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Poison Rain (Lluvia de veneno)
por Prensa Rural
Wednesday, Sep. 10, 2003 at 6:02 PM
prensa_rural@colombia.com
Fumigation has devastated Colombia and failed to reduce its cocaine output. And the White House is requesting another half-billion dollars for it.
BY LUCINE EUSANI
AND ALAN GROSTEPHAN
SAN PABLO, COLOMBIA
Gloria Murillo’s one-acre farm in this central Colombian municipality looks like it met a forest fire. Her banana trees and corn stalks sag, their leaves brown. On the ground lie the charred remains of yucca, beans, rice and coffee. U.S.-supplied crop dusters have sprayed a high-octane version of Monsanto’s Roundup, killing not just her crop of coca—the raw material for cocaine—but also her family’s food crops. And the herbicide seems to have contaminated tributaries of a nearby river, the Cimitarra. Now Murillo’s four children have diarrhea and white sores. “They fumigated us like insects,” she says. “The government promised us help, but they haven’t come with anything. They have us ruined.”
Some Colombian farmers respond to fumigation by abandoning their plots and clearing forestland to establish new coca fields. Others give up on farming and migrate to the rapidly expanding shantytowns ringing most major Colombian cities. Murillo is considering staying put and replanting her coca. She could harvest a new crop in four months, compared to more than a year for bananas or yucca. And drug traffickers would provide the seed and might pay for the yield in advance.
Her case sheds light on U.S. antidrug efforts in this war-torn country. Since 1996, the United States has spent more than $1.9 billion on aid to Colombian security forces. Most of this money has gone toward fumigating crops of coca and opium poppy, the raw material for heroin. But the aid hasn’t made a dent in Colombia’s drug output. The nation still produces more than 80 percent of the world’s cocaine supply, according to the U.S. government.
“Fumigation alone isn’t going to solve the coca problem,” said Maj. Carlos Narváez, who heads drug eradication operations of Colombia’s National Police, in an October interview. “These are people forgotten for many years by the government. A development plan is going to be needed, including roads, health programs and education.”
The United States has funded some efforts to help Colombian farmers switch to legal crops, but most campesinos who agreed to uproot their coca shrubs haven’t received any aid. And many scientists and health officials say the spraying has devastated human health and the environment. In October, the government’s human rights chief called for a halt to fumigation in the southern province of Putumayo.
Such calls have had little effect on the policies of President George W. Bush and Alvaro Uribe Vélez, who took office as Colombian president August 7. They’re pressing the U.S. Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to intensify the spraying.
A U.S.-supplied Black Hawk helicopter accompanies a crop duster in the southern Colombian province of Putumayo in February. The fumigation causes illness, kills legal crops and harms the environment. Photo: Jeremy Bigwood.
MANY FARMERS IN SOUTHERN COLOMBIA, the nation’s coca heartland, have parents or grandparents who settled in the area in the 1950s to escape a low-grade Colombian civil war known as La Violencia. The settlers cleared Amazonian forest for farmland but struggled with a lack of topsoil, roads and markets. For decades they remained poor and hidden from the rest of the country.
In the early 1990s, as the Bolivian and Peruvian governments eradicated coca crops, drug traffickers offered these farmers a chance to earn a few thousand dollars a year, an opportunity they couldn’t refuse.
Aerial spraying, a tactic banned in the Bolivian and Peruvian eradication programs, has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy on Colombia since 1992, when U.S.-backed fumigation began on a small scale in Catatumbo, a northern region. Spraying began on a large-scale in 1996 in the southern province of Guaviare.
That year, when the Colombian government broke promises to help coca growers convert to legal crops, campesinos organized one of the largest series of protests in the nation’s history. More than 200,000 people marched and blocked roads across southern Colombia, demanding infrastructure, credit, technical aid, education and economic alternatives for coca farmers. The government’s main response was to militarize the area and then look the other way as paramilitary groups assassinated protest leaders.
