Plan Colombia

For five centuries, Colombia has been a home for smugglers. Throughout the country's history the commodities have changed from gold to narcotics, but Colombia's difficult geography(towering mountains, dense jungles, and a smuggler's delight of coastson both the Pacific and the Caribbean) and ineffective governments have conspired to sink the country into a morass of illicit trade.

Over the last decade, however, the problem has worsened. As cocaproduction was successfully cut down in Peru and Bolivia, Colombiancocaine runners, who had been concerned almost solely with refiningthe raw materials, began to grow their own coca. In addition, annualheroin production in Colombia, once negligible, skyrocketed tothe point where the country now supplies most of the American fix.

Finally, and most significantly, the death of the powerful Cali and Medellin drug cartels left a vacuum at the top of the narcotrafficking food chain. Filling that void are the leftist FARC guerrillas and the right-wing AUC paramilitaries, two of the main groups waging Colombia's civil war. Once the enemies of drug traffickers, the fighters now tax the trade to finance their murderous military campaigns. In response, the Colombian government developed Plan Colombia, a five-year, $7.5-billion program for coca eradication and social development. The front lines of this war are drawn in Putumayo, a fertile patch in southern Colombia where green fields of coca blanket the rolling hills. In 2000, the Colombian government, with significant support from the United States, began a program of aerial eradication of coca fields in Putumayo, while promising support to any farmers who willingly eradicate their own coca crops. The first year of Plan Colombia was marked by severe criticism of the fumigation campaign and the continuing belief among Colombian peasants that the government is failing to look after them as promised.

A farmer in Arauca, a region in southern Colombia's Putumayo department, walks through a coca field where new plants are growing on land that was fumigated during the first year of Plan Colombia. The farmer said that the plants that grow back on the fumigated plots are substandard, and they appear to produce fewer and smaller leaves. He believed that even if he switched to a legal crop, the ground would be unable to support good crops.

A woman and her young son work as raspachines--literally, "scrapers"--in a coca field in southern Colombia.

A raspachine wraps his fingers in cloth tape before he sets to work harvesting the bright green leaves of coca plants by grasping the branches a the base and ripping the leaves off in one swift motion.

A bag of coca leaves from a field in southern Colombia. The colors of the bag--yellow, red, and blue stripes--are the Colombian national colors.

Coca leaves start to become cocaine in wooden, open-air shacks like this one in southern Colombia's Putumayo department. The leaves are chopped with weed trimmers or other tools, and then the active ingredients are leached out with gasoline. The gasoline is siphoned out of the barrels and run through twice more before the leaves are discarded in slag heaps behind the lab.

Farmers collect coca precipitate in a piece of cloth to wring as much of the liquid from it as possible.

Nearing the end of their part in the cocaine process, farmers siphon a liquid mix from which they will extract a coca precipitate to send to "the kitchens" to be crystallized into cocaine powder.

A farmer collects coca base into a ball he will sell for 2-3 million pesos (about $1000 - 1500 US) per kilogram. The farmer said it takes about 1.3 kilos of the base to refine into 1 kilo of cocaine powder, which sells in the United States for $30,000 to $40,000.

A campesino (peasant farmer) and his daughter pick up supplies for a new chicken co-op, courtesy of Fundaempresa, one of several corporations charged with doling out government assistance...