The Failure of Plan Colombia
The U.S. government's coca-eradication campaign in Colombia has neither curbed coca cultivation there nor reduced the availability of cocaine here. So why aren't we changing course?
By Jens Erik Gould
Web Exclusive: 04.23.07
If it weren't for the modern-day logos on some of the men's T-shirts, a snapshot of the Colombian village of La Balsa could be easily mistaken for a print taken a century ago. Rickety wooden homes that evoke images of an old Deep South backwater line the town's avenue -- which is no more than a grassy pathway. The seemingly-forgotten village has no electricity, no running water, no doctor, and no mayor. Its school doesn't go past the fifth grade. The village is situated just four miles from the Ecuadorian border in the hot and sticky coastal lowlands of the far-flung Nariño department. It is cut off from the nearest road by a motorboat ride across a river and a two-hour walk on a path that gets so muddy when it rains villagers are ashamed to make their horses traverse it. Much of rural Colombia is subject to this dearth of basic services and infrastructure. What villages like La Balsa do have, though, is an abundance of coca plants.
Seven years ago, the U.S. government launched a $4.7 billion anti-drug effort in Colombia, which provides more than 90 percent of cocaine that enters the United States. The program's pride and joy is an aggressive aerial spraying campaign to destroy coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine that ends up on American streets. Just three days before I arrived, U.S.-funded airplanes had dumped chemicals on La Balsa's crops, and, in some areas, even on the village structures themselves.
But Jorlin Giovanny, one of the some 300 peasants who live there, was already rescuing the seeds from his dead coca plants, methodically chopping centimeter-wide branches on a wooden block with a machete that left a metallic ring in the sultry air. The sun-tanned 27-year-old soaked the cut-up pieces in water and replanted them that very afternoon in tidy rows in the red dirt behind a half-finished house he was helping to build for his mother. "There's no other option," said a calm Giovanny, who was well-accustomed to this post-spraying ritual and expected the seeds to sprout again in a month's time. "What else are we going to do?" Virtually every family in town continues to grow coca, even though they say planes have sprayed their crops at least five times in the past five years.
Coca farming persists in La Balsa because selling the plant remains practically the only way to make a living. In fact, farmers told me the aggressive spraying campaign actually encourages them to continue cultivating the illegal crop because it makes them dependent on coca profits to buy basic food staples. This is because the planes' toxic herbicides, in addition to hitting coca plants, often kill off less-resistant legal crops such as plantains, cassava, and sugar cane -- the community's main sources of food. Even aside from that risk, producing legal crops is a losing prospect here because there is no infrastructure to make transporting them to the cities cost effective. "So what else can you do to give your little kids something to eat?" asked Uber Buila, who runs a small laboratory near the town's entrance where villagers use gasoline and acid to turn coca leaf into coca base, the first stage of cocaine production. "The government should find another method of eradicating coca."
More:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12660 
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