The United States, meanwhile, pumped more money into the fumigation program and contracted with DynCorp International, a mercenary firm based in Reston, Virginia, to help fly and maintain the aircraft. By 1999, annual U.S. aid to the Colombian military and police had reached $309 million, according to the Washington, D.C.–based Center for International Policy (CIP), making Colombia the world’s third leading recipient of U.S. assistance, behind only Israel and Egypt.
When drug output kept increasing, President Bill Clinton’s administration poured yet more gas onto the fire. In 2000, the White House convinced Congress to approve a multiyear aid package called “Plan Colombia.” Since then, assistance to Colombian security forces has averaged $460 million a year, according to CIP figures. The money has enabled the United States to create, train and equip three Colombian army battalions, and provide the army with 60 helicopters. The choppers protect U.S.-supplied crop dusters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the larger of the country’s two leftist guerrilla armies.
When it can, the FARC shoots at the aircraft because most of the crops targeted for fumigation generate “taxes” that fund a decades-old guerrilla war against the Colombian military and its paramilitary surrogates. The paramilitaries control their own coca growers and most of the country’s trafficking networks, but the antidrug operations rarely target them.
Further blurring the line between the drug war and counterinsurgency, the helicopters enable the Colombian military to deploy troops quickly throughout a nation of 43 million inhabitants divided by three mountain ranges. And since last year the Bush administration has been playing a new card, linking the drug war to the war against “terrorism.” In July, at the White House’s urging, Congress authorized Colombia to begin using some of the U.S. aid to combat the guerrillas without any pretense of fighting drugs.
THE PLAN COLOMBIA FUMIGATION focused first on Putumayo, which had become a FARC stronghold and the source of half of Colombia’s yield. Subsequent spraying targeted crops elsewhere, including the Middle Magdalena, a valley that includes San Pablo and produces about 10 percent of the country’s coca. U.S. officials say this year’s fumigation will cover a record 300,000 acres nationwide, 30 percent more than last year.
The fumigation appears to be coordinated with the paramilitaries, who carry out most of the war’s civilian killings, now averaging about 3,500 a year. Anticipating Plan Colombia, paramilitaries took over most Putumayo towns three years ago and have promised not to shoot down crop dusters there. (The FARC still operates in the province’s rural areas.)
In the Middle Magdalena, paramilitaries support a U.S. program that seeks to persuade area farmers to grow beans and chocolate instead of coca, according to the Los Angeles Times. The paramilitaries have held workshops for the farmers about environmental and social destruction due to cocaine, and they’ve begun distributing fliers asking the farmers to give up their coca crops. Human rights groups warn that the paramilitaries might force out or kill those who don’t cooperate with the eradication. The paramilitaries already have massacred thousands of people in the area in the name of expelling the country’s smaller guerrilla force, the National Liberation Army (ELN).
The prospect of more massacres doesn’t seem to bother U.S. or Colombian leaders. The Times quoted an unnamed State Department official about the paramilitaries: “We’re certainly happy that anybody is saying they support this and will work toward manual eradication.”
The paramilitary role has fed a suspicion in the Middle Magdalena that the drug war’s ultimate aim is not to wipe out illegal crops but to remove campesinos from their land, clearing the way for oil drilling, mining, logging, ranching and industrial agriculture. “Multinational corporations and local elites see this area as strategic for exploiting resources,” says César Jerez, a human rights advocate who works with the Cimitarra River Valley Campesino Association (ACVC).
Through Plan Colombia, the United States increased aid for helping farmers switch to legal crops. Such aid has totaled $122 million since 2000, according to the Houston Chronicle. Last year U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Anne Patterson agreed with President Andrés Pastrana, Uribe’s predecessor, on a plan to suspend the Putumayo spraying for one year. Under the plan, the government invited the province’s coca growers to sign a “social pact” committing them to eradicate their illegal crops manually in exchange for about $900 in tools, seed and farm animals. Most of the farmers—about 35,000—signed on, and the government suspended the fumigation flights in January.
Nancy Sánchez, who works in Putumayo for the Association for Alternative Social Advancement (MINGA), a Bogotá-based nongovernmental organization, says the plan was foolish: “Anyone who knew Putumayo realized that to change an entire way of life in one year would be absolutely impossible.”
