Cocaine confounds control efforts

March 18, 2007

By TODD J. GILLMAN The Dallas Morning News

SOACHA, Colombia - Maria Ayara's husband grew coffee. They lived a quiet life in the countryside.

The men came in the night, men from the militias that prowl Colombia's lawless coca-growing regions. They were there to grab control of the coca zone. They took away her husband, and a hundred others. Some were butchered. Hers disappeared. She fled with their four children and the clothes on her back. Now she makes $6 a week, working every day at a small store in a slum near Bogota.

A priest whispers comfort as she tells the story in the church office. It's been six years, and two weeks. Her husband is dead.

"I'm sure," Ayara said softly. "It was chaos."

The U.S. has pumped $6 billion into a six-year effort to slash Colombia's coca crop and curb the upheaval it has wrought, here and on the streets of America. President Bush, visiting last Sunday, promised billions more. And Colombia embraces the aid.

"Where would we be without the United States?" said Bishop Daniel Caro Borda, whose flock includes Ayara and thousands of others forced from their homes in the crossfire of civil war and narco-trafficking.

It's a double-edged question. Colombia needs help. Yet American addictions pour fuel on the violence that the U.N. says has created 3.6 million refugees, more than any country but Sudan.

"Colombia is the great humanitarian disaster no one's heard about," said Baylor University political scientist Victor Hinojosa, who studies the drug trade in Colombia. "It's the place where the war on drugs and the war on terror overlap."

Colombia supplies 90 percent of cocaine that ends up in the U.S.

Under President Alvaro Uribe, there has been some success. Crop destruction has hit records. Seizures are up. Murder and kidnapping aren't quite the epidemics they once were. Yet on the streets of American cities, cocaine is just about as abundant and cheap as ever. It's a frustration for policymakers, police and drug counselors.

Colombia receives the biggest share of U.S. aid to Latin America, mostly to support a project called Plan Colombia, a multi-tiered push begun six years ago to step up eradication and anti-smuggling efforts, entice coca farmers to switch to lawful crops, beef up the army and police, reform the judiciary and weed out corruption. Critics in both countries say there's too little emphasis on social reforms and aid to the poor.

Colombia's Anti-Narcotics Police say that last year alone, eradication kept 1.6 tons of cocaine from the world market and cut drug traffickers' revenue by $41 billion. Some 68,000 Colombian families make a living from illicit crops, some under death threat by one armed group or another.

Left-wing insurgents have been trying to overthrow the government for 40 years. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, is the biggest rebel group, and it relies heavily on drugs for financing. The U.S. government calls it a "violent narco-terrorist guerrilla group" and credits it with control of 70 percent of the country's drug trade.

U.S. law enforcement officials say Mexican cartels pay FARC up to $1 billion annually for cocaine.

Right-wing militias also claim a piece of the drug trade. These brutal paramilitaries have staged numerous massacres, including the one in Ayara's village.

"The money is very seductive. It corrupts. It's pretty prevalent. It's not going away any time soon. It's just such a major source of funds," said Mary DeLorey, a Latin America policy coordinator at Catholic Relief Services, adding that the link between the drug trade and the massive displacements is often overlooked.

Human rights groups counted 172,000 Colombians forced from their homes in the first nine months of 2006 alone. They typically end up in the "misery belts" around major cities, such as Soacha, a community south of Bogota.

Still, Uribe is widely popular. Some 31,000 right-wing militia members have demobilized. Security along highways and in cities has improved dramatically. He won re-election by a landslide last May.

U.S. officials say that Plan Colombia may not be perfect but that illicit drugs would flood the market without it.

"In terms of narco-trafficking, the first thing the United States can do is convince our people to stop using drugs," Bush said last week. "Colombia has changed to the better as a result of the Plan Colombia. There's still bad activities going on, but it's a lot less than it was before."

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Uribe's foreign minister quit last month when her brother, a congressman, was linked to the right-wing militias.

"What this paramilitary scandal shows is that this country went from having two large cartels and an industry controlled by drug lords, to an industry that is now controlled by war lords. It's a very dramatic shift in 10 years," said Francisco Thoumi, director of the Center for Studies and Observatory of Drugs and Crime at the University of Rosario in Bogota. "We have been fighting this thing for how many years now, 37? This is not a winnable war." Not, he said, until Colombian society stops tolerating corruption and embraces the rule of law.

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The Colombian government claims it has cut in half the amount of land used to grow coca. U.S. estimates show a much smaller drop. But there is no dispute that eradication has put an end to plantation-scale production - dispersing both the cultivation and the violence it attracts to nearly every region. It has also complicated operations for Colombia's many armed groups.

"They were all supercharged by income from drug money. They became a state within a state," said Peter DeShazo, former deputy assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, and head of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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In the last six months, Dallas police seized about 376,000 grams of cocaine - a minor dent in the river that flows from the Andes.

Cocaine arrests in Dallas are second only to those involving marijuana. A 2006 Texas School Survey found that about three of every 100 middle and high school students in Texas reported using cocaine in the previous month. The rate was double that among adults aged 18 to 25 - giving Texas one of the highest rates.

"There's a strong view in many circles that we've been pouring money down a rat hole and that those resources could be better spent," said David Scott Palmer, a Boston University professor who has written extensively on drugs and Latin America.

In Dallas, cocaine - in rock or powder form - comes in $10, $15 or $20 doses. The latest craze is "cheese," a combination of black tar heroin from Mexico and Tylenol PM. Doses cost $2.

Mike Hathcoat, director of Phoenix House, a drug treatment facility in Dallas, called cheese a "big, big factor," but said cocaine and other traditional threats persist.

"They have peaks and valleys. They're always out there in the community," he said.

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Soacha, Bogota's biggest suburb, is a magnet for the displaced. At the Roman Catholic archdiocese, refugees gather to share their woeful brushes with the drug war.

Until May 18, 2004 - how could she forget the date? - Derli Maria Grisares Cardona lived in a remote area in Cesar state, growing coffee, corn, yucca, plantains. There were skirmishes between guerrillas, the army, and FARC.

One day, she was returning from town with three months' groceries. Right-wing militia members had blockaded the isolated road. They confiscated the supplies. They pulled men from cars and gathered 50 witnesses. They shot three men, including the husband of her niece - an act of intimidation, to prod farmers into growing amapola, the opium poppy used to make heroin.

Cardona and her family fled. Now she ekes a living selling breakfast from her tiny home in Soacha. Her husband has no work, so he helps.

"The guerrillas give you a choice: You produce this, or you leave your land," she said. "We're not going back."

It saddens Bishop Borda.

"The money from the drugs from here - what are the benefits for Colombia? Has it paved roads? Built new airports or universities? No. Nothing," he said.

And when does he think the violence will subside? The reply is a question: "When is consumption going to go down?"

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(Dallas Morning News correspondent Alfredo Corchado contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2007, The Dallas Morning News.

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