Risking Life for Peace
Caught between rebels, paramilitaries, and crop-dusters, peacemaking Christians put their lives on the line in violent Colombia
David Miller | posted 9/03/2001 12:00AM
At the urging of local officials last year, peasant farmer Uwaldo NarvaÍs convinced his neighbors to pull up their cash crop of coca, the raw material from which cocaine is refined, and sow bananas, plantains, and rice instead. Perhaps he agreed to do this because he wanted his fellow farmers to benefit from the promised agricultural subsidies of the U.S.-supported Plan Colombia, which aims to eradicate coca leaf production in the country. Perhaps his recent conversion to evangelical Christianity had convinced NarvaÍs that he must stop contributing to the corrupt cocaine trade. But not even his wife knows for sure why NarvaÍs signed on. He did not live long enough to explain.As president of the community council of Vereda MedellÍn, a farming settlement three miles south of Puerto AsÍs on the Putumayo River, NarvaÍs himself had cultivated 25 acres of coca and profited nicely. Local processing labs, operated by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), bought NarvaÍs's coca and profited nicely, as well.
In turn, these labs sold the drugs to international cartels to help finance their long-running civil war.
Officials estimate that 402,000 acres of coca plants are under cultivation in Colombia, one of the world's most fruitful coca-producing regions. Each year, about 330 tons of Colombian cocaine, with a street value of about $8,600 per pound, illegally find a way to American drug abusers, according to U.S. officials; another 220 tons go to Europe.
Colombian and U.S. officials are working cooperatively in a costly program to curb cocaine production in Colombia, hoping to reduce cocaine exports to the United States and cripple FARC's economic power. The Bush administration has named a new regional program the Andean Initiative, has increased U.S. support by $882 million, and has drawn neighboring nations into the effort.
Like all farmers in the lush Putumayo area, NarvaÍs had been careful not to take political sides. As a community leader, he had to maintain diplomatic relations with Colombian guerrillas, who control the surrounding countryside, and with government officials across the Putumayo River in the district capital of Puerto AsÍs. Nearly a third of Putumayo's 320,000 residents earn income from the coca industry.
About a year ago, NarvaÍs's wife and children found his body by the side of the road, about a kilometer from their home. NarvaÍs was one of five Putumayo-area leaders killed by FARC since the introduction of Plan Colombia. Since last year's killings, virtually no farmer in FARC-controlled territory has cooperated with Plan Colombia, so crop-dusters, escorted by military pilots, spray coca fields with glyphosate, a herbicide. Critics say the chemical kills legal crops and small livestock, and makes people sick. Some residents have abandoned their farms, crowding into Puerto AsÍs, a violence-prone community of about 100,000, where machine-gun-toting paramilitary fighters patrol public streets.
"As a pastor, I cannot promote Plan Colombia," a Puerto AsÍs minister told Christianity Today. "If I say it is a good thing, my life will be over in seconds. My concept of Plan Colombia is total war. How can I be in favor of that?"
Judge Gilberto Reyes of BogotÁ in July ordered suspension of herbicide spraying, but the government said the ruling applied only to certain Indian lands. Reyes then ruled that the spraying could continue, saying that Indian complaints of health and environmental problems were unsubstantiated.
September 3 2001, Vol. 45, No. 11
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