Bureaucratic delays and guerrilla violence delayed the promised economic assistance for months. And the aid that did arrive reached only 20 percent of the families who had signed the pacts, according to the National Alternative Development Plan (PLANTE), the Colombian government agency in charge of Plan Colombia’s alternative development money.
And, Sánchez says, much of that aid proved useless: “For example, they sent to Putumayo a charter plane full of chickens with clipped beaks that could eat only [a commercial feed mixture]. Within a month, the feed ran out. So it had to be imported from different cities, such as Cali and Huila, which was expensive. Then it ran out in those places too. The chickens began to starve.”
The Colombian government condemned the Putumayo campesinos for continuing to grow coca, and resumed the fumigation in July.
The latest spraying has hurt Putumayo’s showcase alternative development project. Dating back to the mid-1990s, the project encourages cultivation of palm hearts, the tart vegetables often used in salads. The crop is processed near the town of Puerto Asís at a cannery completed last year with $500,000 of U.S. aid. But 34 of the program’s farmers, according to the Bogotá daily El Tiempo, reported they had been fumigated since July, ruining 125 acres of palm. And world prices for palm hearts have been plummeting for years. Putumayo’s palm crop is now just 461 acres, leaving the cannery idle most of the day.
U.S.-backed alternative development has fared similarly in other provinces. In Cauca, just north of Putumayo, 200 families agreed in 2000 to manually eradicate their coca and switch to yucca. But the yucca processing plant, in the city of Corinto, went bankrupt in June, prompting creditors to confiscate its equipment, bought with Plan Colombia money.
Uribe, for his part, has proposed U.S. funding for a project in which Putumayo farmers would replace coca crops with commercial tree farms. But the trees wouldn’t mature for an average of 15 years, much longer than the farmers could expect government support.
BESIEGED WITH COMPLAINTS ABOUT fumigation in their provinces, four Colombian governors traveled last year to the United States to ask for a nationwide halt to the spraying. The fumigation “doesn’t really take into account the human being,” Ivan Gerardo Guerrero, their spokesperson, told the New York Times. “All it cares about are satellite pictures.”
Such requests led Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) to craft a measure, signed into law last winter, requiring the State Department to determine whether the herbicide poses unreasonable health or safety risks to Colombians or their environment. The herbicide’s main ingredient, glyphosate, is produced by St. Louis–based Monsanto and known in the United States by the trade name Roundup.
The State Department report, issued September 4, concludes that the herbicide is safe and cites U.S. Department of Agriculture findings that glyphosate “poses minimal health risks to humans and animals, is environmentally benign, and degrades rapidly in soil and water.”
But the glyphosate concentration in Colombia’s herbicide is 26 percent, compared to the 1 percent that the Environmental Protection Agency recommends for use in the United States. And the Colombia mixture includes two toxic surfactant chemicals that help the glyphosate penetrate the waxy surface of coca leaves. Elsa Nevia, a chemical engineer with Cali-based Rapalmira Laboratory, tested one of the chemicals, POEA, on rats. She found damage to the nervous system, liver, kidneys, eyes, intestines and lungs. The other chemical, Cosmo Flux 411F, has never been tested for health effects, Nevia says.
The State Department report includes comments from the EPA, which said it couldn’t evaluate the toxicity of the Colombia mixture because the State Department had not provided results of crucial tests. In absence of the data, the EPA recommended “an alternative glyphosate product with lower potential for acute toxicity.” But the State Department plans to continue the fumigation with the present mixture until at least next year.
That news distresses many health officials, including Putumayo Health Department Director Diva Revelo, who examined campesinos in clinics across the province after the fumigation began. She found widespread chronic headaches, fevers, skin ulcers, sores, flu, diarrhea and abdominal pain. And campesinos reported acute intoxication immediately after crop dusters had passed. In a February 2001 report, Revelo attributed many of these symptoms to the spraying of rivers, which she said she had witnessed.
