They've been growing coca for the past two decades. Waves of drug mafiosi, then paramilitary bosses, now guerrilla have reaped power and money from the region's farmers. Now the Colombian government has moved in with 3,000 eradicators and a security escort of 1,800 national police. The plan is to rip up coca plants one by one. In response, thousands of growers have gathered in the region's towns to protest, reports El Tiempo today. They've been disrupting traffic on the main coastal highway, shaking down cars, and letting local municipal governments know that they won't give up a long-standing livelihood without a fight.
Eradication has already taken the lives of 30 men, most dramatically in the Macarena National Park, through 2006. (Visit the Colombian National Parks website and find the strangely ominous "undefined" in the sections covering descriptions and visitor's guides.) Eradicators there were ambushed by guerrilla and injured by mines; they expect the same welcome as they move into this new front in Northeastern Colombia, where by UN accounts, 23 percent of the coca fields targeted for eradication are located.
What's really going on? Peel back the layers and find rumors that the strikes are being led by the 18th division of the FARC, under alias "Ramon Ruiz." Peel some more and find that aerial spraying, which had been occurring in the region from time immemorial, had settled recently into a once-a-year rate, allowing for three good three-month harvests before a replanting of sprayed crops. Eradication undercuts this deal by leaving peasants to bridge too long of a season without income. The structures are in place for providing replacement crops of cocoa or coffee, or simply paying off former growers as "family park rangers" to the tune of US$157 a month for two months until they get on their feet. The growers counter with a demand for a two-year window of unobstructed coca growing for "paying off debts." The government replies that it doesn't negotiate with illicit product. The bloody tally begins: 9,000 hectares by March 30, promises the national police; one police shot dead and 8 workers blown to bits by a mined coca plant so far.
The Colombia of president Alvaro Uribe currently has nearly 7,000 peasants on eradication detail, earning US$300 a month for plodding through minefields to force a destitute population of farmers into growing something significantly less lucrative than what they've lived off of for decades. The stated goal is to pull up 100,000 hectares (386 square miles) of coca. The operation will cost the government, subsidized by the US's Plan Colombia of military and economic aid, US$26.2 million. Some 120,000 Colombian families live off of coca.
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