicing through milky green waters, a Colombian navy patrol wove through the maze of mangroves in the remote Sanquianga national park on the Pacific coast, following a tip.

After eight days, the search paid off. Hidden deep within the boa-infested swampland, the patrol came upon a 60ft hull propped up on a scaffold under a tin-roofed hangar. This was no ordinary shipyard, and it was no ordinary vessel.

Shipbuilders had been putting the finishing fibreglass touches to the hull of what is known here as a narco-sub. Had they finished, the vessel would have been loaded with as much as four tonnes of cocaine and put to sea, headed north, to the US market.

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NUNCIDO, Colombia -- Up and down the rivers of western Colombia, a new breed of criminal armies is pressing deeper into this isolated jungle, fighting with guerrillas for control of the cocaine trade and forcing thousands of Indians to flee.

It is the kind of nightmarish ordeal that is an all-too-common feature of Colombia's long war: peasants being terrorized by gunmen seeking dominance in the backlands.

But as Colombia's war for control of the drug trade intensifies in frontiers like this one, with new combatants vying for smuggling routes and coca-growing areas where Indians eke out a meager existence, it is adding to the already grave toll on the nation's indigenous groups. At least 27 of the groups are at risk of being eliminated because of the country's four-decade conflict, according to the United Nations, and human rights organizations worry that the new violence is pushing even deeper into the Indians' ancient lands.

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President Alvaro Uribe Has Not Given Up On His Campaign To Get Personal Drug Use Outlawed.

BOGOTA -- Sitting in the bedroom of her home in one of Bogota's well-heeled neighborhoods, Alicia Fajardo takes a deep toke of a marijuana joint and exhales the thick smoke. With that breath, Fajardo is exercising a right granted her by Colombia's Constitutional Court.

But it's a right that President Alvaro Uribe believes is wrong.

The Colombian Congress this month will begin discussing a bill introduced by the government that would prohibit possession of any drug and would punish addicts and drug users with mandatory clinical treatment.

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BOGOTA -- It's a game played out regularly on the high seas off Colombia's Pacific coast: A U.S. Navy helicopter spots a vessel the size of a humpback whale gliding just beneath the water's surface.

A Coast Guard ship dispatches an armed team to board the small, submarine-like craft in search of cocaine. Crew members wave and jump into the sea to be rescued, but not before they open flood valves and send the fiberglass hulk and its cargo into the deep.

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Cocaine production has surged across Latin America and unleashed a wave of violence, population displacements and corruption, prompting urgent calls to rethink the drug war.

More than 750 tonnes of cocaine are shipped annually from the Andes in a multi-billion pound industry which has forced peasants off land, triggered gang wars and perverted state institutions.

A Guardian investigation based on dozens of interviews with law enforcement officials, coca farmers, refugees and policymakers has yielded a bleak picture of the "war" on the eve of a crucial United Nations drug summit.

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Governments Struggle To Respond As Resurgent Trade Moves Into Uncharted Areas

From Colombia, Peru and Bolivia through Mexico and on to a half dozen west African states, the new cocaine supply route - and the war against it - is leaving a trail of mayhem in its wake.

In Peru, Shining Path guerrillas have revived their movement by trading in Maoist ideology for coca cultivation and links with Mexican cartels, driving cocaine production to its highest level in a decade, according to US figures.

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'Narco-Subs' Are The Latest Trend In Drug Smuggling

Packed with cocaine and grimly christened "coffins," sleek submarines are steaming their way north from Colombia through Pacific waters to deliver tonnes of illegal drugs headed for the U. S. market.

Skimming just below the water line, with only a glimpse of a glass-enclosed cockpit or metal tubes visible from above, the semi-submersibles are the latest shipment method used by trafficking cartels to try to elude detection by authorities.

A pilot and three or four crewmen squeeze into the cramped hulls of the craft on voyages from Colombia's Pacific Coast up to Central America or Mexico, where their cargo is offloaded for shipment to the United States, according to the U. S. Coast Guard.

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Desertions Rise As Status and Perks Are Replaced With Constant Harassment by the Colombian Army. but the Guerrilla Group Is Known for Its Resilience.

Life was good for "Ernesto" when he joined Colombia's largest rebel group at age 14. He loved the leftist fighters' swagger, the perfumed rebel groupies and the stolen SUVs he and his buddies drove unchallenged over the roads of this cattle- and coffee-growing zone.

