Food crops are often destroyed along with the targeted illegal crops. Ironically coca seems to be the only thing still growing in La Hormiga. Not far from Manuel's fields, our delegation of journalists and human rights activists from the US finds a field of coca bushes. They have been damaged by the herbicides, but they are still growing and the coca crop is definitely salvageable. Nearby the trees and the grasses are dying.
Monkeys scurry through the branches of desiccated trees searching for fruit.
At the army base, Gen. Mario Montoya, a former counterinsurgency Instructor at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA who now commands all the military forces in the Putumayo region, gives us a power point presentation about the military's war on drugs in southern Colombia. Gen. Montoya shows us that each year more and more coca is being eradicated. What he neglects to mention is that since the US and Colombian governments started fumigating coca fields in 1992, the amount of land under coca cultivation in Colombia has tripled. His presentation bears an eerie resemblance to Pentagon briefings prior to the Tet Offensive that used body counts to explain how we were winning the war in Vietnam. Rivers flow through its rainforests, feeding into the Amazon.