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TITLE: U.S. Chemical Warfare in the Colombian Rainforest |
AUTHOR: Sean Donahue |
PUB: |
DATE: March 6, 2001 |
Note: Some names have been changed for the protection of the people I met in Colombia.
Manuel was working in his fields when the planes came, spraying "Roundup Ultra" over his fields of corn, bananas, yucca, and plantain. He didn't have time to run for cover and in the weeks since he was sprayed, Manuel's vision has deteriorated and he has developed a strange rash on his back. All the plants in his field have dried up or turned yellow. The corn was just ready for harvest when the planes came. The whole crop was ruined. The U.S. and Colombian governments claim that the planes spraying herbicides over southern Colombia are only targeting coca crops. But it's clear that there was never any coca in these fields. Manuel is 74 years old and now that his crops have been destroyed he has nothing to eat and no way to make money. He rented the land he farmed and he can't pay back the money he owes. Holding a bunch of rotten bananas in his hand, he says, "I don't grow coca. Why did they do this to me?"
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 U.S. 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. The yucca cooperative was devastated by the fumigation too. Fifty farmers had banded together to form this small cooperative which gave the people of La Hormiga some small chance of moving out of the coca economy. But the yucca crop was destroyed.
Near the entrance of the cooperative, we meet Maria, a middle aged woman with four children who lost everything when she lost her crops. She hasn't eaten for days. She wants to try to get to the city to find some food for her children, but the right wing paramilitary group that controls the town stole and trashed her car. The paramilitaries have already killed five of her brothers. The police and the military offer no protection -- the soldiers at the local army base have lunch with the paramilitaries every day.
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 Putamayo region, gives us a power point presentation about the military's war on drugs in southern Colombia. Each slide says "We are in a war . . . and we are winning." Gen. Montoya shows us that each year more and more coca is being eradicated. What he neglects to mention is that since the U.S. 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.
Coca In Putamayo
"For us coca was a sacred plant, but the white man made that sacred plant our enemy."-- Indigenous leader in Putamayo La Hormiga is located in the southern province of Putamayo, which has become ground zero in the war against coca production in Latin America. Putamayo lies between the Putamayo and Caqueta rivers, major tributaries of the Amazon. It is second only to the Amazon region of Brazil in its biological diversity. The lush rainforests are home to countless rare species of plants, animals, insects, fish, birds, and mammals. Despite the rich supply of water and the rich biodiversity of the region, the soil in Putamayo is very poor. In the rainforest, microorganisms help to decompose leaves, feeding nutrients back to the plants through their roots. But the topsoil itself is very thin, and if the forest is cleared what nutrients remain in the soil are quickly depleted.
For centuries the indigenous people of the region practiced a form of crop rotation that allowed them to grow food, medicinal, and ritual crops fairly successfully. They grew coca in small quantities for ritual use -- shamans would chew the leaf to achieve a trance, which allowed them to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Violence and poverty have forced many Colombians to flee their homes, and Putamayo is the last place left for many people to run. In the 1980's and 1990's, Putamayo was colonized by people who began to clear the forest to grow coca to sell to cocaine traffickers -- because coca was the only crop that fetched a high enough price for a family to make enough money to support itself. policies had destroyed the markets for Colombian coffee and wheat. Coca cultivation quickly depleted the soil, so farmers had to begin using herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides to protect their crops and chemical fertilizers to make them grow.
Workers came to pick and process the coca for a few dollars a day. Desperate, rootless, and solitary, many of these workers brought alcohol and drunken violence to Putamayo, and alcoholism began to infect many communities. The coca boom began to lead to the destruction of families. The coca economy brought armed actors into the region. The FARC, the larger of Colombia's two leftist guerilla armies, increased its presence in the region and imposed a "revolutionary tax" on coca growers. People who couldn't pay the tax had to flee the FARC.
Right wing paramilitaries, funded by cocaine traffickers and wealthy landowners, came to the region to buy and process coca and to fight the FARC. The military came to fight the FARC, and used the paramilitaries to do the dirty work of carrying out massacres and assassinations against people suspected of sympathizing with the guerillas. (This same pattern has emerged wherever the U.S. has trained and armed militaries fighting guerilla movements. Death squads that appear to operate separately from the military are established to avoid the appearance that U.S. money is being used to commit human rights abuses.)
