FAILED 'PLAN'

But despite all the bullish spin coming out of Bogota and Washington, Plan Colombia has failed in most categories of the war on drugs. The crackdown on coca farming in Putumayo had the effect of dispersing growers: the number of departments where the plant is cultivated has risen from a dozen five years ago to 20 today. The total amount of acreage planted with coca may be down nationwide, but the supply of cocaine clearly hasn't been disrupted: seizures jumped by 50 percent in 2004, and the purity of wholesale cocaine in the U.S. market, which gets 80 percent of its product from Colombia, has increased in recent years. The complete absence of a spike in the price of either cocaine or the coca base used to make the drug has dumbfounded U.S. officials. "This is a source of frustration," admitted U.S. Ambassador to Colombia William Wood in a guest column published in the news magazine Cambio last January. "There is much that we don't know about drug trafficking."

The law of diminishing returns may be undermining aerial fumigation, the main weapon in Plan Colombia's anti-drug arsenal. As coca fields become smaller and more scattered in response to the spraying campaign, the task of reaching those crops by air has become more costly and inefficient. The anti-narcotics police fumigated a record 136,555 hectares of coca in 2004, but the State Department actually reported a negligible rise in the total amount of acreage under cultivation. Some attribute the paradox to sharply increased crop yields and possible underestimates of the amount of land that is really being planted. "[Colombian officials] must feel frustrated because a lot of the places where they sprayed heavily increased [production] in 2004," notes Adam Isacson, head of the Colombia program at the Washington-based Center for International Policy research organization. "[The growers] will replant coca, which they've done time and time again."

Isacson and other critics say Plan Colombia should redirect the bulk of its resources toward promoting alternative economic-development schemes that give farmers incentives to abandon coca and building more infrastructure to improve their market access for legal crops like yucca and sugar. But that isn't likely to happen any time soon. The head of aerial-fumigation operations at the Colombian anti-narcotics police says he wants an additional six spraying planes and 10 more helicopters to go with the 17 fixed-wing aircraft and 26 helicopters already furnished under Plan Colombia. "We need more aircraft so we can fumigate those crops at least twice a year," says Lt. Col. Henry Gamboa. "We eliminate one harvest with a spraying operation, but each field of coca has the potential to produce at least four harvests each year." If the history of Plan Colombia is anything to go by, the men in uniform will be standing at the head of line when the next batch of U.S. anti-drug assistance is handed out.

© 2005