School children from both Colombia and neighboring Ecuador actually drew these pictures included in this diary. The United States government's primary strategy for combating the narcotics industry and the leftist FARC guerillas that control an area of Colombia the size of SWITERLAND involves aerial crop spraying with a deadly poison sold on the market as Roundup weedkiller. The spray not only kills coca plants, but any other, legal, crops in the vicinity. Sadly it also kills livestock and far worse it has also killed many children.
In the name of the "war on drugs" the Colombian people are being subjected to terror in the form of our government spraying deadly poison from airplanes. In August 2000 Congress approved President Bill Clinton's request for $1.3 billion to implement "Plan Colombia," when Bush became president he enthusiastically continued the evil policy. The U.S. involvement has not failed but has added to the violence in a land that has been war-ravaged by approximately 50 years of non stop civil war. Plan Colombia, which President George W. Bush renamed the Andean Regional Initiative, is being sold to the American people as a key component of the failed war on drugs.
Over 2.5 million people have now fled from the fighting and the aerial fumigation of their farms. These internal refugees, unemployed, living in squatters' communities in the cities to which they have fled, are the principal result of the war so far. Many Colombians believe that they are its intended result, that the real aim of the war against insurgents and against drugs is really to get small farmers off their land in order to make room for development. Under Colombia's coca fields is oil. Paramilitaries terrorize people into leaving their land, and labor organizers are the group most targeted for assassination. More than 3,000 have been killed in the past 15 years.
Colombia is a prime example of U.S. Military clout being used to serve the interests of big oil corporations . Plan Colombia is real bad news for the poor of Colombia because it increases the level of terror in their country. The Whitehouse fails to mention the group responsible for 70 percent of that violence is the government of Colombia and the right wing paramilitary forces which receive aid and full cooperation from Colombia's army.
Colombia: Chemical Spraying of Coca Poisoning Villages
by Hugh O'Shaughnessy, The Observer (London)
June 17th, 2001
Bogota -- Franci sits on the veranda and whimpers. The little girl is underweight. Her armpits are erupting in boils. Like most of her people, she has suffered from respiratory problems and stomach pains since the aircraft and the helicopter gunships came over at Christmas and again at New Year dropping toxic pesticides on their villages.
The tiny indigenous Kofan community of Santa Rosa de Guamuez in Colombia had it hard enough with pressures from settlers on their reservation, without Roundup Ultra containing Cosmoflux 411F, a weedkiller that is being sprayed on their villages in a concentration 100 times more powerful than is permitted in the United States.
Aurelio, a Kofan village elder, shows us around his village. The Kofan have been here 500 years. Now it looks as though their time is up. Pineapples are stunted and shriveled. The once green banana plants are no more than blackened sticks. The remains of a few maize plants can be seen here and there, but the food crops have been devastated. There is hunger at Santa Rosa. He is close to despair.
Colombian babies and children are falling ill. Peasants, already miserably poor, are getting hungrier. Indigenous tribes are being torn apart and whole communities pushed into exile.
The reason is the US-sponsored Plan Colombia, conceived by President Bill Clinton and roundly embraced by President George W Bush, designed to eliminate all cocaine production in Colombia. A key element is the spraying from planes of a highly concentrated chemical toxin on the coca bushes, whose leaves provide the raw material for the drug.
The coca bushes have generally survived. In the front line of America's war on drugs it is humans and the environment that have become the victims.
Indeed the major form of violence in Colombia today is the US sponsored spraying of poison on the farms of campesinos, has greatly escalated since the U.S. Instituted Plan Colombia. Crop dusters fly over coca fields with helicopter escorts, spraying Roundup Ultra, a souped-up version of the weed killer popular in the U.S. It is manufactured by Monsanto Chemicals, the firm that made Agent Orange for use in the Vietnam War. Although the principal toxin in regular Roundup is glyphosate, in Colombia something called Cosmo-flux has been added to make it stick to the leaves of the coca plant.
The combination is thought to increase the danger to animal and human life. Even the regular formula sold in the U.S. Carries a label warning against possible damage to aquatic organisms, pets, grazing animals, rabbits, tortoises, fowl--and people. The label warns that one must not eat the fruit or nuts of trees that have been in the area sprayed with the chemical for 21 days. But these safety standards are not applied to the aerial spraying in Colombia.
Although the stated objective of the spraying is to kill only coca plants, it is not possible to restrict the damage. The spray can be carried half a mile or more by winds. Because coca is often planted in the same field with food crops, corn, bananas, yucca and beans are killed along with it. Farm animals often die from it, as do fish.
Thousands of Children have become sick and many have died. On hillsides, the death of plants leads to soil erosion. Since the land is part of the Amazon basin, the ecological consequences are severe. As farmers are driven from their homesteads, many go into the jungle to clear new land for crops, with the result that some 1.75 million acres of rain forest have been lost. This poisonous runoff also is causing a lot of harm to neighboring countries such as Ecuador.
The failed "war on drugs" is counterproductive, since it raises the price of the drugs, makes drug trafficking more profitable, and thus encourages dealers to try to sell more. Despite the many billions the U.S. has spent on the drug war, consumption in the U.S. has not declined. The Rand Institute has estimated that spending the money on drug treatment programs would be seven times more effective. That our drug policy has failed must be clear to our policymakers in Washington. Why, then, are we pouring so much money into Plan Colombia? The answer lies in the U.S. need for oil and the greedy bastards who profit from it.