Posted on Mon, Mar. 31, 2003 Associated Press

BOGOTA, Colombia - Fourteen journalists have left one of Colombia's hottest war zones because of death threats from armed groups, the reporters said Monday.

Colombia is one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists. At least 114 reporters have been killed in the past 14 years.

The journalists said they departed northeast Arauca state on the border with Venezuela after they learned their names were on death lists.

The rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as well as right-wing militias in Arauca had threatened them with death if they continued reporting on the conflict there, the reporters said.

Two weeks ago, the correspondent for the country's largest newspaper, El Tiempo, was killed by unknown gunmen.

In January, two international reporters traveling in the area were kidnapped by leftist rebels. They were released several days later.

The rebels and the right-wing militias are fighting for control of Arauca's vast oil-rich plains. The national government is trying to reassert authority in the region.

Reuters, 03.31.03, 5:01 PM ET BOGOTA, Colombia, March 31 (Reuters) - The Colombian government will ask a local court whether state-owned Ecopetrol should renegotiate a contract with U.S. firm ChevronTexacoCorp. (nyse: CVX - news - people) to develop the offshore Catalinas natural gas field at a cost of $150 million, officials said on Monday. The State Council, a court that arbitrates contractual disputes between the government and the private sector, will determine whether the current terms of the Catalinas contract mean the government would forfeit potential royalties, Comptroller General Antonio Hernandez told reporters. If so, then Ecopetrol would renegotiate the contract, said Hernandez, the chief auditor of government spending, speaking after a meeting with President Alvaro Uribe. The auditor argues that if the project is, in effect, an extension of two fields already operated by a ChevronTexaco subsidiary then the state would receive $100 million less in royalties. Under Colombian law, if the court decides that Catalinas is just an offshoot of the existing operation according to the current contract, then royalties would be only 7 percent of production, compared with 20 percent if the project is totally new. "We have decided in this meeting that the national government will consult the State Council," Hernandez said. "It shouldn't take a long time, I estimate it will be two or three months," he said, adding, "Depending on its ruling, we will continue or renegotiate the contract." Ecopetrol signed the Catalina contract with Texas Petroleum Co., a ChevronTexaco subsidiary, on Feb. 8 but the controversy has slowed development of the project, which would cost $150 million. Catalinas, off the coast of the northeastern Colombian province of La Guajira near Venezuela, would ensure the natural gas supply to much of central Colombia for decades, with some left over to export to Venezuela. Texaco already operates the offshore Chuchupa field in La Guajira, and the onshore Ballenas field, producing a total of 500 million cubic feet a day, with which it supplies much of the gas needs of the country's capital, Bogota. Total proven reserves at the fields are estimated by Ecopetrol at 2,266 billion cubic feet. ChevronTexaco has not commented here on the dispute.

NEWSDESK 31 Mar 2003 21:01:11 GMT

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 31 (Reuters) - Sixteen Colombian journalists working in a region where U.S. special forces are providing anti-guerrilla training said they were fleeing to the capital Bogota on Monday after receiving death threats from gunmen, a media rights group and colleagues said.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said leftist rebels and right-wing militias fighting in Colombia's four-decade-old war had separately declared the journalists in the eastern, oil-rich province of Arauca "military targets" and warned them they should leave or face being killed.

Rodrigo Avila, a correspondent for Caracol TV and one of the journalists threatened, said local radio stations in Arauca were only playing music and airing cultural programs.

"The rebels' idea is to silence the press in the capital of Arauca and unfortunately they are achieving it. We are forced to shut up and find a solution," Avila told reporters.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, produced a list of eight journalists, while the right wing paramilitaries, known as the AUC, threatened another eight, and also named two who had previously been killed.

One of the men named, Eduardo Alfonso, was gunned down and killed two weeks ago by suspected far-right paramilitaries as he arrived for work at an Arauca radio station. His boss, Efrain Varela, was killed last year.

War-ravaged Colombia is one of the most dangerous places in the world for reporters, according to media watch groups.

President Alvaro Uribe late last year declared Arauca, a steamy area of savannas and swamps on the border with Venezuela, a special war zone, giving security forces extra powers to control movements and check identities.

The measures, which have been strongly criticized by rights groups, have had little effect on violence in the province, which has been hit by a rebel car-bombing campaign.

About 70 U.S. special forces are in Arauca province training Colombian troops to combat guerrillas and defend a key oil pipeline.

Local police say they do not have enough bodyguards to protect the threatened journalists.

"We ask the government to guarantee the security of the journalists threatened in the province of Arauca," RSF said in a news release. "The absence of journalists is an open door for more abuses."

