Binky
05-16-2005, 09:07 PM
Series: Part 3 Of 3
JUST WHO IS CALLING THE SHOTS?
This is the last in a three-part series on Colombia's drug war.
SANTA RITA, Colombia - A sombre, soft-spoken coffee grower named Benito Vargas rests on a small wooden veranda in the shade of a large guayabo tree and denies that there's malfeasance in these green hills.
"I've lived here for 24 years," he says, referring to this small hamlet in the verdant mountains of southern Colombia, "and I've never seen any illicit plants."
By "illicit plants," Vargas means either poppies ( the raw material for heroin ) or coca ( the raw material for cocaine ).
Both are exceedingly popular crops in this South American republic, which accounts for the bulk of the world's cocaine supply and much of its heroin.
But Vargas insists he and his neighbours have never had any part of the illegal business that has saddled this gorgeous, riven land with a sorry reputation around the world as a haven for drugs and crime.
"Here, the people are clean-living," says Vargas, "very hard-working."
The coffee-grower's description of his community strikes a somewhat discordant note on this grey and rainy morning.
A team of officials from the U.S. embassy in Bogota, the Colombian capital, has just brought a clutch of Latin American and Caribbean journalists -- plus one Canadian -- out to these green coffee fields perched at 1,500 metres above sea level, outside the town of Pitalito in southern Colombia.
They want to show how U.S. efforts are helping to wean small-time Colombian farmers from involvement in the narcotics business, whose criminal agents regularly entice or coerce impoverished farmers into the production of illicit crops.
This is a huge problem in Colombia, but it doesn't seem to have much resonance here in the peaceful hamlet of Santa Rita, not if Vargas is to be believed.
U.S. officials also say Colombia's largest left-wing guerrilla army -- known as the FARC, the Spanish acronym for the Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces -- was active here not so long ago, pressuring farmers to engage in poppy growing.
But Vargas denies this version of history as well. Yes, he says, some years ago small armed units of the FARC did occasionally traverse these hills on foot, but they didn't spend much time here.
"I never saw a guerrilla in anyone's home," he says.
So why have U.S. officials brought these journalists here?
The answer suggests something about the ornery nature of the challenges now facing the United States in the fifth and final year of an ambitious, Washington-led assault on the huge Colombian drug business.
In fact, the U.S. officials had intended to take their journalist charges somewhere else this morning, to a rural region near the southern city of Popayan.
But that area has been the scene of intense fighting in recent days between the FARC and the Colombian army, and so the Americans made a last-minute change of plans and brought everybody to Pitalito, aboard a U.S. State Department C-130 cargo plane from Bogota.
It's a minor glitch in a much larger scheme, but it does raise a vexing question: Just who is calling the shots around here?
A large, rugged land hounded by two left-wing guerrilla armies, plus a clutch of right-wing death squads, Colombia is the reluctant home of the world's most lucrative narcotics industry.
It would be a tall order for anyone to control the agenda in such a territory. But that is more or less what the United States is trying to do. Since 2000, Washington has plowed $3.5 billion ( U.S. ) into Colombia to support its war on drugs and terror, plus an additional $1.5 billion in several neighbouring countries for the same purpose.
What has been achieved? The answer tends to depend on whom you ask.
"In 2003, we saw a drop in Colombian coca cultivation for the first time in a decade," says Laura Jewell, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs. "The Colombian armed forces are taking back their territory, little by little."
Although still prone to sometimes unnerving violence, much of Colombia is more peaceful now than it has been for years. Nowhere is this transformation more evident than in the capital itself.
Bogota has a nightlife again, one that isn't purely criminal. Well-heeled cachacos, as capital-dwellers are known, venture out after dark now to gather at the city's shopping malls, restaurants and bars, something few would have dreamed of doing short years ago, when common thugs and armed rebels held sway at night.
Meanwhile, in much of the countryside, the war against drugs and terror grinds relentlessly on.
"When we're talking about improvements," says a long-time foreign resident of Bogota, "we're talking about degrees."
The conflict takes many different forms and involves many different weapons - -- everything from helicopter gunships rattling through the tropical skies to infantry battalions slogging through triple-canopy rain forest, from rural-development initiatives in villages such as Santa Rita to crop-spraying airplanes weaving over the illegal coca plantations that keep sprouting up in almost every part of the country.
The Americans say the crop-sprayers are finally starting to have an effect. Certainly, the man in charge of the aerial eradication program in Colombia believes this is so.
He won't let reporters use his name, but he is a brash young American with a full blond mane, plus a goatee and moustache, who typically dresses in blue jeans, a blue work shirt, wrap-around sunglasses, and hiking boots. Out in the countryside, he keeps a SIG Sauer 9-mm pistol strapped to his belt in a black-leather holster.
