By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Nov 14 2003 (IPS)

Plan Colombia is being called into question due to its failure to reduce illegal drug crops and thus deal a blow to what is considered the main source of financing for paramilitary and guerrilla groups.

The multi-billion dollar strategy of U.S. military intervention and financing aimed at eliminating drug crops, which was launched four years ago by then-president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002), was originally drafted in English at the White House.

The aim was to reduce the inflow of drugs into the United States, the world’s biggest market for narcotics, while strengthening Colombia’s armed forces in their fight against the leftist rebels.

The strategy has included the spraying of illegal crops and a crackdown on drug trafficking to weaken the financing of the insurgents and force them to negotiate in conditions that would be more favourable to the government, besides destroying the guerrillas’ social support base in rural areas.

But after four years, Plan Colombia has not led to a reduction in the land planted in coca or opium poppies, despite the U.S. aid to the military and the police that has amounted to nearly 1.4 million dollars a day over that period, said Adam Isaacson, coordinator of the Washington, D.C.-based Centre for International Policy’s Colombia programme.

Isaacson, a senior policy analyst at the Centre who has spent six years studying the relations between Colombia and the United States, was one of the speakers at a seminar on ”Plan Colombia – No: Impacts of Fumigation”, which ended Friday in Bogota.

”No one in Washington is talking about Plan Colombia anymore,” said the analyst.

That also seems to be the case in the Uribe government. This week, the director of Plan Colombia, Sandra Suárez, was named environment minister, and the Plan Colombia office was merged with two other government agencies.

In fact, the official name ”Plan Colombia” is being phased out, apparently as a sign of its failure.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main rebel group, which is of peasant origin, and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) have been waging an armed struggle against the Colombian state since 1964.

The two groups, which according to military sources have a combined total of around 25,000 combatants, announced in July that they would act together against the government of right-wing President Alvaro Uribe, one of the United States’ closest allies in Latin America.

During the era of the ”iron curtain”, Colombia’s guerrillas supported themselves on ”Moscow gold”; when the White House began to wage its ”war on drugs”, the insurgents were dubbed ”narco-guerrillas” by the United States; and now, the rebels are ”terrorist groups” who finance themselves with drug revenues, said Isaacson.

”This is the only case in the world where a guerrilla group has remained up-to-date over decades: communists, narco-traffickers, or terrorists – they are always in fashion,” he remarked.

In the meantime, the drug trade, seen as the rebel groups’ main source of financing, is still going strong despite optimistic reports by the Colombian police, the U.S. State Department, and even the United Nations Drug Control Programme on the reduction of plantations of illicit crops.

One element that refutes such reports is the fact that the price of drugs paid by consumers is not increasing.

”We know that spraying in one area merely makes the crops appear in another,” said Isaacson, who recalled ”a basic law of unfettered capitalism: when there is enormous demand, everything possible will be done to satisfy it.

”If the offer had fallen, we would have seen an increase in the price of drugs, as well as in the value of basic cocaine paste in southern Colombia,” he said.

But the statistics of the U.S. government itself ”indicate that the sale prices of cocaine and heroin on the streets of our cities have not risen. One gram of cocaine is still worth between 50 and 150 dollars,” he added.

Aerial spraying of drug crops has been carried out in Colombia since 1986. But Plan Colombia has intensified the use of the technique, and 400,000 hectares have been fumigated with the herbicide glyphosate in operations headed by advisers hired by the Pentagon.

Experts of different nationalities have demonstrated that the cultivation of drug crops migrates, not just from one area to another, but from one country to another, when eradication efforts begin to heat up.

Isaacson pointed out that not only are drug crops currently grown in nine regions of Colombia, but cultivation is increasing again in Bolivia and Peru.

Nor has another of Plan Colombia’s objectives been met: restoring government control over coca and poppy-growing regions.

On the contrary, Plan Colombia’s military action ”has fuelled an expansion of the presence and violent actions” of the guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups, Marcela Ceballos with the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a local non-governmental organisation, said in the seminar.

The irregular armed groups have gained a monopoly over huge extensions of territory, she said.

While drug consumption levels have held steady, the spraying has spelled hunger for around 200,000 peasant families in Colombia whose sole livelihood depends on the cultivation of drug crops, and who have no other economic alternative.

Ricardo Vargas, with the non-governmental think-tank Acción Andina, said ”Plan Colombia focuses on reducing the cultivated areas while ignoring the social and economic dimensions.”

Vargas explained that ”it takes years to implement crop substitution programmes (one of Plan Colombia’s stated goals), while the impact of spraying is immediate.”

The epicentre of Plan Colombia, which was first adopted by Pastrana and has been continued by Uribe since he took office in August 2002, is the southern department of Putumayo, an isolated area on the border with Ecuador, where 79 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, compared to 37.6 percent nationally.

The spraying in Putumayo began in 2000. But since January 2001, 678,600 litres of glyphosate have reportedly been dropped on 29,000 hectares of illegal crops in that department, in a concentration higher than the one used commercially.

A total of 150,000 hectares were fumigated last year in Colombia, with 3.5 million litres of herbicide. To reach this year’s goal of 200,000 hectares, 4.6 million litres are to be used.

The Catholic University in neighbouring Ecuador recently published a study backed by the Office of the People’s Defender (ombudsman), showing the results of examinations by the genetics laboratory of blood samples from 22 women – 10 Ecuadorians and 12 Colombians – who live along the border between the two countries.

The study found that the women, who have been exposed to spraying since 2001, have suffered serious damages to their genetic material.

In 10 percent of the cases the damages are irreversible, while the rest of the women face a higher risk of miscarriage, giving birth to deformed babies, infertility and contracting chronic diseases or cancer in the six months to a year after exposure to glyphosate.

Ecuador has asked Colombia to stop spraying along the border. Last week, indigenous and social movements in Ecuador asked United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was on a visit to that country, to include a similar request to Colombia on the agenda of the U.N. general assembly.

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