COLOMBIA: The war on drugs being waged by the US administration on Colombian territory with the help of the government of President Alvaro Uribe has suffered a serious reverse.
According to figures published by the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, a record effort last year to eradicate by aerial spraying the coca bushes - whose leaves provide the raw material for cocaine - fell well short of the drastic reduction the two governments had hoped for.
The eradication effort involves the use of low-flying aircraft spraying poison. These have to be protected by armed helicopters from attack from the ground: since 2000 the cost is estimated at more than the $3 billion.
The poisoning of 337,427 acres of land last year produced no dent at all in Colombia's capacity to produce the narcotic.
But observation by satellites suggests that, far from falling, the area under coca went up slightly from 281,323 acres at the end of 2003 to 281,694 last December.
Explanations for the failure of last year's effort include the emergence of a stronger and more productive strain of coca bushes; the inability of any agency to provide peasants with an alternative crop capable of providing the income that coca provides; the effect of the authorities chasing coca-growers out of traditional areas into new regions; and the failure of the government to pay the compensation it promised to growers who voluntarily abandoned the cultivation of coca.
The price of cocaine to consumers remained generally stable, a sign that there was no shortage of the substance.
Ricardo Vargas, Colombia's leading expert on narcotics and a firm opponent of the "war on drugs", has said the growing of coca, which in 1999 was confined to 12 of Colombia's departments or provinces, had today spread to 23.
Nevertheless both governments committed themselves to continuing their efforts.
What is undoubted is that years of expert monitoring of the effects of inexpert application on the Colombia countryside of Roundup Ultra - a strengthened form of a very common pesticide containing the chemical glyphosate - have produced a mass of evidence of damage to human health, and of widespread damage to domestic animals, fish and food crops, not to mention wildlife and the environment.
The monitoring has been comprehensively rejected by the US, which continues to say that the pesticide is "no more harmful than table salt."
New evidence of the "balloon effect" of the "war on drugs", in which pressure on coca-growers in one Andean country produces new plantings of coca bushes in another, came from Peru this month.
Its defence minister, Roberto Chiabra, said 37,000 new acres under coca had been detected in Peru. This, he said, was a byproduct of the US-backed anti-drug activities in Colombia.
"The US government's own data provide stark evidence that the drug war is failing to achieve its most basic objectives," said John Walsh, of the Washington Office on Latin America, a charity linked to the churches.
Further discomfiture for the Colombian and US governments came last week when five US soldiers, in Colombia to train local troops in anti-narcotic techniques, were arrested after 16 kilos of cocaine was found in the aircraft which was taking them from a military base at Apiay in southern Colombia to the Texan city of El Paso.
Senator Jairo Clopatofsky, a member of the Colombian Senate's foreign relations committee, called for them to be extradited to face trial in Colombia since several hundred Colombians have been extradited to face drug charges in the US.
However, the US envoy in Bogota, Mr William Wood, said the men enjoyed diplomatic protection.
The case recalls a similar one in 2000 when Col James Hiett, US military attaché in Bogota, whose job included overseeing US troops involved in anti-drug operations in Colombia, and his wife Laurie were jailed in the US for sending packets of cocaine in the post to the US.
The US was given one small piece of encouraging news. Satellite observations showed that plantings of poppies, the raw material for heroin, had fallen in Colombia from nearly 11,000 hectares in 2003 to 5,200 last year.