NEIVA, Colombia — The government is bracing from protests when U.S.-trained troops push into a southern region this year to wipe out Colombia's largest concentration of cocaine-producing plants, the defense minister said Friday.
"It's predictable that there's going to be violence and marches," the official, Luis Fernando Ramirez, told U.S. reporters during a trip highlighting drug eradication efforts.
Spearheaded by a new 950-man narcotics battalion, the government intends to move shortly into Putumayo State, where authorities estimate about a third of Colombia's coca crop is grown.
Although U.S. officials don't expect to release 1999 figures until later this month, they say Colombia's illicit coca crop increased dramatically over the past year.
One reason is the increasing involvement of leftist rebels who tax and regulate the drug trade in their vast areas of control. Guerrillas regularly fire on herbicide-spraying planes in defense of peasants' coca plots and fields of heroin-producing opium poppies.
On Friday, Ramirez and police director Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano proudly displayed three new Blackhawk helicopters donated by Washington to help eradication efforts. Colombia supplies 80 percent of the world's cocaine and is a growing heroin producer.
They flew journalists to an opium plot in a steep Andean valley near this southwestern city, depositing the reporters on a 7,500-foot hillside.
As heavily armed police commandos scanned ridges for rebels, a TurboThrush crop-duster dive-bombed the plot with the herbicide glyphosate.
Congress is expected to debate this month a proposed $1.6 billion aid package for Colombia that would pay for two more battalions, dozens of attack helicopters and funds for weaning peasants off illegal crops.
President Andres Pastrana's government cannot proceed, he said, without a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the tens of thousands of peasants living in the state who depend on coca income to feed their families.
Without providing alternatives, the potential exists for unrest far worse than 1996 riots by tens of thousands coca growers in adjacent Caqueta State in which at least six people were killed protesting aerial eradication.
The strategy for aggressive aerial fumigation of coca plots in Putumayo is expected to include alternative crop programs.
Human rights and U.S. church groups insist that the U.S. aid package will fuel human rights abuses in the areas where the counterdrug battalions operate.