It was touted as a landmark in the US-backed war on drugs: Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos took a machete and cut down what he said was the "last plant of opium poppy in the country."
Less than two months later, large parcels of the bright-red flowers used to make heroin can be seen growing up to a meter high along terraced ridges in the southern highlands along Colombia's border with Ecuador.
"All of us here grow poppy to survive," Wilson Ruiz, 23, said while using a sharp blade to extract the milky sap from some of the 1,500 flowers growing on his homestead.
Drug warriors say they have made dramatic progress in the fight against heroin in Colombia, which accounts for more than half of the drug sold on US streets, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Thanks in large part to US$4 billion in US aid, Colombia's eradication campaign slashed poppy cultivation from 6,540 hectares in 2001 to 2,100 hectares in 2004, according to US government figures.
But a tour of this flower-strewn battleground shows many poor farmers have little incentive to give up the cash crop. Stamping out opium poppies entirely will take more government intervention, which has been hamstrung by leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries, both dependent on drug profits.
After Afghanistan, Colombia's drug cartels control much of the world's trade in high-quality heroin, which can cost 10 times as much as cocaine.
The profits trickle down to peasants like Ruiz, who sells the sap for US$200 a kilogram to buyers -- he says he doesn't know their names -- who regularly canvass the remote and misty Andean highlands where he lives and where the climate is not good for growing coca.
Ruiz's poppy crop produces about three-quarters of a kilo of sap in each of two annual harvests, and the labor is more painstaking and less lucrative than growing coca and processing the leaves into coca paste.
Despite the federal victory declaration, Narino State Governor Eduardo Zuniga estimates some 1,000 hectares of poppies still grow in his mountainous state, which accounts for almost all of Colombia's production.
"The government rushed to proclaim that it had destroyed all the poppy cultivation, but the truth is that's nearly impossible,'' said Zuniga.
A decade ago, opium poppy plantations covered more than 15,000 hectares in Colombia -- a figure still dwarfed by the 162,800 hectares that US officials say cover Afghanistan, whose President Hamid Karzai last week rejected US plans for a Colombia-style herbicide attack on the crop.
General Jorge Baron, head of Colombia's anti-narcotics police, said shipments are likely to continue because local stockpiles of the drug stretch back three years. He insists, however, that US-funded aerial fumigation of illegal crops with the herbicide glyphosate has been a resounding success.
Indeed, Ruiz and Rodriguez seem to be getting all stick and no carrot. Even as they hurriedly harvested their poppy, a team of police eradicators could be seen 30m away, chopping down a neighbor's plot.
Since the start of the year, the police crews have been combing the area near Villahermosa to eliminate whatever vestiges of the crop they can find.
Laments Ruiz: "They come to cut but never to offer us help."
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