Bogotá

Fumigating the Poor

Sensitive to charges that Plan Colombia will only stoke the fires of this internal conflict, the Colombian government's point man on the issue, National Security Adviser Gonzalo de Francisco, strains to emphasize the least bellicose aspects of the operation. During an extended interview in the elegant Narino Presidential Palace, the soft-spoken 40-year-old political scientist makes his best case. "Coca has feet, it moves around," he says. So, yes, he says, there is a military component to eradication. But aerial fumigation is not to be "indiscriminate," he says. "Forced eradication is like chemotherapy," he says. "If we continue forced eradication for five more years we will kill the patient." So while forcible fumigation will be escalated against the big-time growers, for the first time in a serious way, de Francisco says, the Colombian government will strive to negotiate contracts with impoverished coca farmers under which they will agree to manually destroy their crops. In return, the government will give each family up to $2,000 in subsidies and technical assistance to grow substitute crops like rice, corn and fruit. (De Francisco says that Washington is providing $16 million specifically for these purposes--about 1 percent of its Colombian aid package.) The average coca farmer makes about $1,000 a month, but de Francisco argues that while a campesino might make less growing corn or rice, he has a moral and legal obligation to stop growing coca. "Coca will be leaving Putumayo," he affirms, while agreeing that as many as 10,000 rural residents might be "displaced."

But de Francisco's critics contend that as much as 75 percent of the illicit crops are on tiny plots owned by poor farmers who have little other chance of economic survival. Only a minority are large "industrial" sites. "Plan Colombia is absurd and dangerous because it believes it can fumigate poverty," says political science professor José Cuesta. Cuesta, a former M-19 guerrilla, is now a leader of the Citizens' Network for Peace in Colombia. "The coca crops are nothing but a concrete response to the ravages caused by unrestrained free-market economic policies." Even the coca pickers, he says, are increasingly the urban poor looking to survive. "If the government were serious about drugs, it would forget about the campesinos and attack the industrial and financial centers that most profit from trafficking," says Cuesta. "This wouldn't be called Plan Colombia. It would be called Plan United States."

De Roux fears the current actions could drive the farmers deeper into the arms of the FARC. "Until now the farmers have not supported the guerrillas but merely accommodated them," he says. "This military push might cement the bond. Worse, it could push the FARC and the coca growers deeper into the jungle, and it could encourage the FARC to become a full-blown cartel." Already Ecuadorean farmers living near the southern Colombian border are reporting that they have been offered money by Colombian drug traffickers to begin coca production.

Meanwhile, the indigenous population of the targeted southern region is already paying an elevated price. Right-wing paramilitaries have recently expanded in that area and are challenging the FARC not only for territorial control but also for collection of the coca "tax." The Indian communities have been caught in the crossfire and have lost much of their traditional leadership in the bloodshed. The FARC has also escalated its forced recruitment of teenagers from indigenous families. Add to that the stepped-up government spraying, and "for the indigenous this is a catastrophe," says a government anthropologist who requested anonymity. "Much of the land there is unfit for anything but coca. And the government is wiping out the traditional and even the nontraditional crops." The national human rights ombudsman's office has highlighted several cases involving Cofan Indians who had their food crops, medicinal plants, fish harvesting tanks and grazing fields sprayed with herbicides. An Associated Press correspondent who traveled to Putumayo reported that most of the fumigation he saw had hit the smallest of crops, many an acre or less. This directly contradicts the government claim to be targeting the "industrial" crops.

None of this has deterred the Colombian Army from claiming at least partial victory in mid-February. An official army press release said that eradication efforts were running ahead of schedule and had been "carried out without any incident to date with any farmers or settlers." This bluster might be just that--face-saving public relations. A few weeks after the push began, six regional governors protested the forced eradication and military approach of Plan Colombia, doubtlessly contributing to the otherwise unexplained decision to halt the spraying temporarily.

Echoes of Vietnam

Perhaps after the meeting between Pastrana and Bush, we'll have a better idea of what the new Administration's Colombia policy will be. Someone in Washington is going to have to decide how much more it wants to invest in Colombia, how much of that aid should continue to be military and just how much, if at all, Pastrana's parallel peace efforts will be supported. Or, on the contrary, what kind of appetite Washington has for being more explicitly entwined not so much in a drug war as in counterinsurgency. The line between the two is already considerably blurred by Plan Colombia. "It's ambiguous," says a US Embassy official. "Anyone involved in any phase of drug production no matter what hat he is wearing is now a legitimate target."

There's no question that a significant part of the American political class would just as soon see Pastrana shut down the peace talks. "If the FARC does not start showing some real good faith real soon, it is indeed time to pull the plug [on the peace process]," says Republican Congressman Benjamin Gilman. "Pastrana should then go ahead and shut down the guerrilla zone and send in the troops." This sort of talk rattles some Colombian analysts. "It's not very reassuring that we are the only regional headache for the US," says Roberto Pombo, editor of García Márquez's Cambio. "If we have a couple of hundred advisers here and one day the FARC kills three of them and that happens on a day when the US President is in trouble on some domestic issue, what happens to us? Ask the Libyans under Reagan, or the Sudanese under Clinton." Adds Mauricio Vargas, "The US is already up to its ears in Colombia. Everything's already here except the troops." There are already American "contract" teams in Colombia, one of which was fired upon in late February when it went into a guerrilla zone to rescue a downed helicopter crew.

But is Plan Colombia really a prelude to a new Vietnam? It's unlikely that the Bush Administration is about to send thousands of US troops into the crossfire between the FARC and the paramilitaries. But there are, nevertheless, historical parallels beyond the obvious imagery of blanketing foreign jungles with defoliants. Once again, US power is being projected abroad to achieve its own objectives at a punishing social cost to a country we're "assisting." And as in Vietnam, even the US objectives are muddled and elusive. All available evidence shows that drug use is never reduced by attacking the source but only by reducing the demand. Plan Colombia, at best, will only disperse drug production from Colombia to some neighboring location, and it will do nothing to reduce drug use in the United States--except perhaps to spike the price of cocaine and make the trade that much more profitable.

One US Embassy official essentially confirms the gap between what seemed to be Pastrana's original vision of Plan Colombia and its reality today. "The US and Colombia have different priorities," the official says. "Colombia has peace as a priority. We have narcotics."

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