Colombia's campaign to eradicate coca growing will move into one of the country's national parks for the first time with police planning to uproot the plant used to make coca in a jungle area defended by Marxist rebels.
BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia's campaign to eradicate coca growing will move into one of the country's national parks for the first time with police planning to uproot the plant used to make coca in a jungle area defended by Marxist rebels, a top police officer said.
Using shovels and their hands to dig or pull out the bushes, police will in the next few days start the sweaty work of uprooting 11,000 acres of coca bushes in the Macarena National Park, a mountainous region about 155 miles south of the capital Bogota.
It will be dangerous too, because the coca bushes are protected by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist peasant group known by its Spanish initials FARC which relies on the cocaine trade for much of its funding, said Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro, the head of Colombia's National Police, late on Tuesday.
"We have information of mine fields. They are going to be harassing us permanently and attacking us," Castro told Reuters in an interview.
Hundreds of police, armed with assault rifles and wearing flak jackets, began to fly into the Macarena area by helicopter Tuesday to protect a 930-strong eradication squad. The army will provide additional security during the eradication, which should take three months.
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At the same time, crop-dusting planes will also spray herbicide on about 30,000 acres of coca planted outside the park, Castro said.
President Alvaro Uribe ordered police into Macarena to begin the first eradication in a national park after FARC rebels killed 29 soldiers in the area at the end of December.
The government had planned to spray the bushes but dropped that idea after environmentalists argued the herbicides could affect the great diversity of plant and animal species in the parks.
A move of some kind into the national parks had been inevitable, given that two-thirds of the country's remaining 200,000 acres of coca as of the end of 2004 was growing in the parks, according to the latest U.N. figures.
Satellite data shows the amount of coca leaf in Colombia has halved since 2000, thanks to a massive, U.S.-backed program to spray coca from the air.
"The significance of this is that we're going to take back a national park for the nation," he said.
Colombia's 51 nation parks cover 10 percent of the surface of a country the size of France and Spain combined, and there is coca in 13 of them, according to the government.
Source: Reuters
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