Changing Lifestyles : Poppies Pop Up Again : Denied the aid they were promised, Colombian Indians are forced back to the cultivation of opium to survive.

MOSOCO, Colombia —  Every two weeks, the 13 members of the Indian Council of the town of Mosoco gather at their small brick meeting house to discuss community affairs and gaze out the window at mountain slopes cleared for planting of opium poppies, the raw material of heroin.

The dark stains on the cliffs where trees have been cut and bushes burned bring back bitter memories of a previous drug boom. The Indian leaders recall the drug traffickers, guerrillas and paramilitary groups that burst into their lives before. They remember the disintegration of community values. And it is all beginning to happen again.

A year ago the government promised aid and development programs in exchange for a pledge by the Indians to stop growing poppies. A deal was struck.

But the government did not keep its promise, so the Indians have gone back on theirs. And Colombia, a country already tragically scarred by a cocaine culture and marijuana production, has now emerged as one of the world’s leading producers of heroin.

The failed deal to stop poppy production by the 300,000 Indians of the state of Cauca--in southwest Colombia, near the Ecuador border--symbolizes Colombia’s larger problem. The government, despite having rooted out thousands of hectares of coca, marijuana and poppy plants, is widely seen here as losing its grip again.

“We told the people for a year that government aid was coming” in exchange for eliminating poppy cultivation, Adolpho Vivas, deputy governor of Mosoco, said of the unfulfilled agreement between the Indians and the Colombian authorities.

“But the government never came through, people had no money to support their families, and they went back to planting again.”

As hundreds of Indians on 12 reservations return to the lucrative heroin trade after a one-year moratorium, their leaders say the government delivered on only a tiny fraction of the development projects promised in a 1992 agreement. The anticipated windfall, which included projects to promote health, education and crop rotation on the Indian lands, was estimated at more than $27 million. The communities, with outside technical help, set about designing projects that would sustain long-term development.

When the promised aid did not come through, the Indians turned again to the temptations of the drug barons. And Colombia, which exported only cocaine and marijuana five years ago, is today regarded the second-largest producer of heroin in the hemisphere, after Mexico.

Despite $54 million in U.S. anti-narcotics aid to the Colombian armed forces in 1992 and eradication measures that wiped out 12,000 hectares of poppies that year, the nation now has an estimated 20,000 hectares of opium poppies under cultivation.

Drug traffickers, loosely linked to the Cali cocaine cartel and trained by Asian heroin producers, expected a bonanza when they first brought poppy seeds to the lush valleys and mountain plains of this backward region in 1988. Poppies grow more quickly than the coca bush used to make cocaine, and profits from heroin are eight to 10 times greater by volume.

Eager to expand into a new business, the traffickers, with their promise of fast money, seduced impoverished communities living on subsistence agriculture with promises of heroin riches. By 1991, an Indian farmer who made about $500 a year growing potatoes and corn was making $25,000 a year or more growing poppies.

Members of the Paez community, one of the tribes of Mosoco, went on a spending spree. They fixed up their homes, bought motorcycles and purchased new land in the far-away coffee zone.

The Gaumbiano Indians of the lowlands invested in the future.

“In a typical family, the father now has a small bus that he can use to make money when the poppy boom fades, the mother has a television, and the son has a motorcycle,” said Claudia Pineros, an anthropologist who has worked in the region.

But the boom had a dark side that surfaced when the price for opium rocketed from two cents a gram in 1989 to $2.36 a gram in 1991. The alliance of greed and violence began to break the communities’ values. The most notorious incidents were the direct result of drug-trafficking. Hundreds of Indians and peasants stole each other’s drugs and money and killed each other in the process.

Drug traffickers and their guerrilla allies from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia moved in from the outside to “settle accounts” with Indians they suspected of robbing them in drug deals. And paramilitary forces, often including members of Colombia’s army or police, eliminated Indians who refused to abandon their land to drug barons.

On Dec. 15, 1991, after unsuccessfully trying to acquire a village’s lands and labor for poppy cultivation, a group of 50 men wearing ski masks entered the town of El Nilo, torched the villagers’ huts and executed 20 Paez Indians.

The tightly knit social structures of the Indian communities began to unravel. Solidarity forged over centuries of struggle against Spaniards and Colombian landowners began to disintegrate. Armed teen-agers, their pockets bursting with money, roamed the streets, and many Indians openly defied the authority of their ruling councils, the relationship that had always kept the tribes together.

“Money brought us to the point where people were drinking, fighting, wounding and killing members of their own villages,” lamented one member of the community.

Even the environment, assiduously protected by the Indians, began to disappear. Poppy growers climbed high into the mountains to hack down forests and clear land for poppy cultivation. Rivers, deprived of shade, began to dry up. The sacred Lake Juantama, legendary home of an 18th-Century Indian chief, shrank, starving the flora and fauna around it.

With the society in tatters and rumors that the army was gearing up for aerial fumigation to kill the poppy fields, the Indian Council of Mosoco, along with 58 others, asked the government for a deal.

The final agreement, in which the communities pledged to pull up their poppies in return for development projects, was signed in May, 1992, by the Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca and the head of the government’s anti-narcotics police and other senior officials.

Now, one and a half years later, and despite a U.S. contribution of about $500,000, less than $1.1 million has been distributed to the Indians of Cauca under the agreement. Not one peso has come to the community of Mosoco.

Many villagers, feeling betrayed, were at the point of rebellion when the councils agreed not to stand in the way as the villagers returned to poppy cultivation.

Looking back at the failure of the experiment, the Indian leaders express only frustration. They lament the destruction of their environment and fear the danger represented by drug traffickers, guerrillas and the Colombian army, which they believe is planning to spray their homeland with poisonous herbicides. They are especially bitter at the Colombian government and the United States, which they say do not understand their situation.

“The concern of the United States and other developed countries is eliminating the drug problem; our concern is eliminating poverty,” said Sonia Hurtado, a member of the Mosoco council. “It would be better if we collaborated.”

Adds Marcos Avirama, a veteran Indian leader: “If there is truly interest in seeing the drug problem in our country disappear, there will have to be international aid for popular and social organizations fighting for the recovery of our productive and marketing capacity, our cattle raising and our environment.”