Rethinking Plan Colombia: some ways to fix it

Europe says it opposes aerial eradication on environmental grounds and extols the alternative development option. "The US does not have enough faith in alternative development, and the Europeans have faith, but do very little," says Calvani.

Increasingly, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe himself has also voiced criticism of the eradication focus and begun calling for a more "multidimensional approach."

"We cannot disconnect alternative development from this war," he said last week, speaking to the Colombian American Association in New York. "It is necessary to eliminate crops, yes. But we need to combine this with options, and with better access to markets," he said.

Mr. Uribe's administration is lobbying for Colombia to be reclassified as a US "strategic partner" in the war on drugs – a move that would give Bogotá greater control of where money was spent.

If awarded this freedom, he would, for example, suggest expanding the Forest Warden Families program that pays farmers monthly stipends in return for keeping their land free of illicit crops. "We have 43,000 families looking after 1.7 million hectares. In that area, coca production has fallen 80 percent and we have recovered 236,000 hectares of forest where coca was being grown," said Uribe last week. "The results are spectacular."

The continued US focus on aerial spraying, despite questionable results, has to do in part with who's in charge of the drug fight, admits one State Department official. Development and social experts have, historically, been far less involved and listened to, she claims, speaking off the record because she is not authorized to discuss the subject. The defense and security voices – with their more combat-oriented approach – have the upper hand, she notes.

The post-Sept. 11 discourse used by President Bush and adopted by Uribe (including rechristening narcotraffickers and guerrillas as narcoterrorists) has made it even harder to replace "hard" measures with softer ones. The US political cycle also plays a part in drug-fighting methods, adds Bruce Bagley, an expert on drug trafficking at the University of Miami. "No one in the US wants to look 'soft' on drugs, and nothing looks tougher than spraying hundreds of thousands of hectares of coca fields," he says. "Talking about [alternative] development won't get you re-elected."

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The second school of criticism wants to take the drug-war debate off Colombian soil. These critics say the solutions lie on the side of drug consumption, not production. The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group, argues for dedicating more funds toward drug prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation programs in the US – and for scaling back altogether on programs aimed at stopping the supply of drugs from Colombia. US treatment programs, in particular, have been proven effective. They cite a 1994 RAND Corp. study that found that if the goal was to reduce cocaine use in the US, treatment of heavy cocaine users was 23 times more cost-effective than drug-crop eradication and other source-country programs, and three times more effective than mandatory minimum sentencing.

But only about 17 percent of Americans who needed treatment for an illicit drug use problem in 2004 received it, because of prohibitive costs, insurance limits, or other barriers, according to WOLA.

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