MOSOCO, Colombia — Every two weeks, the 13 members of the Indian Council of the town of Mosoco gather at their small brick meeting house to discuss community affairs and gaze out the window at mountain slopes cleared for planting of opium poppies, the raw material of heroin.
The dark stains on the cliffs where trees have been cut and bushes burned bring back bitter memories of a previous drug boom. The Indian leaders recall the drug traffickers, guerrillas and paramilitary groups that burst into their lives before. They remember the disintegration of community values. And it is all beginning to happen again.
A year ago the government promised aid and development programs in exchange for a pledge by the Indians to stop growing poppies. A deal was struck.
But the government did not keep its promise, so the Indians have gone back on theirs. And Colombia, a country already tragically scarred by a cocaine culture and marijuana production, has now emerged as one of the world's leading producers of heroin.
The failed deal to stop poppy production by the 300,000 Indians of the state of Cauca--in southwest Colombia, near the Ecuador border--symbolizes Colombia's larger problem. The government, despite having rooted out thousands of hectares of coca, marijuana and poppy plants, is widely seen here as losing its grip again.
"We told the people for a year that government aid was coming" in exchange for eliminating poppy cultivation, Adolpho Vivas, deputy governor of Mosoco, said of the unfulfilled agreement between the Indians and the Colombian authorities.
"But the government never came through, people had no money to support their families, and they went back to planting again."
As hundreds of Indians on 12 reservations return to the lucrative heroin trade after a one-year moratorium, their leaders say the government delivered on only a tiny fraction of the development projects promised in a 1992 agreement. The anticipated windfall, which included projects to promote health, education and crop rotation on the Indian lands, was estimated at more than $27 million. The communities, with outside technical help, set about designing projects that would sustain long-term development.
When the promised aid did not come through, the Indians turned again to the temptations of the drug barons. And Colombia, which exported only cocaine and marijuana five years ago, is today regarded the second-largest producer of heroin in the hemisphere, after Mexico.
