Venezuela a growing source of narcotics

By Mike Ceaser THE WASHINGTON TIMES

     PERIJA MOUNTAINS, Venezuela — Illegal drug cultivation is said to be increasing amid these dark green mountains since Venezuela's abandonment more than a year ago of its eradication program.      The Perija range, which straddles the Colombian border near the Caribbean coast, has long been a source of concern for drug-control officials because its steep, remote slopes offer prime conditions for cultivating and hiding illicit crops.      For more than a decade, the Venezuelan military with United States cooperation carried out annual eradication campaigns involving hundreds of soldiers who chopped down and yanked out clandestine fields of marijuana, opium poppies and coca, the raw material for cocaine.      But last year, as Venezuela experienced social and political upheaval including an aborted military-led coup in April, the country carried out no eradication.      "[The mountains] are full" of drug crops, said a national guardsman in the town of Machiques who participated in past eradications but requested anonymity. "The places we destroyed have regrown."      In fact, drug acreage in Venezuela is tiny compared with the numbers in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, long centers of illegal drug exports. In 2001, Venezuela eradicated 117 acres of coca and 96 acres of poppy crops, while the other three eliminated tens of thousands of acres. Still, nobody is certain how much illegal drug cultivation exists in Venezuela, since it has no monitoring program.      In 2002, Colombia's eradication program, part of the U.S.-funded $1.9 billion Plan Colombia, achieved its first-ever coca-acreage reduction, cutting coca cultivation there by 15 percent. But the advance was partially nullified by higher output in Peru and Bolivia.      For critics of drug eradication, the shift of cultivation to other countries is the inevitable "balloon effect," in which a reduction in one place encourages production elsewhere. Small coca plots have also been discovered in Ecuador.      "You can achieve a short-term reduction in a limited area ... but it pops up somewhere else," said Adam Isaacson, who directs the Colombia program at the Center for International Policy in Washington.      Though there are no numbers on illegal drug acreage in Venezuela, recent reports agree that plantings in the Perija range have increased.      The U.S. State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report for 2002, issued last month, said that during the 2001 eradication effort, coca fields as large as 20 acres were found in the Perija range for the first time. Also, the report said, "three cocaine base labs in this region were discovered for the first time ever in Venezuela, indicating what could be a troubling new trend."      Cesar Romero, a ranger in Perija Mountains National Park, said that in the last few years rangers have more frequently encountered drug cultivation during patrols. Last September, he stumbled onto a harvested poppy field covering about six acres.      "It is increasing," he said.      Like other areas where drug cultivation has flourished, the Perija mountains are lawless and impoverished. Except for occasional military patrols, the central government is nearly absent. The poor inhabitants have few saleable crops, since fruits and vegetables would spoil during the long mule trips to towns.      State lawmaker Javier Armata, who represents the Yupa tribe in the legislature of Zulia, which contains the Perija range, said Colombian guerrillas pay indigenous people with cash, food and medicine for planting drugs.      "[The guerrillas] say drug planting is the best way to earn money," said Mr. Armata. Still, according to military officers and news reports, most drug cultivation in the mountains is done by Colombian peasants.      While Colombia's eradication has sharply reduced drug acreage in its southwest, coca farming has surged in the east, bordering Venezuela. And Colombia's political violence has sent thousands of peasants, some of them drug farmers, fleeing to Venezuela seeking refuge. There are also reports of drug cultivation on Venezuela's flatlands south of the Perija range.      Gen. Alberto Jose Gutierrez, commander of an infantry division whose responsibility includes part of the Perija range, predicted that Plan Colombia would lead guerrilla groups to move to Venezuela.      "They will try to enter our territory," he said. "But we have taken measures. We have our frontier posts."      Gen. Gutierrez said the government's eradication program had ended before his transfer to the region and that he did not know the reason why. The military's central command in Caracas did not respond to requests for comment.      The eradication halt is not the first time Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has opted out of the U.S.-backed drug war. Shortly after becoming president in 1999, he banned U.S. anti-drug overflights, citing national sovereignty.      While border military regiments are short of fuel and other supplies necessary for carrying out eradication expeditions, some here suspect a political motivation in the drug-eradication halt.      The Chavez government faced great political turmoil over the past year. Last April, Mr. Chavez was kidnapped by military officers aligned with his political foes, and released after two days of international pressure. In December, leaders of the interests that Mr. Chavez unseated by a popular landslide in national elections four years earlier shut down Venezuela's oil industry — the country's main income-earner — in a crippling general strike that collapsed less than two months ago.      Fernando Villasmil, president of the Zulia state legislature, says the Chavez government has drastically reduced the military's presence along the frontier, leaving an opening for guerrillas.      "If [the government] doesn't take radical measures, [the drug crops] will expand in size," he said. "We will change from being a transit country for drugs into a producer country."