MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Colombian rebels blame drug trade on US addicts

Colombia's guerrilla closely linked to the narcotics trade said Monday that Bogotá's Washington-funded anti-drug strategy is faltering because the United States isn't doing enough to reduce consumption among its “32 million addicts”.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, was responding to a report from The New York Times that labeled the Colombian drug war a failure and which the current administration of President Alvaro Uribe rejected point blank.

"The so-called 'war on drugs' is the excuse wielded by the United States government to continue its interference in the Andean countries where people cultivate coca leaf, which is not cocaine" said FARC in an Internet release.

Although cocaine can be extracted from coca, the leaves have been used by the Andes region peoples for centuries for medicine and religious purposes.

FARC accuses Washington of "pushing the war in coca planting countries, but doesn't combat the distribution - controlled by the U.S. mafia - or consumption, represented by more than 32 million addicts".

FARC underlined that Plan Colombia, as Bogotá calls its anti-drug initiative, is just a cloak for waging an all-out war against the insurgents.

"Drug trafficking produces 750 billion US dollars a year, of which 85% remains in the US financial system" claims FARC.

A long article in The New York Times argues that Colombia's anti-drug strategy has failed despite the billions of dollars United States has poured into the Andean region in an effort to eradicate coca.

"The Colombian government believes that instead of so much criticism from the U.S. media, there should be more solidarity with the sacrifices of Colombia because while in the US they are consuming cocaine, here we are contributing the dead" said Colombia's Interior Minister Sabas Pretelt.

"The latest chapter in America's long war on drugs - a six-year, 4.7 billion US dollars effort to slash Colombia's coca crop - has left the price, quality and availability of cocaine on American streets virtually unchanged" reported The NYT.

"The effort, begun in 2000 and known as Plan Colombia, had a specific goal of halving this country's coca crop in five years. That has not happened. Instead, drug policy experts say, coca, the essential ingredient for cocaine, has been redistributed to smaller and harder-to-reach plots, adding to the cost and difficulty of the drug war", argues the New York newspaper.

However Pretelt insisted that the Colombian government has fumigated 132,000 hectares of coca plantations and manually eradicated another 38,000 hectares, totalling 170,000 hectares of the illegal crop.

"If we hadn't done that, United States, Europe, would, literally, be flooded with coca" highlighted Pretelt adding that Colombia had seized more assets belonging to drug traffickers than any other country in the world.

An average of between 200 and 220 tons of cocaine are seized every year "precisely so they are not shipped abroad" underlined Pretelt.