Journalists in Arauca routinely face harassment and threats from rebels and militias fighting for control of oil proceeds and the booming drug trade.

In January, rebels held a British reporter and an American photographer hostage for almost two weeks, in a kidnapping which drew worldwide attention. Attacks on local reporters hardly ever make international headlines.

<a href=www.oneworld.net>More Yadira Ferrer

BOGOTA, Mar 24 (IPS) - The Colombian government's decision to use a higher concentrate of the defoliant glyphosate in aerial spraying of coca crops has heightened the sense of alarm among environmentalists and local authorities, who complain of the effects that fumigation has had on human health and the environment.

They also point out that spraying merely forces many coca- growers to move to more remote areas in the jungle with little or no coca-planting tradition, where they carve out new fields on which to grow the illicit crop.

Colombian Minister of the Interior and Justice Fernando Londoño and police chief Teodoro Ocampo reported that the Environment Ministry had authorised an increase in the concentration of glyphosate -- a chemical defoliant produced by the U.S.-based Monsanto Corporation -- from eight to 10.4 litres per hectare.

The decision was based on reported findings that in some cases, the herbicide -- also known by its trade name Roundup -- served more as a fertiliser for native plant species than as a weedicide that destroyed coca.

Governors Floro Tunubalá of Cauca and Parmenio Cuéllar of Nariño, two departments or states in southern Colombia, have protested the use of more concentrated glyphosate, pointing out that they had received many complaints of skin and respiratory ailments from people living in areas that had been sprayed with the more diluted version.

The decision to increase the concentration of the herbicide is based on a U.S. State Department report according to which glyphosate does not pose a threat to human health.

But Cuéllar, the governor of Nariño, said ''It is not true that the fumigation is carried out with the chemicals that have been announced. These are much more toxic, and cause great harm to farmers and their subsistence crops.''

Since coca, which is used to produce cocaine, began to be sprayed here in the early 1990s, environmentalists have complained that the herbicide used also destroys subsistence crops, sickens domesticated animals, contaminates water supplies, and harms the flora and fauna of Colombia, a country rich in biodiversity.

In addition, they say, the herbicide, sprayed by the Colombian police and military from planes, often falls directly on indigenous peoples. Offices of the people's defender (ombudsman) around the country have received hundreds of complaints from peasant farmers of eye, respiratory, skin, and digestive problems, and of harm to legal crops, animals and water supplies.

People's Defender Eduardo Cifuentes told IPS that he had asked the constitutional court to annul the Environment Ministry's authorisation to increase the concentration of glyphosate.

Former president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) did not allow small coca plantations to be targetted by the spraying, in order to avoid antagonising peasant farmers in the midst of the touchy peace talks that his government was carrying out with the main guerrilla group.

But the talks broke off in February 2002, and when right-wing President Alvaro Uribe took office in August 2002, he launched a new phase of Plan Colombia, a largely U.S.-financed anti-drug strategy widely criticised by activists as a counterinsurgency offensive.

The new phase of Plan Colombia entailed much broader aerial spraying with glyphosate, even on coca farms of less than three hectares, which were previously included in the voluntary manual eradication programme in which farmers were given incentives to switch to legal crops.

According to the latest annual coca survey released on Mar. 17 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) for Colombia and Ecuador, the land planted in the illicit crop in Colombia shrank from 144,807 hectareas in 2001 to 102,071 in 2002 -- a 30 percent reduction.

The results were partly due to expanded spraying by the Colombian government, especially in the southern departments of Putumayo and Caquetá, UNODC Colombia head Klaus Nyholm said in the report.

U.S. government statistics indicate that Putumayo and Caquetá produce around 60 percent of the coca leaves grown in this civil war-torn South American nation of 42 million, which has made the two departments the chief focus of Plan Colombia.

Nyholm said that another factor that may have contributed to the shrinking of the surface area planted in coca was a drop in prices, especially since the prices of farm products like cocoa beans and sugar rose at the same time, making coca less attractive.

To produce its annual coca survey, UNODC relies on the Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System (SIMCI), a joint venture set up in 1999 by the UN agency and the Colombian government. UNODC uses similar monitoring systems in Bolivia and Peru, which also produce coca, as well as in several opium poppy-growing countries in the Middle East and Asia.

The UNODC report also noted that between 2001 and 2002, coca- growing expanded slightly in Colombia's Amazon region, while new plantations were discovered in Venezuela and Ecuador, in areas along the Colombian border.

