Dying for the white stuff

Eradication campaigns have driven traffickers deeper into Colombia's national parks. Picture / Reuters

Of the thousand shades of green that wash the hills of Tayron National Park the lightest is the coca leaf.

Seen from the air, mud trails spread like yellow veins into the forest, each ending in burnt black scars. These clearances give way to dense coca fields as the growers move deeper into the primary forest, hacking and slashing as they go. Cocaine labs speckle the high ground, hoisted on stilts and wrapped in black polythene against the rain.

These hills that rise out of the Caribbean Sea near Santa Marta in northern Colombia are the latest front in a losing battle to stop the "white stuff" that's arriving in ever greater quantities into the West.

While Europeans are turning in record numbers to cocaine for recreational purposes, Colombia's environment and its people are paying the price. The country has been left with three million internal refugees from drug-fuelled conflicts; a rapidly diminishing rainforest; the worst landmine problem in the world; and indigenous tribes driven from their homelands deep in the Amazon. Eradication campaigns have driven the narco-traffickers deeper into the protected national parks, where the spraying planes are barred from going.

Thirty-five years into the US-funded "War on Drugs" and supply of the industrial world's favourite stimulant remains steady. In Bogota, Sandro Calvani, head of the UN's Drugs and Serious Crime unit said eradication was simply making the traffickers better at farming.

"In the past five years there's been a significant reduction in hectarage ... But the narco-traffickers have responded by caring for the coca plant better. They're treating them like tea plants."

The logic of Washington's war is to limit demand by choking the supply line. Billions of Washington dollars have been spent every year on spraying tens of thousands of hectares with herbicides but there has been little impact on the street value of cocaine, according to this year's US State Department narcotics report.

"This is a global problem," says Colombia's Vice-President Francisco Santos Calderon. "On the supply and the demand sides there is a shared responsibility."

The Latin American country that has become synonymous with the supposedly glamorous drug is trying to tell the world that snorting a line of coke is killing a Colombian.

Despite its relative stability - Colombia has avoided the coups and dictatorships rife in Latin America - the country has been blighted by four decades of internal conflict. The "white stuff" has complicated efforts to find a peace.

Today, the fighting still rages between the right-wing government and the leftist guerrillas, the Farc. A third force of right-wing paramilitaries, the AUC, is in a flawed process of demobilisation that has been heavily criticised by human rights groups. In the background of each of these battles, paying for the weapons and fuelling the fighting is cocaine.

Colombia's rich earth is also its curse. The mix of nutrients and minerals allow it to grow four of the five variants of the coca plant - the raw material for the "dandruff of the Andes". For centuries the indigenous people chewed its green leaves to combat everything from toothache to altitude sickness.

That was until a German scientist, Friedrich Gaedcke isolated the cocaine alkaloid in 1855. The new wonder drug promised a bright future with applications ranging from soft drinks to anaesthetics. Its fans included Sigmund Freud and Pope Leo XIII, purported to carry a hip flask of cocaine-based Mariani wine with him. That came to an end with a moral panic in pre-World War I America, based on the spurious assertion of a cocaine epidemic among black Americans in the deep south led to prohibition. Criminalisation followed.

On the streets of London, Sydney or New York "blow" might mean an addiction; a lost job; or worse, a lost loved one. In Colombia, which produces 80 per cent of the world's supply, it has helped to pay for a conflict that kills as many as 3000 every year.

Colombia is home to a disproportionate percentage of the world's biodiversity. But satellite images taken this year show that coca plantations have cut into 13 of Colombia's 51 national reserves.

"They know we're not allowed to spray in the parks," says anti-narcotic police's Major Fernando Lopez. In La Macarena reserve south of Bogota the biggest manual eradication effort is under way. The work is arduous and extremely dangerous. The military has assigned 3000 personnel to guard 70 workers. "We thought it would take 130 days to do it but after a month we have cleared just 1000ha," said Major Lopez.

In the past three weeks alone, more than a dozen police have been killed by guerrillas. The Farc has taken to booby-trapping coca plants with landmines.

Turf wars between the government, cartels, guerrillas and paramilitaries mean an epidemic of land mines.

Almost 5000 people have been killed or mutilated by these explosives since 1990, says Luspiedad Herrera, the director of Colombia's landmine observatory. "Many of them are made of plastic to avoid detection and disguised as toys," she said.

This random violence and territorial conflict has driven entire communities out of rural areas and into Colombia's chaotic cities. Unofficial estimates put the number of displaced people at over three million, an internal refugee crisis rivalled only by the Congo.

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