Colombian Cocaine Increases Despite Expansive U.S. Reduction Effort
Washington Post
June 19, 2008
BOGOTA, Colombia — - The amount of land devoted to production of coca, the leaf used to make cocaine, has grown at a dramatic pace in Colombia despite a huge American-funded counter-drug program of aerial fumigation and aggressive interdiction, a U.N. agency said Wednesday.
In a 132-page report based on satellite imagery and on-the-ground surveys, the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime said Colombian farmers planted 245,000 acres of coca last year, 27 percent more than in 2006. Coca cultivation in the world's three top producers, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, increased 16 percent, to 448,743 acres, a swath of land slightly smaller than Delaware.
"The increase in coca cultivation in Colombia is a surprise and shock," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the Office on Drugs and Crime, said in a statement. "A surprise because it comes at a time when the Colombian government is trying so hard to eradicate coca; a shock because of the magnitude of cultivation."
The findings follow almost eight years of heavy aerial fumigation of drug crops in Colombia, an American-designed strategy that has cost more than $5 billion. That program includes military assistance that has helped Colombia's army weaken the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a peasant-based rebel group that has funded its war against the state in part through the cocaine trade.
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