While the UN agency reported an overall drop in illegal crops in the Andean region, from a combined total of 210,000 hectares in 2001 to 172,000 hectares in 2002, the area planted in coca in Bolivia rose from 19,000 to 24,000 hectares, while falling only slightly in Peru, from 46,232 hectares in 2001 to 46,000 last year.

The case of Bolivia indicates the inconsistent way that Washington-dictated counter-drug policy has been implemented in that country, argued Ricardo Vargas, the Colombian representative of Acción Andina, a non-governmental organisation that studies the effects of the fight against drug trafficking on indigenous and peasant people in the Andean region.

Vargas told IPS that what has occurred in Bolivia demonstrated that ''getting one's hopes up over statistics is not recommended, because the numbers only reflect circumstantial effects.''

He pointed out that in 2000, ''the United States proclaimed the success of the forced eradication programme to which the peasants and indigenous people in Bolivia were subjected.''

As a result of forced eradication, coca production in Bolivia shrank from 48,000 to 14,000 hectares in 2000, before climbing again, to 19,900 hectares in 2001 and 24,000 in 2002, said Vargas.

He explained that indigenous people and peasant farmers in Bolivia were forced to take part in a crop substitution programme that replaced coca with seven legal products, such as bananas and pineapples.

But once the harvest was in, the farmers found there was no market for their new crops -- a situation that triggered a wave of protests and social discontent that nearly catapulted the leader of the coca-growers, lawmaker Evo Morales, to the presidency in last year's elections as the candidate for the Movement to Socialism. (END/2003)

news.ft.com By James Wilson Published: March 21 2003 4:00 | Last Updated: March 21 2003 4:00

Seven months in to Alvaro Uribe's four-year term as Colombian president, his long honeymoon appears to be over.

Having capitalised on his popularity to win approval for economic reforms during his first months in office, Mr Uribe's government is gearing up for a new session of Congress, when the focus will be on tougher anti-terrorism legislation. But the president's plans are threatened by discord within his government.

"He is losing cohesion," says Pedro Medellín, executive director of the Ortega y Gasset Foundation in Colombia, which researches governability and public policy. "If the president does not react, this could happen more and more, with various groups all trying to impose their own agenda."

A significant jolt to Mr Uribe (pictured) arrived out of the blue on February 6, when his welfare minister, Juan Luis Londoño, was killed in an air crash. The following day, a huge bomb at a Bogotá social club killed 35 people. A week later another massive bomb in the southern city of Neiva killed 16. Authorities think the blast may have been meant for Mr Uribe, who was due to visit.

But violence, and even attempts on his life, are what Mr Uribe could have expected when he took office. More frustrating will have been the public fights inside his government, sparking domestic criticism, souring international relations and putting the president on the defensive.

Fernando Londoño, the outspoken interior minister, railed against Brazil and Venezuela for their supposed failure to denounce Colombian rebels as terrorists which Mr Uribe views as diplomatically important. The president chided Mr Londoño for interfering in foreign affairs, calling for "less talk and more action". But relations with Venezuela worsened as a result.

More serious has been the friction between the defence minister, Marta Lucía Ramírez, and senior soldiers. Having put security at the heart of his government's strategy, Mr Uribe can ill afford differences between his ministers and his troops. Yet Ms Ramírez and Héctor Fabio Velasco, the air force chief, had a bitter public spat when Spain donated eight second-hand Mirage military jets to Colombia last month. Gen Velasco said they would be too expensive to maintain. Ms Ramírez retorted that Colombia should not thumb its nose at offers of help.

Once again Mr Uribe had to intervene. But the argument put the spotlight on wider tensions in military ranks over attempts by Ms Ramírez, Colombia's first female defence minister, to impose a more results-oriented culture.

There have been calls for some ministers to be sacked. But before taking office Mr Uribe insisted the same cabinet team would serve throughout his term.

At the same time, Mr Uribe's attempts to tackle long-standing security problems have emphasised the scale of his task. After another bomb this month killed 12 in the north-eastern city of Cúcuta, he named a new police chief and accused local judicial authorities of being riddled with terrorists.

Colombians' expectations of their president are great, and if he is perceived to be failing, Mr Uribe's programme could be threatened. In particular, his plan to introduce political reforms and spending cuts via a referendum this year would be less likely to gain acceptance. Economists in Colombia and abroad say that without the referendum's approval, the government would struggle to control public finances.

Mr Uribe's personal approval ratings are still high. But Mr Medellín says his passion for micro-managing is aggravating problems. The president's telephone calls to mid-ranking officials and soldiers to demand results go down well with the public, but Mr Medellín says Mr Uribe is distorting relationships between ministers and their departments, and should focus on political leadership and strategic direction: "He should stop worrying about little things and worry about bigger things."