FEATUREColombian drug measures seen
swelling rebel ranks

BOGOTA, Reuters [WS] : Colombia's crackdown on illegal drug
plantations is forcing peasants to flee their land and join the ranks
of Marxist guerrillas, a U.S.based human rights group says.

The independent Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) says
Colombia's U.S.backed drug eradication policy going handinhand
with counterinsurgency operations and widespread violation of human
rights is doing ``more harm than good.''

The police and army, which share a drug enforcement role, have long
accused leftist rebels, especially the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC), of drug trafficking. They also accuse the guerrillas
of whipping up social unrest in the main cocagrowing regions,
including last year's peasant marches in southern Colombia to protest
government programs to eradicate coca leaf crops the raw material
for cocaine.

``Colombia's fumigation program is ... forcing people to move deeper
into the jungle to grow coca, swelling the ranks of the FARC and
generating a socioeconomic crisis which only favors the FARC and
marginalizes the government even more,'' WOLA researcher Coletta
Youngers told Reuters in an interview.

Colombia's drug crop fumigation program is the most ambitious in
Latin America. Last year authorities sprayed more than 44,500 acres
(18,000 hectares) of coca leaf and 9,900 acres (4,000 hectares) of
opium poppy.

THIN LINE BETWEEN DRUG FIGHT AND COUNTERINSURGENCY

Many peasants in remote areas claim they have no alternative to
growing coca leaf since poor infrastructure means they are unable to
get traditional crops to market or sell them for a fair price. Drug
traffickers make regular trips to such areas to buy the raw material
for their trade.

Washington has given some $80 million in counternarcotics funding to
Colombia's police and army this year, together with a multimillion
dollar package of equipment and material aid.

``Antidrug operations in Guaviare and other cocagrowing regions are
linked to a counterinsurgency campaign characterized by continuous
and serious human rights violations,'' said Youngers, who recently
returned from a factfinding mission to Guaviare province.

Local authorities in neighboring Caqueta, a stronghold of the FARC's
Southern Bloc and one of the country's major cocagrowing regions,
claim the military is using the cover of counternarcotics operations
to destroy entire communities suspected of serving as guerrilla
support bases.

President Ernesto Samper temporarily demilitarized a huge swath of
Caqueta in June to allow FARC guerrillas to free 70 troops, some of
whom had been captured in a humiliating battle more than nine months
earlier. Since then the army has put a stranglehold on supplies of
fuel and cement, both used in the preliminary stages of cocaine
manufacture, in the region.

Jaime Ramirez, who sells gasoline (petrol) in Cartagena del Chaira,
the jungle town that briefly shot to prominence when the FARC handed
over the captive troops in a public ceremony there, said the army had
cut his supplies to less than one eighth of previous levels.

MILITARY DEFENDS STRICT MEASURES

Gen. Agustin Ardila, head of the army's Fourth Division, which
operates in eastern and southern Colombia, defended the strict
measures. ``We have severely restricted the traffic of cocaine and
each day we're putting more troops into the area to hit at the
financial base of the narcoFARC,'' he told Reuters. ``The peasants
in these areas have always been under the influence of the FARC.''

Other army sources estimated the cut in fuel supplies had stemmed as
much as 70 percent of the cocaine trade in the area most of which
they say is controlled by the FARC.

Ardila said similar restrictions had driven out drug traffickers and
coca growers from Miraflores, in Guaviare, which he described as an
``international cocaine paradise.'' He said the moves had led to a
drop in the population there from more than 10,000 to less than 1,200
in just a year.

Victor Oime, mayor of Cartagena del Chaira, who recently traveled to
Bogota to demand an end to the army restrictions, said drug
traffickers were still smuggling their own supplies into Caqueta via
alternative routes.

But he said the measures had had a drastic effect on river transport,
virtually the only way in and out of the region, and on fuel
available to power electricity generators, water pumps, domestic
stoves and rudimentary agricultural equipment.

``The situation in Cartagena and lower down the Caguan River is
critical. The only thing the military is doing with these measures is
destroying the community and (it) threatens to kill those people who
fight for the social rights of the population,'' Oime told Reuters.

He said that if the government did not lift the measures people may
be forced to stage new mass marches similiar to the coca growers
protests last year, which ended in violence and even deaths.

``Instead of just letting us fall right back into the same state of
neglect they have turned us into a military objective,'' another
local official, who did not wish to be named, told Reuters. REUTER@

[Copyright 1997, Reuters]