The Truth About Plan Colombia.(International Edition; WORLD AFFAIRS)

Byline: Adam B. Kushner

The U.S.-backed war on drugs is failing, as coca traffickers stay one step ahead of Uribe.

By some measures Alvaro Uribe is the world's most successful head of state. Since taking office in 2002, the president of Colombia has routed the ELN terrorist group, broken the FARC guerrillas, demobilized their right-wing paramilitary foes and made Colombia's cities safe again. Homicides are down 40 percent nationwide since his term began, and economic growth is up, from just 2.5 percent in 2002 to 8.2 percent in 2007. Result: 66 percent of Colombians approve of Uribe even during a global financial catastrophe --down from the 80s a few months ago--the highest of any president in a democracy. U.S. policymakers have also hailed Uribe: President George W. Bush has feted his "determination to rid the country of narcotrafficking."

Determination is not, however, enough to win the war on drugs. Since 2000, the United States has sent more than $6 billion to Bogota to help Uribe and his predecessor stabilize the Andean region, stanch the flow of drugs into America's cities and cut drug production. In what is known as Plan Colombia, Washington sent pilots and choppers to Colombia, trained commandos and furnished weapons to fight traffickers and terrorists. For his part, Uribe and his predecessor raised the military budget from 4 to 6 percent of the national GDP. But instead of cutting drug production in half by 2006, as Plan Colombia intended, the acreage of land dedicated to coca cultivation is up 15 percent since 2000 and now yields 4 percent more cocaine than it did eight years ago. An October report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, an oversight agency, says Plan Colombia's goals "have not been fully achieved."

To a certain extent, Uribe is struggling against impossible odds. Colombia's south, home to its most fertile coca fields, is bigger than France and many of its scarcely populated jungles remain unexplored by cartographers--or police. Such tough terrain is made for coca. With few roads suitable for trucking, it becomes extremely expensive to transport coffee or some other crop to market, and there's only so much a supplier can charge for a kilo of coffee beans. But narcotraffickers have at their disposal a network of illegal airlifts, jungle runners and riverboats to move cocaine from the local "cook" (workshops are located near the fields) to international traffickers in Venezuela and on the Pacific Coast. As a business proposition, shipping small volumes of expensive goods (a kilo of cocaine can fetch up to $175,000 in some markets) is infinitely more sensible than shipping vast volumes of cheap commodities. Daniel Mejia, an economist at Los Andes University in Bogota, figures the annual profit on a hectare of coffee is $500, compared with $5,000 for coca.

Moreover, the difficult geography means that 70 percent of crop eradication--the backbone of Plan Colombia's antidrug strategy--must be done by air. Perry Holloway, a U.S. diplomat who coordinates eradication efforts from the embassy in Bogota, says less than 0.2 percent of Colombian land is taken up by coca crops, but the plants are seeded in narrow slivers lodged between produce and vast tracts of jungle. Some farmers have figured out they can avoid airborne crop-eradication efforts by cloaking the coca beneath other vegetation, like beans. Rafael Pardo, one of 11 candidates for president in next year's election, says eight years ago authorities fumigated three hectares of land to eliminate one hectare of coca; now they need to target more than 20.

Meanwhile, the fragmenting drug trade makes crackdowns even tougher. Before Uribe became president, the drug trade was managed by three vertically integrated groups that controlled every aspect of the business, often through violence, intimidation and bribery. After years of intense battle, the government broke them up in the ...