By Karl Penhaul

BOGOTA (Reuter) 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 of coca leaf
and 9,900 acres 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 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.