The paramilitaries are responsible for the vast majority of the killings and disappearances in Colombia. They operate on classic counter-insurgency principles developed by the U.S. in Vietnam and perfected by U.S. trained militaries and death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980?s. Chairman Mao said, "The people are the sea in which the revolutionary swims." The paramilitaries act to "dry up the sea" by killing or chasing away people and communities suspected of sympathizing with the FARC -- which includes anyone who speaks out for economic justice and anyone who gives members of the FARC food, shelter, or medical care. (Of course the FARC will often demand food, clothing, and medical care at gunpoint. Whether the aid is voluntary or coerced matters little to the paramilitaries.) The drug traffickers who back the paramilitaries seize the land that?s left behind after people are murdered or displaced and use it to establish coca plantains or to set up cattle ranches to launder their cocaine profits. The paramilitaries are paid with the proceeds.
The indigenous people and the poor are caught in the middle of this war. The guerillas view anyone who refuses to join them as a traitor. The paramilitaries suspect the poor of sympathizing with the guerillas. As one indigenous leader said "Now we are strangers in our own land and they are killing us." The coca economy has devastated the culture and ecology of Putamayo. Fr. Pablo, a parish priest in Putamayo said: "The traffickers scored a goal against us when they brought us coca. It has brought a change in culture, turned a culture of life into a culture of death. Before the coca there weren?t even police. Then came the coca, the guerillas, and the army." However, the "solution" the US and Colombian governments are proposing for the coca problem may do more damage than the coca trafficking itself.
Fumigation: The "Cure That Kills"
"Fumigation is like chemotherapy, sometimes you end up killing the patient." -- Gonzaolo de Francisco, National Security Adviser to Colombian President Andres Pastrana
In November 2000, Congress passed "Plan Colombia," a $1.3 billion plan to fight cocaine production in Colombia. Over 75% of the money in the package was earmarked for military and police aid to the governments of Colombia and its neighbors. There is little or no talk of going after wealthy cocaine traffickers or cracking down on the paramiltaries, whose leader, Carlos Castaño, admits that 70% of his income comes from cocaine trafficking. Instead, Plan Colombia is focussing on eliminating coca production in southern Colombia through forced crop eradication, and on launching a military offensive against the FARC to minimize resistance to forced eradication.
The only way peasants can avoid having their crops fumigated is to get everyone in their town to agree to pull up all their coca plants in 12 months. Families are offered roughly $1,000 to invest in planting legal crops. But since the average 5 acre coca field produces two harvests a year which bring the farmer a little over $4,000 (the cocaine produced from these crops will fetch $800,000 in the U.S. or Europe,) and no other crop fetches a high enough price for a family to support itself, most farmers choose to take their chances with fumigation.
The State Department has hired Dyncorp, a private company based in Reston, VA, to carry out a crop fumigation program in Colombia. Crop dusting planes (Turbo Thrushes and OV-10 Broncos) piloted by Colombian police and mercenaries hired by Dyncorp fly low over forests and fields, spraying "Roundup Ultra," an herbicide manufactured by St. Louis based Monsanto (the same company that supplied the U.S. military with Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.) U.S. pilots, most of them Vietnam combat veterans, make as much as $90.000 a year, tax free, working for Dyncorp in Colombia. The planes are escorted by helicopter gunships -- Huey's or Blackhawks supplied by the U.S. -- that protect the crop dusters from guerilla attacks (the FARC is extremely well armed and does have anti-aircraft weapons.) In late February U.S. and
Colombian officials confirmed that U.S. pilots working for Dyncorp had been involved in a gunfight with the FARC when the FARC shot down a fumigation plane. Why contract a job like this out to mercenaries? A March 1999 article in the Multinational Monitor quotes Andy Messing Jr., a U.S. Special Forces Veteran who has close ties to the Colombian National Police -- "You can't control them as well as you can the U.S. military, [and} when they wind up getting whacked it only adds to the confusion." U.S. law currently prohibits U.S. soldiers from engaging in combat in Colombia. There are no such restrictions on private contractors from the U.S. Dead mercenaries also don't require military funerals. U.S. soldiers coming home in flag-draped coffins might evoke memories of the Vietnam War, drawing unwanted scrutiny to U.S. operations in Colombia. And if mercenaries commit human rights violations, the U.S. government can deny knowledge and responsibility.
