While she is only 24, the incident last January was not the first time this young woman has suffered impacts from Colombia's four-decade-long civil war and the trade in illegal drugs that continues to finance much of the nation's violence. A decade ago, Carolina witnessed a massacre by soldiers, and then another massacre by the military's right-wing paramilitary allies. Then, in early 2005, Marxist guerrillas visited her family's farm and took away her husband to make him a fighter.
She has not heard from him since.
In Puerto Asis, a hot and noisy market town just a few hours from Colombia's southwestern border with Ecuador, it seems as though half the population has horror stories like Carolina's. Like her, many peasants complain that the coca spraying has destroyed their food crops.
At the behest of U.S. leaders in Washington, Colombia's conservative President Alvaro Uribe has pursued the aerial crop-spraying program with greater fervor than any other South American leader.
The collateral damage caused by it has antagonized many Colombians as well as neighboring governments, embittering them against both Uribe and the Bush administration, which backs him.
With his hard-line approach to coca eradication, Uribe now appears to be isolating himself politically on an increasingly leftist and coca-friendly continent. In mid-December, when the Colombian government started fumigating coca crops near the Ecuadorian border, Ecuador protested and yanked its ambassador from Bogota.
Incoming Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa called the fumigation a threat to Ecuador. "The planes pass to the Ecuadorian side of the border, and I insist they kill crops and sometimes Ecuadorian farmers."
Correa officially took office on Jan.
15. His left-leaning politics make him an emerging ally of harsh Washington critic Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, which borders Colombia to the northeast. Chavez stood as the guest of honor at Correa's inauguration ceremonies in Quito, and as Chavez did upon his own sweep to power eight years ago in Venezuela, Correa has announced plans to draft a new constitution for Ecuador.
After meeting with Chavez in Caracas on Dec. 22, Correa abruptly canceled a previously planned visit with Uribe in Colombia. It appeared to be a sign of solidarity with Chavez, who then denounced Uribe's aerial coca fumigation program as part of a U.
S. conspiracy. "The battle against narcotrafficking can't be a platform for trampling the environment or human beings," Chavez said.
"The battle against narcotrafficking has been imperialism's excuse for penetrating into our countries, trampling our peoples and having military presence in our nations."
For his part, Uribe has also tried to put the coca fumigation in a broader context, framing it as an issue of global security.
"The whole world will have to comprehend that Colombia cannot permit the FARC to continue filling the area with drugs," he said of the border region, where leftist FARC guerrillas are active.
"Because with 10,200 hectares, the FARC is capable of financing the destruction of the world."
Correa has said he will create a coalition of Latin leaders to oppose Colombia's drug fumigation. Meanwhile, Colombia has pressed ahead with the fumigation campaign.
The Colombian government reported finding some 13,000 hectares of coca plants within a 10-kilometer-wide corridor along its border with Ecuador, almost all of which have been fumigated over the past weeks, it says.
Earlier this month, however, there were signs of détente between Correa and Uribe on the fumigation issue.
After canceling his visit to Colombia last month, Correa appeared with Uribe at the Jan.
10 inauguration of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to jointly announce an agreement intended to guarantee that herbicide does not contaminate Ecuador's territory. The two leaders made plans to monitor the fumigation's impacts and carry out scientific studies of its effects. Because Colombia's fumigation will continue in the meantime, many see the accord as a victory for Uribe.
But the harmony has not lasted. In recent days Correa seemed to distance himself from the accord. He remains adamant that the spraying endangers his country.
"We have dozens, hundreds of testimonies that glyphosate has fallen [onto people], that it has ruined their crops, that they have diarrhea, vomiting, etc, and that the children have skin eruptions," he says. This week he said Ecuador will "harden our posture with respect to this aggression we are receiving."
Ecuador has not presented hard evidence to back its charges of harm on its side of the border.
Officials of both the Colombian and U.S. governments declined to comment for this story, citing the matter's sensitivity.
But both governments claim that the herbicide -- a higher-concentration version of Monsanto's popular "Roundup" -- is safe for both people and livestock. They back their position with a study by the Organization of American States, which found the glyphosate-based herbicide to be generally benign.
But the studies haven't softened the drug war's impacts on this corner of Colombia.
And the effects here seem to mirror, if more intensely, the situation in other parts of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, where the U.S.-backed drug war has for decades tried unsuccessfully to eradicate cocaine crops.
The U.S. government sends more than $700 million annually in mostly military aid to Colombia to combat drug crops and the outlaw armies that finance themselves from them.
But while the total land area of coca cultivation here has dropped, the drug supply to U.S. cities has remained stable, according to the U.
S. government's own studies. Meanwhile, anger at the U.
S.-backed eradication policies helped elect Evo Morales, a coca farmer, to the presidency of Bolivia, which once produced more cocaine than Colombia. Morales has riled Washington by advocating the cultivation of coca bushes for food and medicine.
U.S. officials insist any coca leaf will inevitably be purchased by narcotraffickers, who pay much more for it.
Even though Bolivia's coca industry has never generated a guerrilla movement like Colombia's, the two nations have other similarities. As in Bolivia's Chapare region, most Colombian coca-planters seem aware that their products are destined to become drugs, which will sicken and addict people in other countries. But the peasants maintain that planting coca is their only option for feeding their families.
The leaves bring a higher, more dependable price than do food crops and are much easier to transport over pitted rural roads. And coca bushes produce their first harvest just months after planting.
"There is no other way to survive," a farmer named Remigio, who was waiting in Puerto Asis' crowded public hospital, told a reporter.
"I also produce bananas and yucca, but I have nobody to sell them to. . .
. The people are aware that coca destroys, but since it produces money . .
." His voice trailed off.
The Colombian and U.
S. governments finance a variety of alternative development programs aimed to wean farmers off of planting drug crops. But few of them have had lasting success.
Diego Orozco Gomez, the government's agricultural extension officer for the Puerto Asis region, complains that his is a difficult fight because he has persuaded farmers to switch to food crops, "and then the plane comes and fumigates them."
"We haven't seen an [alternative development] project that's been successful," Orozco said as the helicopters that protect fumigation planes roared overhead. "I haven't been able to find one.
"
He added that fumigation has only caused farmers to disperse their coca plots to new locations. That pattern compounds the impacts on Colombia's rich biodiversity, as farmers clear spots deeper and deeper in the jungle to hide their crops.
Both the drug war and the diplomatic battles continue.
Colombia recently claimed that it spotted patches of coca bushes on the Ecuadorian side of the border, but journalists and Ecuadorian officials who visited the locations reported finding only legal crops.
Colombia's determination to continue fumigating, and its neighbors' opposition to the practice, promise a future filled with more of the same, as coca farmers and eradicators continue trying to outmaneuver each other.
"The people have learned to manage the fumigation," says Orozco, the agricultural expert.
"They get fumigated, but they already have their seedbeds ready to plant more.
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