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REPORTS: COLOMBIA |
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Wednesday 03
December
2003
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DRUGS-COLOMBIA:
The
Other Face of the Narco-Traffickers
Constanza Vieira
MOCOA, Colombia, (IPS) - Aleida Cuarán,
36, was sentenced to eight years in a
Colombian prison on Jan. 24, 2001. She
remembers the exact date, and with a
frank gaze states matter-of-factly that
she is serving time ''for drug
trafficking.''
Aleida Cuarán, 36, was sentenced to
eight years in a Colombian prison on
Jan. 24, 2001. She remembers the exact
date, and with a frank gaze states
matter-of-factly that she is serving
time ''for drug trafficking.''
Cuarán is from Mocoa, the capital of the
southern Colombian department (province)
of Putumayo, an oil-rich zone that is
one of the poorest parts of the country,
and one of the hardest-hit by the armed
conflict and drug trafficking.
From prison, she is unable to take care
of her four daughters, ages 13, 15, 17
and 18, and a 20-year-old son who was
born nearly blind. Cuarán and the father
of her children separated 12 years ago,
and since then the family has not heard
from him.
When she was arrested, she left her
family under the responsibility of her
sister, who is too poor, however, to
take them all into her own home. Only
the near-blind son lives with her. The
girls rotate between the homes of
friends, working for their keep.
All of the girls wash clothes and do
other domestic chores in exchange for
room and board. But despite everything,
only the youngest has dropped out of
school.
Cuarán used to do other people's laundry
for a living. Three years ago, she was
earning 1.15 dollars a day. ''There were
people who paid me more, to help us
out,'' she says. ''We had to pay rent,
and we were always in such great need.''
What worried her most was that her
daughters would ask her why they
couldn't all go to school. The problem
was that school implied expenses, for
uniforms, supplies, and books.
One day someone offered Cuarán a small
fortune -- 160 dollars -- to carry seven
kgs of unrefined cocaine paste on a
relatively short trip to Pasto, the
capital of the neighbouring department
of Nariño, which stretches from the
Pacific coast to the Andes mountains,
where Pasto is located.
At the time Cuarán accepted the tempting
offer, which would feed her family for
months, the southwestern part of
Putumayo, on the border with Ecuador,
had the highest density in the world of
coca bushes, whose leaves provide the
raw material used to produce cocaine.
This civil war-torn country of 44
million is now the world's top producer
of coca.
Up to 1998, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main
rebel group, was the only armed
organisation that received financing by
providing protection for coca
plantations.
The guerrilla group also collected
''taxes'' from drug traffickers for the
processing facilities where basic
cocaine paste is produced, clandestine
airstrips, aircraft, the transport of
chemicals, and production, charged on a
per kg basis.
But in 1998, the United Self-Defence
Forces of Colombia (AUC), the right-wing
paramilitary umbrella group, began to
penetrate the area dominated by FARC,
and is now fighting with the insurgent
group for control over the territory and
for the ''protection tax'' and other
fees paid by the narco-traffickers.
After she set out carrying the cocaine
paste, Cuarán was stopped and searched
at an anti-drug control post in El
Mirador, two hours from Mocoa along the
highway that runs from Colombia's Amazon
jungle region to Pasto. If she had been
carrying less than five kgs, she would
have been sentenced to only four years
in jail.
Now, while she does her time in the
Mocoa prison, she is completing her
seventh grade studies.
Cuarán is one of 450 women in jail in
Putumayo on drug trafficking charges. In
Mocoa, 150 children of 80 female
prisoners are, like her daughters, going
from home to home, trading work for a
roof over their heads, meals, and in
some cases, the possibility of attending
school.
''We cannot continue to fill the prisons
up with women who were just trying to
feed their children,'' Cuarán told IPS.
In Mocoa, one kg of basic cocaine paste
fetches 1,000 dollars. By comparison, a
cluster of plantains, a staple of the
Colombian diet, sells for 2.50 dollars,
without counting the cost of
transportation to market. One kg of
cocaine paste is obtained from leaves
that take four months to grow, while the
plantain harvest takes at least a year.
But the chemical precursors needed to
produce cocaine paste are costly, and
the peasants who grow coca end up
earning only 180 dollars per hectare.
And by the time the coca-growers are
paid, they already owe that money in
debt, said Gustavo Burgos, the ombudsman
of Mocoa, who receives the complaints
filed by local residents.