The herbicide being used in Colombia, Roundup Ultra, is not recommended for use in aerial fumigations in the U.S. Roundup was first marketed in 1976, as Monsanto sought a new product to replace Agent Orange, which had originally been marked as "Lasso" and had put Monstanto at the top of the herbicide industry. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has been linked to non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a particularly deadly form of cancer. The "inert" ingredients in Roundup Ultra can cause rashes, vision problems, headaches, and respiratory problems. According to a fact sheet prepared by the Colombian organization Acción Andina, "
Doctors in Japan have certified cases of poisoning, mainly through accidental swallowing of Roundup, but also through occupational exposure. The symptoms of acute poisoning include gastrointestinal pain, massive loss of gastrointestinal fluid, vomit, excess lung fluid, pulmonary congestion or failure, loss of consciousness, destruction of red blood corpuscles and kidney damage or failure. Following repeated fumigation, the Yanacona Indians in Cauca are suffering many of these symptoms. The dwellings in this community have been sprayed indiscriminately, children being the most affected" .The herbicide can remain in the soil for as long as a year. There is some evidence that the herbicide may kill the microbes and fungi that form the basis of the nutrient cycling system in the rainforest. Putamayo is the second most biodiverse region in the Americas. Mayor Manuel Alzate of Puerto Asis told us "You are poisoning the lungs of the world."
The U.S. Embassy claims that the fumigation planes only target large coca plantations, and that they use satellite maps and Global Positioning System guidance to precisely target coca crops. Even if we assume this is true there are several major problems. The herbicides being used were designed to be applied from the ground. When sprayed from a plane, the herbicides can drift a considerable distance on a windy day. In December U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone and his aides were accidentally sprayed during a fumigation demonstration when the herbicides drifted. Southern Colombia is also full of streams, rivers, and lagoons. Roundup Ultra takes a long time to break down in the water and is toxic to fish. Finally, peasants often intersperse food crops with their coca plants to try to get the most out of a piece of land, so the fumigations have tended to simultaneously destroy peasants' primary source of food and their primary source of income.
Indigenous people have been hit particularly hard by the fumigations. A few weeks before our delegation visited Colombia, the Cofan reservation near the Ecuadorian border was fumigated. The Cofan weren't involved in commercial coca cultivation, but they did grow a small amount of coca for ritual use. Their food crops, medicinal crops, and ritual crops were all destroyed. The surrounding forest was killed too, and the dead leaves and branches had become fire hazards. The tribe had to sell all its cattle because the grasses in the pastures were killed by the herbicides. The streams that tribe depended on for drinking water were all poisoned. People were developing strange digestive and respiratory problems.
Many had fled to Ecuador. A few remained on the reservation. A representative of the tribe told us "Our elders are crying. They think that the Earth has been murdered." Fr. Pablo, who had surveyed the devastation said "This is a disaster whose gravity will be felt by our children. They are the ones who will need the wood of the trees that were killed, the species that were lost, birds, butterflies, water creatures. Another grave consequence is the death of the people's hope and this hurts me most."
Why was the Cofan reservation fumigated? Gonzalo de Francisco, National Security Advisor to Colombian President Andres Pastrana suggested that the government was helping the Cofan retake their land from coca farmers who had invaded their territory. The Cofan clearly weren't looking for that kind of help. A local organizer involved in the fight against the fumigations suggested another motive to us in hushed tones at the airport in Puerto Asis: There are oil reserves and mineral deposits underneath many of the indigenous reservations. Colombia's constitution prohibits forcing indigenous people off their land. But if the indigenous people were to leave their land voluntarily, corporations could come in and exploit the resources. Like the U'wa in the North, the Cofan have a long history of resisting oil exploration. Rendering their land sterile and uninhabitable could very well serve the interests of the oil companies. There is not yet sufficent evidence to back up this theory, but it certainly fits the pattern of terror in Colombia.
Plan Colombia: Designed To Fail?
