The plan includes $1.3 billion in aid to train and outfit a Colombian anti-drug brigade to support police efforts in eradicating coca and in halting processing and shipment of coca and cocaine in two southern provinces that are largely controlled by Colombia's largest guerrilla group.
In commando-style raids there, Colombian troops have found airstrips, military encampments, processing laboratories and some 25,000 acres of coca fields, which they say were capable of producing two tons of cocaine a week.
Instead, everything revolves around coca, as evidenced by thousands of acres of coca fields and the coca-processing laboratories in the jungles.
Cultivation of coca leaves, the raw material in the processing of cocaine, continues to play a major role in the economy (see Trade).
(Paste is slang term for a crude cocaine derivative product comprised of coca leaves grown in the Andes as well as processing chemicals used during the cocaine manufacturing process).
Thus the bulk of coca production has shifted to Colombia, where most of the processing and marketing operations were already located.
In two weeks the leaves will be just the right size for picking and processing into coca paste, the first stage in the production of cocaine.
In the Andes, these have three parts: eradication of coca, the shrub from whose leaves cocaine is extracted; the closing down of processing laboratories and trafficking rings; and alternative development, or helping coca farmers to earn a living in other ways.
By nightfall, they had found three crude cocaine-processing laboratories in the jungle, more than 6,000 seedlings of a new, more potent variety of coca plant, a half-dozen large fields brimming with ripening coca bushes and four hapless peasants.
