Rising Tensions Over Venezuelan Drug Crop--Thriving fields near Colombia border at issue

<a href=www.newsday.com>NewsDay.com By Mike Ceaser SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT April 20, 2003 Perija Mountains, Venezuela - These dark green mountains, where Colombian guerrillas roam and the Venezuelan military rarely ventures, are becoming a new frontier in illegal drug cultivation, according to recent reports. 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. In recent weeks the 1,380-mile Venezuela-Colombia border has increasingly threatened to become a flashpoint for the two countries, with security problems brought on by drugs and guerrillas. Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez are set to discuss such issues in a meeting Wednesday. For more than a decade, the Venezuelan military, with U.S. cooperation, carried out eradication campaigns involving hundreds of soldiers who chopped down and yanked out fields of marijuana, opium poppies and coca, the raw material for cocaine. Last year, amid an aborted coup in April and serious political and social upheaval, Venezuela abandoned those efforts. This is not the first time Chávez has opted out of the U.S.-backed war on drugs. Shortly after becoming president in 1999, he banned U.S. anti-drug overflights for "sovereignty" reasons. While border military regiments are short of fuel and the manpower necessary to work on eliminating drug crops, some here suspect a political motivation in the eradication halt. The leftist Chávez has been repeatedly accused of aiding the Colombian guerrillas, which finance themselves partly by taxing the drug trade and are active in the Perija mountains. The range is "full" of drug crops, said a national guardsman in the nearby town of Machiques who participated in past eradications but requested anonymity. "The places we destroyed have regrown." Certainly, Venezuela's drug acreage is tiny compared with those in the traditional coca-growing nations of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. In 2001, Venezuela eradicated 117 acres of coca and 96 of poppy, while the "big three" eliminated tens of thousands. Still, nobody knows the extent of the illegal crops in Venezuela since it has no monitoring program. And recent reports show that plantings in the Perija range have increased. A recently released State Department narcotics control report said that during the 2001 eradication coca fields as large as 20 acres were found in the Perija range for the first time. It added, "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 the Perija Mountains National Park, said that in the past few years rangers have discovered drug crops more frequently during patrols. Last September, he stumbled on an already-harvested poppy field covering about six acres. Last year Colombia's eradication program, part of the $1.9 billion U.S.-funded anti-narcotics program called Plan Colombia, reduced coca acreage for the first time, with a U.S. report finding a 15 percent drop over the year before and the United Nations finding a 30 percent decline. However, the advance was partly nullified by acreage rebounds to the south in Peru and Bolivia. Small coca plots have also been discovered in Ecuador. Critics of drug eradication say the shift of cultivation to other countries is the inevitable "balloon effect," in which a reduction in one nation only produces a surge elsewhere. "You can achieve a short-term reduction in a limited area ... but it pops up somewhere else," said Adam Isacson, who directs the Colombia program at the Center for International Policy in Washington. Like other areas where drug cultivation has flourished, the Perija mountains are lawless and poor. Except for occasional military patrols, the central government is nearly absent. The indigenous inhabitants have few marketable crops, since produce would spoil during the long mule trips to towns. Deputy Javier Armata, who represents the Yupa indigenous people in the legislature of western Venezuela's Zulia state, which contains the Perija range, said Colombian guerrillas give indigenous people cash, food and medicines in exchange for planting drug crops. The guerrillas "say that drug planting is the best way to earn money," Armata said. "They earn more." 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 plantings have surged in its east, across the border from Venezuela. And Colombia's civil war has forced thousands of peasants, some of them drug farmers, to seek refuge in Venezuela. John P. Walters, the U.S. drug czar, told the House Committee on International Relations on Feb. 27 that Venezuela's lack of control over its territory concerned Washington. Venezuela's "pressing political problems have created an opening in which narcoterrorists can operate with impunity," Walters testified. Deputy Fernando Villasmil, president of the Zulia state legislature, says the Chávez government has drastically reduced its military presence along the frontier, leaving an opening for guerrillas. "If [the Venezuelan 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."