"The old dogs they got a new trick: it's called criminalize the symptoms while you spread the disease" -- Ani Difranco "We look on in great pain when we see how the farmers are trampled on like cockroaches while the big traffickers walk the streets of New York and L.A." -- Fr. Pablo To add insult to injury, fumigation doesn't work. Last year coca production in Colombia increased for the eighth year in a row. In 1992, 41,206 hectares of land were under coca cultivation in Colombia, and 954 hectares were fumigated. In 1999, 43.135 hectares were fumigated, but 122,500 hectares were in production -- this despite the fact that in 1997, 52% of the 79,100 hectares of land that were in coca production were fumigated. As Dr. Ricardo Vargas Meza of Acción Andina writes: "Despite the intensity of the fumigation, the total area planted continued to grow.
The situation is paradoxical, considering that Peru, which was the leading world producer of coca leaf in 1992, reduced its coca crop from 155,000 ha in 1992 to 51,000 ha in 1998 without dumping a single liter of glyphosate on Peruvian soil. We know that the anti-drug policy was not the cause of this reduction. The change merely reflected the change in the monopolistic structure of the drug trafficking business that had been prominent up to mid-1995, when the main supplier of coca paste for the Colombian cartels was Peru. The structural change in drug trafficking meant moving from the centralized model to the decentralized, flexible structures of the today?s organizations that export drugs from Colombia, who obtain the raw materials they need within Colombia: This is the stimulus to the current demand for coca paste and poppy latex."
The primary effect of fumigation is to drive coca producers deeper into the rainforest, destroying more land. And yet while the U.S. is pushing forward with a fumigation program in Colombia that criminalizes and punishes the peasant class and destroys the environment without showing any effectiveness in reducing cocaine production, Plan Colombia at best ignores, and in many ways strengthens the large drug trafficking organizations that drive the cocaine industry. One of these organizations is the Colombian Air Force, which many in Colombia call the "Blue Cartel" because it is so deeply involved in drug trafficking. The U.S. has not put any significant pressure on the Colombian government to clean up corruption in the air force. The paramilitaries are also deeply involved in cocaine trafficking, but Carlos Castaño, the head of Colombia's largest paramilitary group claims that the DEA tried to recruit him to help carry out parts of Plan Colombia, and a DEA agent in Miami who served as a translator during the agency's meeting with Castaño has confirmed the story.
In some ways this is nothing new, the U.S. military and the CIA have often allowed their allies in the Third World to finance their operations by taking part in the drug trade, and have sometimes taken a cut of the profits themselves for helping to facilitate deals. (See Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's Whiteout: The CIA, Drug & The Press.) It does seem especially bold, however, for the military/intelligence community to resort to their old patterns of behavior while implementing a plan that is ostensibly an anti-drug program.
Domestically, a similar pattern emerges. According to Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies: , "A landmark study of cocaine markets by the RAND Corporation found that, dollar for dollar, providing treatment to cocaine users is 10 times more effective than drug interdiction schemes and 23 times more cost effective than eradicating coca at its source." But, Tree adds "The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reports that 63% of the need for drug treatment is unmet in the U.S., 3.3 million persons in 1996. [ . . .] We have yet to honor a commitment made by Congress in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 to provide treatment on request to every addict.."
Meanwhile, back home or drug war focuses on arresting and jailing drug users and small time dealers, while big time traffickers avoid prosecution by retaining the best attorneys and laundering their money. As German Martinez, City Clerk of Puerto Asis said, "The blind spot of Plan Colombia is that it is attacking only the production. We have to fight against criminalization of the producer and the addict, the idea that the producer is a delinquent and the addict is a delinquent. If we understand the producer as someone facing social problems and the addicts as someone who is ill then things can change." Until we face these facts, we will continue to criminalize the symptoms while we spread the disease. Plan Colombia is soft on cocaine trafficking and hard on the people and the land. Unless we abandon Plan Colombia, this phase of the drug war will remain nothing but a war on the poor.
Sean Donahue is Co-Director of NH Peace Action and is Active in Massachusetts Earth First! He traveled to Colombia in January with a delegation from the Colombia Support Network. He may be contacted at 603-228-0559.
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