As if they hadn’t suffered enough being pawns in a 40-year civil war, camposinos growing coca and making paste and selling it for a pittance, while being forced to pay tribute money to whatever paramilitary or rebel gang that controlled their neighbourhood, now had to contend with aircraft dumping RoundUp – that deadliest of weed killers – on their crops. As often as not, they were either not growing coca, or they were but their neighbour was not and wind drift as well as lousy aerial identification led to crops of corn - or plantain, or heart of palm - being destroyed. We visited several of those farms, many of which had made a serious effort to get away from coca and plant other crops. One was run by a co-op of about 40 widows of disappeared or assassinated men in the Al Hormiga region of Putamayo. They had spent two years scraping together about ten hectares of land and planting a variety of alternate crops. They’d been fumigated about two weeks before because, they were told someone had erroneously reported they were also growing coca.

In Al Hormiga we visited the office of a man with the title of Public Defender. An emissary from Bogota, his only job is to take complaints about wrongful damage done by the fumigations and report them back to the Ministry of the Interior, which in turn, is supposed to provide reparations and/or refer the complaint to the military – which, with U.S. assistance, is the generator of the aerial spraying. He told us that he had referred around 5,000 complaints since setting up shop in 2002. Thirty-two were responded to. No one has received any compensation.

For about a year, he has been telling those dwindling few who still come to his office not to bother – they’ll never get what they’re entitled to. He seemed sincerely angry about how the program has been handled. Is he a willing participant in a sham? Or is he a socially conscious bureaucrat betrayed by his bosses? The delegation was split in half on that one (I opted for the latter).

The Justice and Peace Law, passed in 2005, overlies all of this. Its object was the demobilization of those in paramilitary organizations and their reintegration into the Colombian mainstream, along with payment of reparations to those who had suffered any number of atrocities. The carrot was a scheme of reduced sentences (or no sentence at all) and assistance in becoming a productive member of society. There was no stick, so it has been a disaster.

Of the more than 20,000 ostensibly demobilized in the past year, the vast majority got no jail time, made no reparations, were reintegrated - and many secretly joined up again. Not one of the big guys has had to face a tribunal and the most severe sentence imposed to date is three months

. Our group did, however, have a chance to witness a kind of synergistic screw-up. In Putamayo, we visited a modern farm of about 100 hectares, set up specifically as a reintegration project. Its managers and workers are all de-mobbed ex-paras, housed in a large farmhouse that would be the envy of most Iowans, fed and paid double the minimum wage by the government. That is a princely sum in Colombia.

It is therefore the object of an enormous amount of resentment in the surrounding area, where camposinos have been systematically fumigated over the past seven years. They are ostensibly gentlemen farmers. But their neighbours know them as perpetrators of atrocities and creators of mass graves.

It took two years to establish the farm and get a number of crops going. Three days before we arrived, they were fumigated - in error, they say they were told. In Colombia, you learn to be cynical. If the government can be devious enough to set up useless Public Defenders all over the country, it can just as easily prolong the easy life given to those who have served its interests. The delegation was, once again, split on the question. I thought the fumigation was deliberate.