Plan Colombia: Big gains, but cocaine still flows
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Uribe's government, meanwhile, is being criticized for allowing some top drug traffickers to avoid extradition by surrendering themselves as part of the government's peace deal with the paramilitaries. And the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in turn, may have been pushed into more remote zones - but they are estimated to still be earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year from their involvement in the drug trade.
There is no lack, after all, of coca. Despite the unprecedented eradication efforts, coca cultivation actually increased last year by 8 percent, according to a study released in June by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). More significantly, the amount of cocaine being produced from coca leaves is also increasing. According to DNE, Colombia produced 776 metric tons of cocaine last year, 231 more than previous US estimates, and enough to supply almost 80 percent of the world market.
Why? Growing techniques have improved over the years and farmers in some regions are now able to harvest coca leaf six times a year, instead of the usual four harvests, according to UNODC. Also, aerial spraying has pushed farmers to smaller, more isolated plots deeper in the countryside, making spray operations more complicated and less effective. While coca was concentrated in three provinces at the start of Plan Colombia, today, it has spread to at least 23 of the country's 32 provinces.
This geographical expansion also feeds a different problem, explains Pablo Casas, a security expert at the Security and Democracy Foundation in Bogotá. In the past, counternarcotics work was concentrated in a few areas, he says, but "everyone touches drugs now. Which means there are more police, military, and local authorities for the narcos to try to corrupt."
Even worse - as far as Washington is concerned - is that the most expensive US foreign aid program outside the Middle East has apparently failed to significantly change the availability, price, or quality of cocaine on American streets.
The question of cost and purity of street cocaine in the US remains contentious, due both to methods of gathering statistics, and ways in which those statistics are interpreted. When the White House drug czar's office announced last November that the price of a gram of cocaine was slightly higher (a sign of less availability), it was quickly attacked with statistics showing the opposite.
Sen. Charles Grassley, (R) of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, in an April letter to Walters, even suggested the White House was selecting data to paint "a rosier, but not necessarily more accurate, picture" of the achievements of Plan Colombia.
Most sides to the debate agree however with the findings of the 2005 US National Survey on Drug Use and Health released this month. The study shows youth rates of cocaine use have fallen slightly since 2002 - but the number of first-time users is up, as are the number of hard-core addicts. Overall, according to the survey, levels of cocaine use and addiction are at least as high as they were in 2000.
"We need a new a new approach to drug policy," says John Walsh, a drug policy expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group. "A reevaluation is long overdue."
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Gomez quit the police force when she got married and lost interest, over time, in the drug war shop talk. But Murillo, her husband, remained a member of the counternarcotics unit, and "he loved being part of the big game ...working with the Americans," she says.
Once, she says, he called her from San Diego, Calif., where he was testifying in a big case. "He was so excited. He felt he was doing something important," she remembers.
In the year before his death, Gomez admits, they had begun to argue a lot. He would say he was going to do something with her and the kids, and would be called away by the unit. He would promise to call, and then be out of touch. When he missed their sixth wedding anniversary because of a drug operation, she had just about had enough: "Tell your Gringo masters I want my husband back!" she had screeched down the phone line.
They talked of separating. She berates herself most now for not telling him she still loved him, the last time they spoke.
Lately, after speaking out in the press against the Colombian military, Gomez has been receiving menacing phone calls late at night. "Prepare coffins for the rest of the family," a muffled voice told her last week.
She is scared to take the kids to the park across the street. She rarely goes out herself. "If I could just speak to Carlos one more time, I would tell him I was never angry with him," she says. "I was just angry with the way everything was being done... I would tell him we needed to do it over again, differently."
THE WAR ON DRUGS: PART 2
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