Article: Violence erupts when peasants protest drug war U.S.-backed effort to destroy coca plants enrages Colombians

As teenage soldiers with bayonets fidgeted nearby, a Catholic bishop tried to soothe a crowd of angry coca farmers to no avail. Tear gas, rocks and gasoline bombs were soon flying.

Peasants charged through billowing tear gas on a bridge leading into Florencia, taunting soldiers in gas masks but failing to break through barbed-wire barricades.

"Don't let me die," groaned one protester, bleeding heavily from a shoulder wound as soldiers carried him away on a stretcher. He died soon after. Peasants in this southern coca-growing region are responding with violence to a U.S.-backed campaign to target the drug trade at its source, by wiping out the shrub whose leaves are processed into ...

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