"I only carry it on forward operations," he says, while crop-spraying planes buzz around the airstrip at the southern Colombian town of Tumaco, on the Ecuadorian border. "I'm not allowed to carry it in Bogota."
This particular American is currently responsible for deploying a team of 22 pilots of various nationalities and a fleet of 35 crop-spraying aircraft, including a number of Air Tractor 802s, a state-of-the-art spray plane. The AT-802s are valued at $2.8 million each in the configuration used here, which involves armour-plating to protect the pilot and engine.
Last year, the planes sprayed about 136,000 hectares of coca or poppies -- up from about 50,000 hectares five years ago -- using a herbicidal cocktail of glyphosate, water, and a dash of Cosmo-flux, an industrial soap that causes the chemical to stick to the leaves of whatever it lands on. The Americans insist glyphosate is environmentally safe, but others are not so sure.
"People do claim that it has a negative effect," says a foreign resident of Bogota. "Any time you spray large amounts of chemicals, and they are killing things, the effect isn't good."
The Americans concede the spraying program is not as effective as the bare numbers suggest, as Colombia's drug producers are generally quick to replant when fields are sprayed.
In fact, some say the race between the sprayers and the planters is a wash, although U.S. officials insist the program has depressed cocaine production nonetheless, because newly planted coca takes a year or more to reach maturity.
Only then can the leaves be harvested and turned into a rough paste called base de coca before being refined into white-powder cocaine hydrochloride at clandestine labs scattered around Colombia, prior to being shipped to markets abroad.
Meanwhile, U.S. authorities are active here on many other fronts.
More than 500 U.S. military trainers -- and some 120 U.S. defence department sub-contractors -- are currently working with the Colombian armed forces, including the 200,000-strong army, in their 40-year-old war against left-wing insurgents, a conflict that is inextricably linked to the narcotics trade, where the rebels now play a prominent role
The United States is also backing efforts to speed up the delivery of justice here and to bring some transparency to a court system long plagued by secrecy, corruption, and fear.
After three years in office, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe continues to enjoy widespread support among Colombians, who endorse his hard-line approach to the country's problems and so far seem to accept his close identification with Washington.
But the challenges facing Uribe and his U.S. allies are so complex -- and the profits in the narcotics trade, so immense -- that some wonder whether the struggle can ever be won.
"It's going to be a long road," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conceded during a recent visit to Bogota for talks with Uribe. "It's hard. But the Colombians have made progress."
Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2005 The Toronto Star
Contact: lettertoed@thestar.com
Website: http://www.thestar.com/
JUST WHO IS CALLING THE SHOTS?
This is the last in a three-part series on Colombia's drug war.
SANTA RITA, Colombia - A sombre, soft-spoken coffee grower named Benito Vargas rests on a small wooden veranda in the shade of a large guayabo tree and denies that there's malfeasance in these green hills.
"I've lived here for 24 years," he says, referring to this small hamlet in the verdant mountains of southern Colombia, "and I've never seen any illicit plants."
By "illicit plants," Vargas means either poppies ( the raw material for heroin ) or coca ( the raw material for cocaine ).
Both are exceedingly popular crops in this South American republic, which accounts for the bulk of the world's cocaine supply and much of its heroin.
But Vargas insists he and his neighbours have never had any part of the illegal business that has saddled this gorgeous, riven land with a sorry reputation around the world as a haven for drugs and crime.
"Here, the people are clean-living," says Vargas, "very hard-working."
The coffee-grower's description of his community strikes a somewhat discordant note on this grey and rainy morning.
A team of officials from the U.S. embassy in Bogota, the Colombian capital, has just brought a clutch of Latin American and Caribbean journalists -- plus one Canadian -- out to these green coffee fields perched at 1,500 metres above sea level, outside the town of Pitalito in southern Colombia.
They want to show how U.S. efforts are helping to wean small-time Colombian farmers from involvement in the narcotics business, whose criminal agents regularly entice or coerce impoverished farmers into the production of illicit crops.
This is a huge problem in Colombia, but it doesn't seem to have much resonance here in the peaceful hamlet of Santa Rita, not if Vargas is to be believed.
U.S. officials also say Colombia's largest left-wing guerrilla army -- known as the FARC, the Spanish acronym for the Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces -- was active here not so long ago, pressuring farmers to engage in poppy growing.
But Vargas denies this version of history as well. Yes, he says, some years ago small armed units of the FARC did occasionally traverse these hills on foot, but they didn't spend much time here.
"I never saw a guerrilla in anyone's home," he says.
So why have U.S. officials brought these journalists here?
The answer suggests something about the ornery nature of the challenges now facing the United States in the fifth and final year of an ambitious, Washington-led assault on the huge Colombian drug business.
In fact, the U.S. officials had intended to take their journalist charges somewhere else this morning, to a rural region near the southern city of Popayan.