''It is the person who sells the cocaine
paste who earns the money, the middleman
between the campesino (peasant) who
grows the coca and the real narco-traffickers,''
Burgos told IPS.
The intermediaries hire people like
Cuarán, often driven by desperate
poverty, to act as ''drug mules'' or
couriers.
After a long, complicated journey, the
unrefined cocaine paste is converted
into cocaine and eventually makes it to
the streets of New York or other large
U.S. cities, where it sells for between
50 and 150 dollars a gram, depending on
its purity.
The United States, keen on reducing the
inflow of drugs, channels financial and
military aid to Bogota through the Plan
Colombia anti-drug and counterinsurgency
strategy, whose main focus is Putumayo.
For the past four years, the U.S.
government has provided 1.4 million
dollars a day to Colombia in military
and police aid, according to Adam
Isaacson, coordinator of the Washington
D.C.-based Centre for International
Policy's Colombia programme.
That has provided a much-needed boost
for defence spending in Colombia, which
has a fiscal deficit equivalent to 2.5
percent of Gross Domestic Product,
according to official figures.
One of the aims of Plan Colombia, which
was designed with help from the U.S.
government, is to eradicate coca crops
by means of widespread aerial spraying,
using a heavily concentrated mixture of
the herbicide glyphosate.
Although the spraying is driving up the
poverty level in Putumayo, already one
of the most impoverished regions in the
country, the government's aim is to
reduce the financing FARC receives from
the taxation of coca cultivation and
processing.
But Cuarán complained that the
persecution focuses on the weakest parts
of the chain, the coca farmers and
small-time couriers, while the
intermediaries freely make their way
around the area.
In late November, the Women's Peace
Caravan, consisting of more than 100
buses carrying 3,000 women's activists
and community leaders, drove through
Mocoa as it travelled to the epicentre
of the war.
Cuarán and six other women inmates were
given permission to leave the prison,
accompanied by two guards, to welcome
the Peace Caravan in the city square.
Cuarán spoke in the name of her fellow
inmates, complaining that in Putumayo
there was no compliance with law 750,
which was enacted last year. The new law
makes house arrest possible for male or
female heads of households who have no
spouse or partner to help take care of
the family.
''We are calling on society to recognise
that we are the victims of the scourge
of narco-trafficking, and not links in
the chain of crime,'' said Cuarán.
''In this region which is neglected by
the state and harassed by the parties to
the conflict, and where there are no
jobs, we have very few opportunities,''
she added.
Marta Elisa Gómez, a local resident of
Mocoa, was wearing pretty hand-made
denim shoes.
''I made them myself,'' she told IPS.
''I know how to make shoes. I have the
moulds, but I can't work because there
is no leather sewing machine here. I can
only make shoes out of cloth, with great
difficulty.
''There is no industry here,'' said the
37-year-old Gómez. ''There is no dairy
factory, there is no processing of
anything. No one generates employment
here. Young people join the 'paracos'
(paramilitaries) because there is no
work.''
A month and a half ago, Gómez's husband
had a close call with the
paramilitaries. ''With the economic
situation the way it is, he decided to
carry some goods (coca). The paracos
found out, and followed him, to steal
it.'' He survived by hiding out in the
bush for three days and sleeping in
trees, she recalled, bursting into
tears.
Putumayo has major oil reserves. But
although it is located atop an
underground sea of black gold, 79
percent of the population is poor, more
than double the official figure for
Colombia as a whole.
While this correspondent awaited the
return of the Peace Caravan in Mocoa, a
boy approached.
All week long, fighting had been going
on between the army and the guerrillas,
90 kms south of the city. The rebels had
committed acts of sabotage at some 30
spots along oil pipelines, and
hard-right President Alvaro Uribe had
announced massive sweeps to capture
insurgents and their supporters.
''I need you to do me a favour,'' said
Paulo César Rivera, a 10-year-old with
big dark-brown eyes, cinnamon-coloured
skin and straight jet-black hair. He
looked very agitated as he pulled a
bullet from the right-hand pocket of his
pants, and handed it over.
''I found it on the street this morning.
If I give it to a soldier, this bullet
will end up killing someone for sure,''
he said. ''Take it away from here.''
I asked him what I should do with the
bullet. ''Have them destroy it, melt it
down,'' he answered before walking away.
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