Into the Breach.(war against drug trade)

First, Jose Argati heard the low rumble of the engines. Soon five light aircraft appeared low in the skies above his farm. Accompanied by Army helicopters, the crop dusters doused Argati's cornfields with herbicide. After four runs over his property in Colombia's southern Putumayo province, 17 acres of corn withered into a wasteland. But like most farmers at the epicenter of Colombia's booming cocaine economy, Argati was in no position to play the innocent victim: he had been growing five acres of bright green coca bushes alongside his banana and plantain trees. Still, the grizzled 56-year-old peasant cursed Colombian authorities. "We didn't get to taste a single kernel," he said, plucking a shriveled ear of corn. "The worst enemy of the small farmer is the government, and in particular President [Andres] Pastrana. He wants to finish us off."

Argati and his fellow coca farmers are on the front line of a war that is likely to grow a lot more deadly. Last year the Clinton administration approved a $1.3 billion aid package to bolster the Pastrana government's Plan Colombia, aimed at halving Colombia's drug production in the next four years. Some of that money is paying for up to 200 U.S. Special Forces troops training the Colombian Army's new anti-drug battalions, and the biggest chunk will be spent on supplying those troops with Blackhawk and UH-1N (Bell) helicopters. The Bush administration shows no signs of heeding critics of the aid, who charge that Washington will inevitably be dragged into Bogota's 37-year-old war with leftist guerrillas. The largest rebel force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), is heavily involved in the drug trade, raking in an estimated $1 million a day. And as Army troops wade into FARC-controlled areas, hundreds of civilians will get caught in the cross-fire.

Using the first tranche of American cash and training, Colombian police and soldiers are in the first stages of an all-out assault on the coca fields of Putumayo. The offensive began with the aerial spraying of coca bushes in the Guamuez River valley in mid-December, and Army officials promise to attack all drug labs and farms in areas that are controlled by the guerrillas or their archenemies, a right-wing paramilitary group called the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. Code- named Operation Emperor, the security forces' joint air and land offensive targets "industrial scale" coca plantations of at least five acres. Says Col. Roberto Trujillo, the commander of the U.S.-trained battalions operating in Putumayo: "It doesn't matter to me whether they are FARC, paramilitary forces or drug traffickers."

But the people suffering the brunt of the government's campaign so far have been the peasants of Putumayo. The remote province is home to an estimated 170,000 acres of coca, making it the world's largest source of the plant that yields cocaine. Doctors in the cocaine-trafficking town of La Hormiga have treated six rural patients who complained of vomiting, headaches and dizziness after they were exposed to airborne doses of the herbicide glyphosate, used by the government's crop dusters. Some peasant families claim to be running low on food stocks after losing their banana and yucca crops to the ravaging effects of the herbicide. Eight provincial governors have called for an immediate halt to spraying. "The indiscriminate fumigation has plunged us into a crisis," says La Hormiga Mayor Edmundo Meza. "Even the cattle are going hungry because the herbicide dries out the pasture."

Senior police officials vehemently deny that their planes are recklessly spraying food crops. "We [fumigate] with precision, responsibility and respect for the farmers," says Brig. Gen. Gustavo Socha, the head of the national police's anti-narcotics division. Nonetheless, opposition to Plan Colombia is spreading fast among locals--and not just among the farmers.

Coca is the lifeblood of Putumayo. Everyone makes a buck off the drug trade, from the itinerant workers who come from other parts of the country to harvest coca to the merchants who sell the precursor chemicals used to produce powder cocaine. The 600 right-wing militiamen who moved into Putumayo two years ago to do battle with FARC also benefit. In El Placer, one of the hardscrabble towns where the paramilitary fighters have ousted the guerrillas in recent months, a senior commander named Gavilan told NEWSWEEK that the monthly income from drug-related taxes amounts to about $150,000.

Police officials ...