But eight years later, Ernesto's life as a foot soldier in the 25th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, had lost its charm. Gone were the status and the free-spending ways, a lifestyle financed by kidnappings and extortions here in the west-central state of Tolima.

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Rebels, Drug Traffickers and Soldiers May Battle Around Them and Encroach on Their Lands, but Tribes Hold on to Their Peaceful Ways to Resolve Conflicts.

After word spread across this Indian reservation that seven people had been kidnapped by leftist rebels, the community's unarmed "indigenous guard" sprang into action.

Within minutes, hundreds of men, women and children were out on roads and pathways searching for the hostages, communicating by radio, cellphone and shouts. Many held lanterns that, as the search continued after nightfall, made the rescue party seem an eerily glowing centipede snaking up and down hillsides.

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Santos Will Meet With Barack Obama Soon After Inauguration to Try To Persuade Him to Continue Plan Colombia, the $556-Million-A-Year U.S. Aid Plan. He Discusses the Case He Will Make.

Soon after President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos will fly to Washington to lobby for continuance of Plan Colombia, the largest U.S. foreign aid program outside the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Colombian leaders face a steep challenge: persuading the new administration to maintain $556 million a year in military and economic aid as it braces for an era of trillion-dollar deficits. Santos will have to fend off critics who say Plan Colombia has fallen short of its coca eradication goals and that the military's battlefield gains against leftist rebels have been stained by human rights abuses, including "false positives" -- the killing of innocent civilians passed off as battle casualties.

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Authorities Say Enrique Portocarrero Was The Innovative Creator Of Stealthy Submarines Called Semi-Submersibles, Used By Cocaine Traffickers To Evade Detection.

Reporting from Tumaco, Colombia -- Squat, bull-necked and sullen-looking, Enrique Portocarrero hardly seems a dashing character out of a Jules Verne science fiction novel.

But law enforcement officers here have dubbed him "Captain Nemo," after the dark genius of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." They say the 45-year-old has designed and built as many as 20 fiberglass submarines, strange vessels with the look of sea creatures, for drug traffickers to haul cocaine from this area of southern Colombia to Central America and Mexico.

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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.

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Bogota, Colombia -- Although he is only 21, Camilo Yoge has seen his indigenous tribe lose its culture, territory and traditions.

Yoge, a member of the Cofan tribe, has seen farmers, ranchers and oilmen invade his ancestral lands to plant illegal coca crops, raise cattle and search for oil. He has seen many young Cofan take to wearing Western-style clothes, listening to popular music and abandoning their native language for Spanish.

"We're losing out traditional dress, our environment," lamented Yoge, who is studying to become a taita, or shaman. "We are no longer free in our own territory."

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The GOP Presidential Candidate Lauds the Nation's Efforts to Curb the Illicit Activity. He Also Touts Free Trade and Calls for Improvements in Human Rights.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- Fresh from a ride on a fast boat used to chase narcotics traffickers, John McCain on Wednesday praised this nation's efforts to crack down on its illicit drug trade.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, on the second day of a Latin American tour, also continued touting a proposed free-trade pact between the United States and Colombia that faces stiff Democratic opposition in Congress.

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Ex-Guerrillas Find Way into Society; Drug Trafficking Still a Problem

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The wounds of war are still fresh here in the Quinta Ramos Peace House, a shelter for former guerrillas in the Colombian capital.

Men who spent their entire lives fighting now worry about finding work. Hardened rebels struggle to become mothers to children taken away at birth.

After more than four decades, Colombia's leftist insurgency appears to be on the run, in part because of $6.2 billion in U.S. aid during the past eight years to its closest ally in South America.

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Bogota, Colombia -- Colombian peasants devoted 27 percent more land to growing coca last year, the United Nations reported Wednesday, calling the increase "a surprise and a shock" given intense efforts to eradicate cocaine's raw ingredient.

Estimated cocaine production, however, increased only slightly in Colombia and other Andean nations - to about 994 metric tons in 2007 from 984 metric tons the year before, according to the U.N. - as cultivation shifted to smaller, less-productive plots in more remote locations.

The net increase in coca farmland came despite record U.S.-backed eradication efforts that disrupted the growing cycle, said Gen. Oscar Naranjo, the chief of Colombia's police.

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