One step forward in a quagmire; Coca and cocaine in the Andes.(The Andean cocaine industry)

Economist (US), The, March, 2006

Progress against coca in Colombia is threatened by the perilous politics of the drug "war" and, as always, by market forces

LA MACARENA National Park is a dramatic mountain ridge that cuts like a serrated knife through the tropical grasslands of Colombia. It is a refuge for dozens of species of wildlife found in few other places on earth. But recently it has become a new front in the "war" on the cocaine industry that the United States and its allies have now been waging for a generation in the Andean states of South America.

Each day, hundreds of peasant labourers march through the park, spades in hand, to plots planted with coca, whose leaves are used to make cocaine. They yank out bush after bush under the eye of more than 1,000 police. That...

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