Source: DTN News / Int'l Media(NSI News Source Info) BOGOTÁ, Colombia - May 3, 2010: I'm in the heat of a war right now that we've been figh
ting for years. But it's not Iraq or Afghanistan.Yet this one also has machine guns and grenades, combat aircraft low in the sky and satellite reconnaissance overhead. And, like Iraq and Afghanistan, the bad guys in this war shoot back. It's a war into which we've already poured billions of dollars and are still pouring more. But for my money, it's a war worth fighting.
It's the war on drugs. That may sound like a political term in the United States, but it's a very risky, very real war down here in Colombia. In the past week, with a team from HDNet Television's "World Report," I've flown out on heavily armed and armored Huey helicopters for invasions deep in the jungle to disrupt the production of cocaine.
In one raid, the people who worked in a primitive lab to refine cocaine's basic ingredient, coca, had gotten out just ahead of us; the residue of the coca leaves was still wet.
With government boots on the ground, their livelihood is threatened. Which is why, when we'd been down just 10 minutes, the Colombian troops we were with told us we had to go — and go now! There were signs that the bad guys, many of whom are part of powerful guerrilla groups, were heading back. We hoofed it along a trail cut with machetes to the landing zone a half mile from the lab; the narco-traffickers deliberately set up shop away from clearings so they'll have enough warning from the helicopters' noise to bail out. With machine-gun snipers covering the jungle and two more with mounted guns boarding with us, we lifted off and circled to provide cover while a second Huey swooped in to pick up the rest of the troops.
From here, the war on drugs is no game.
The Colombians do most of the heavy lifting, but we train them and pay for everything they have, from helicopters to weapons to uniforms to canteens. One American here told me, "Everything is ours, right down to their lip balm."
Plenty of our own people are in the line of fire, too. Seven days a week, civilian U.S. pilots in the steamy interior of the country fly spray planes — the kind you'd see protecting a farm at home — to destroy coca crops in the jungles of Colombia. The difference from agricultural spray planes is that these are heavily armored on their underbellies; they get shot at on a regular basis.
We went on a helicopter defensive cover mission overhead one day. These guys fly out up to 100 miles and then, using everything from informants' tips to satellite coordinates to find the coca, they release a short dose of herbicide. It's the same stuff many of us use in our gardens: RoundUp.
It's a dirty, dangerous war. I met some agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency near the border with Ecuador. Their specialty is intercepting drug traffickers. They showed me a big boat they had captured. With about a foot of fiberglass showing above the water's surface, it's not a submarine but a "submersible," built for just one trip before it's trashed.
If illegal cocaine makes it to the Pacific, it gets transferred onto a boat like this, up to 10 tons of it. That's a lot of ruined lives in our American cities.
Are we winning this war on drugs? Maybe the fairest answer is we're not losing. One American I met in the jungle told me, "At worst, we're holding the line. At best, we're getting a little ahead." But the same day, a Colombian major asked me to tell the American people this: "We are doing all we can. But we cannot fight consumption in your country. You have to do that." He's right.
Greg Dobbs is correspondent for the program "World Report" on HDNet Television.
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