The State Department report also glosses over environmental damage, including deforestation when fumigation prompts coca farmers to move their crops. “Colombia is a global biodiversity hotspot, and one-third of its reported plant species are not found anywhere else in the world,” wrote Ivette Perfecto, a University of Michigan tropical ecologist. “Yet the [report] does not examine potential risks to these species unique to Colombia, nor does it examine the potential impacts on endangered species in the affected regions.”
The State Department report also sidesteps the effects of chemicals that land off target. In the United States, herbicides are sprayed near the ground, often by helicopters. Colombia’s fumigation is carried out at higher altitudes by fixed-wing aircraft. The Putumayo spraying has hurt thousands of people on the Ecuador side of the San Miguel River, making them sick or damaging their crops and livestock, according to Quito-based Ecological Action. Many of the victims are members of Ecuador’s largest indigenous group, the Quichua. Residents of an Ecuadoran village called San Francisco 2 have filed a class-action lawsuit in Washington, D.C., seeking unspecified monetary relief from DynCorp.
And the State Department report doesn’t address fumigation’s effects on subsistence agriculture. “Aerial spraying, whether through drift, accident or intention, is destroying the food crops of farmers who have agreed to eradicate drug crops and, even worse, of farmers and indigenous communities innocent of drug production,” wrote Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the Latin America Working Group, in a review of the report.
A compensation system required by Congress has not been implemented. “Of 1,000 claims filed by Colombian farmers for damages, 800 were dismissed, sight unseen,” Haugaard wrote. “And the only claim determined to be valid has not yet been paid.”
Campesinos with neither coca nor food crops have little choice but to abandon their land. The Colombian Human Rights and Displacement Advisory Group (CODHES), a Bogotá-based NGO, estimates that fumigation uprooted 36,200 people from Putumayo between January and September of 2001.
THE GOVERNMENT’S HUMAN RIGHTS ombudsperson, Luis Eduardo Cifuentes, offered his view October 9 in a 42-page report based on more than 6,500 complaints from Putumayo campesinos about illness, food crop damage and environmental harm. He said DynCorp and the U.S. and Colombian governments have violated promises to not spray over bodies of water, settlements, indigenous reservations and areas where farmers had signed voluntary eradication contracts. He added that the failure of the Colombian government to set up an epidemiological monitoring program has made it impossible to verify a link between the spraying and the reported ailments, and has made a “joke” out of environmental regulations.
Despite the cost, fumigation hasn’t diminished Colombia’s drug output. Estimates of acreage devoted to coca vary widely. The CIA reports a 25 percent increase, to almost 420,000 acres, from 2000 to 2001. The United Nations reports an 11 percent drop during the period. But both agree that Colombia’s cocaine production increased. Growers have been planting more-potent coca strains and irrigating their fields more, said Klaus Nyholm, who oversees the U.N. Drug Control Program’s office in Colombia.
Coca farming is also spreading out across the country. In 1999, according to a U.N. report, the crop was grown in 12 of Colombia’s 32 provinces. By 2001, it was grown in 22. Even if fumigation could substantially reduce Colombia’s cocaine production, traffickers would find desperate campesinos elsewhere to take up the crop. In Peru and Bolivia, coca farming already is making a comeback, and many observers expect the crop to take off in Brazil. The Amazon area includes billions of acres ideal for growing coca.
Yet, instead of investing significantly in drug-addict treatment or campesino economic opportunities, the Bush administration is asking Congress for aid to Colombian security forces totaling $508 million next year, according to the CIP. U.S. officials insist that intensified fumigation will cut Colombian coca acreage to a third of today’s level by 2005.
Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Rand Beers, head of the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau, tried earlier this year to explain the policy: “The notion that drugs is our problem because we put cocaine in our noses and heroin in our arms is not the way the world looks at this problem anymore.”
Such logic fascinates Colombian writer William Ospina. “In Colombia, we continuously confuse the causes of things with the conditions that make them possible,” he wrote in his 1999 book ¿Dónde está la franja amarilla? “If a pair of assassins murders someone from a motorcycle, the next day we outlaw motorcycles.”