By IANS
Ibarra (Ecuador) : Growing coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine, is a matter of life and death for the peasants of southern Colombia, refugees who fled the region for neighbouring Ecuador say.
Jairo Erminio is one of the displaced Colombians who arrived at a shelter in the city of Ibarra, in Ecuador’s northern Andean area. They are demanding that their government create for them other “opportunities to survive” if it wants them to cease coca cultivation, reports the Spanish news agency EFE.
Erminio, 30, lives in the Colombian town of Mataje. For a long time, just like many of his neighbours, he has planted coca and harvested the leaves to sell them to cocaine producers.
Coca is a plant native to northwestern South America. The plant plays a significant role in traditional Andean culture. It is best known in most of the world for the stimulant drug cocaine that is chemically extracted from its new fresh leaf tips. Unprocessed coca leaves are also commonly used in the Andean countries to make herbal tea with mild stimulant effects similar to strong coffee.
Coca has a long history of export and use around the world – legal as well as illegal. Modern export of processed coca (as cocaine) to global markets is well documented, and coca leaves are exported for coca tea, as a food additive (Coca-Cola) and for medical use.
However, the manual eradication of the coca crops in the border zone with Ecuador, a task being carried out by the Colombian army, spurred many farmers to flee to the neighbouring country to avoid the troop operations and possible clashes between the army and leftist rebels.
Erminio and several of his relatives crossed into Ecuador in pickup trucks last week.
Throughout the border region of Nariño province, peasants are travelling into Ecuador out of fear of combat in the region and to pressure the Colombian government to engage in a dialogue regarding their demands.
The displaced people are asking the Bogota government to implement a crop substitution plan that would replace the farmers’ illegal coca growing with cultivation of legal crops that would provide sufficient income for them to ensure their families’ survival.
Erminio, a man of few words, said that the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe “seems so far not to have given any importance to our requests. It just wants to destroy the coca leaf and not to respond to our demands”.
Therefore, seated on a bench in the shelter set up by the Augustinian monks in Ibarra, where 167 displaced people are being housed, he said he was happy to learn from Ecuadorian authorities that an official delegation would visit them to review their demands.
Maria Cortez, another of the displaced people housed in Ibarra, said that a bale of coca leaf weighing 57 kg could be sold in Colombia for 6,000 pesos, less than $3.
That price, although it is very low, is better than the agricultural concerns in Mataje pay for other products, such as cocoa, coffee, banana or cassava.
“What can be done with that money?” asked Cortez, who added that the peasants are ready to give up the little coca they grow if the Bogota government compensates them with an alternative crop plan whereby they can earn their livelihoods.
The exodus, Cortez and Erminio said, has been a big problem for the more than 1,600 people who crossed the border into Ecuador last week, despite the fact that the Ecuadorians, in the words of one of the refugees, “have treated us well and happily”.
Both hope that the requests of the displaced people will be attended to by the Colombian government so that they can return to their lands as soon as possible, as 400 of their countrymen have already done.