But that area has been the scene of intense fighting in recent days between the FARC and the Colombian army, and so the Americans made a last-minute change of plans and brought everybody to Pitalito, aboard a U.S. State Department C-130 cargo plane from Bogota.
It's a minor glitch in a much larger scheme, but it does raise a vexing question: Just who is calling the shots around here?
A large, rugged land hounded by two left-wing guerrilla armies, plus a clutch of right-wing death squads, Colombia is the reluctant home of the world's most lucrative narcotics industry.
It would be a tall order for anyone to control the agenda in such a territory. But that is more or less what the United States is trying to do. Since 2000, Washington has plowed $3.5 billion ( U.S. ) into Colombia to support its war on drugs and terror, plus an additional $1.5 billion in several neighbouring countries for the same purpose.
What has been achieved? The answer tends to depend on whom you ask.
"In 2003, we saw a drop in Colombian coca cultivation for the first time in a decade," says Laura Jewell, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs. "The Colombian armed forces are taking back their territory, little by little."
Although still prone to sometimes unnerving violence, much of Colombia is more peaceful now than it has been for years. Nowhere is this transformation more evident than in the capital itself.
Bogota has a nightlife again, one that isn't purely criminal. Well-heeled cachacos, as capital-dwellers are known, venture out after dark now to gather at the city's shopping malls, restaurants and bars, something few would have dreamed of doing short years ago, when common thugs and armed rebels held sway at night.
Meanwhile, in much of the countryside, the war against drugs and terror grinds relentlessly on.
"When we're talking about improvements," says a long-time foreign resident of Bogota, "we're talking about degrees."
The conflict takes many different forms and involves many different weapons - -- everything from helicopter gunships rattling through the tropical skies to infantry battalions slogging through triple-canopy rain forest, from rural-development initiatives in villages such as Santa Rita to crop-spraying airplanes weaving over the illegal coca plantations that keep sprouting up in almost every part of the country.
The Americans say the crop-sprayers are finally starting to have an effect. Certainly, the man in charge of the aerial eradication program in Colombia believes this is so.
He won't let reporters use his name, but he is a brash young American with a full blond mane, plus a goatee and moustache, who typically dresses in blue jeans, a blue work shirt, wrap-around sunglasses, and hiking boots. Out in the countryside, he keeps a SIG Sauer 9-mm pistol strapped to his belt in a black-leather holster.
"I only carry it on forward operations," he says, while crop-spraying planes buzz around the airstrip at the southern Colombian town of Tumaco, on the Ecuadorian border. "I'm not allowed to carry it in Bogota."
This particular American is currently responsible for deploying a team of 22 pilots of various nationalities and a fleet of 35 crop-spraying aircraft, including a number of Air Tractor 802s, a state-of-the-art spray plane. The AT-802s are valued at $2.8 million each in the configuration used here, which involves armour-plating to protect the pilot and engine.
Last year, the planes sprayed about 136,000 hectares of coca or poppies -- up from about 50,000 hectares five years ago -- using a herbicidal cocktail of glyphosate, water, and a dash of Cosmo-flux, an industrial soap that causes the chemical to stick to the leaves of whatever it lands on. The Americans insist glyphosate is environmentally safe, but others are not so sure.
"People do claim that it has a negative effect," says a foreign resident of Bogota. "Any time you spray large amounts of chemicals, and they are killing things, the effect isn't good."
The Americans concede the spraying program is not as effective as the bare numbers suggest, as Colombia's drug producers are generally quick to replant when fields are sprayed.
In fact, some say the race between the sprayers and the planters is a wash, although U.S. officials insist the program has depressed cocaine production nonetheless, because newly planted coca takes a year or more to reach maturity.
Only then can the leaves be harvested and turned into a rough paste called base de coca before being refined into white-powder cocaine hydrochloride at clandestine labs scattered around Colombia, prior to being shipped to markets abroad.
Meanwhile, U.S. authorities are active here on many other fronts.
More than 500 U.S. military trainers -- and some 120 U.S. defence department sub-contractors -- are currently working with the Colombian armed forces, including the 200,000-strong army, in their 40-year-old war against left-wing insurgents, a conflict that is inextricably linked to the narcotics trade, where the rebels now play a prominent role
The United States is also backing efforts to speed up the delivery of justice here and to bring some transparency to a court system long plagued by secrecy, corruption, and fear.
After three years in office, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe continues to enjoy widespread support among Colombians, who endorse his hard-line approach to the country's problems and so far seem to accept his close identification with Washington.
But the challenges facing Uribe and his U.S. allies are so complex -- and the profits in the narcotics trade, so immense -- that some wonder whether the struggle can ever be won.
"It's going to be a long road," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conceded during a recent visit to Bogota for talks with Uribe. "It's hard. But the Colombians have made progress."
Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2005 The Toronto Star
Contact: lettertoed@thestar.com
Website: http://www.thestar.com/