May 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Scorched Earth -- US Chemical Warfare in the Colombian Rainforest

Sean Donahue is Co-Director of New Hampshire Peace Action and an active member of Massachusetts Earth First! He traveled to Colombia in January with a delegation sponsored by the Colombia Support Network. He is available to speak about US military intervention in Colombia <wrldhealer@yahoo.com>

La Hormiga, 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 US 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?"

Dry, dead trees and crops left by aerial fumigation. Food crops are often destroyed along with the targeted illegal crops. Photo: Eleanor Oakley

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 US 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.

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 Putumayo 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 US 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 Putumayo

"For us coca was a sacred plant, but the white man made that sacred plant our enemy."--Indigenous leader in Putumayo

La Hormiga is located in the southern province of Putumayo, which has become ground zero in the war against coca production in Latin America. Rivers flow through its rainforests, feeding into the Amazon. Indigenous people practiced subsistence agriculture here for thousands of years. 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. Colonists came to exploit the rubber and oil in the region and left again, leaving Putumayo sparsely populated.

But in recent decades, violence and poverty have forced many Colombians to flee their homes, and Putumayo is the last place left for many people to run. In the 1980s and 1990s, Putumayo was colonized by people who began to clear the forest to grow coca --because coca was the only crop that fetched a high enough price for a family to support itself. US policies that dumped cheap food on the Colombian market while opposing cooperative efforts between Latin American countries to regulate markets had destroyed the markets for Colombian coffee and wheat.

The coca economy brought armed groups 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 had to flee the FARC. The military came to fight the FARC, followed by right wing paramilitaries organized by the CIA and funded by wealthy Colombians that came to do the dirty work of killing civilians.

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 US in Vietnam and perfected by US-trained militaries and death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s. 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 or its aims. 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 plantations or to set up cattle ranches to launder their cocaine profits. The paramilitaries are paid with the proceeds. The military and the paramilitaries operate hand in hand. Now the US has come to the region with a "solution" to the problems caused by the coca economy that may be worse than the problems themselves.

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. Plan Colombia is focussed 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 $1000 to invest in planting legal crops. But since the average harvest from a five-acre coca field brings the farmer a little over $4000 (the cocaine produced from these crops will fetch $800,000 in the US 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. Dyncorp hires Vietnam veterans to head up Colombian teams flying crop dusting planes and the helicopter gunships that protect them. Why contract a job like this out to mercenaries?

US law currently prohibits US soldiers from engaging in combat in Colombia. There are no such restrictions on private contractors. Dead mercenaries also don't require military funerals. US soldiers coming home in flag-draped coffins might evoke memories of the Vietnam War, drawing unwanted scrutinyº. And if mercenaries commit human rights violations, the US government can deny knowledge and responsibility.

Despite claims that the fumigation planes choose their targets carefully, food crops and wild plants are being killed off throughout the region, and it is easier to pin those problems on the failures of a private contractor than to admit that fumigation is inherently indiscriminant.

Monsanto produces "Roundup Ultra," the herbicide the fumigation planes are spraying in Colombia. The company began to dominate the herbicide market in the late 1960s when it began marketing an herbicide called "Lasso." The US military renamed "Lasso" "Agent Orange." When Agent Orange was banned in the US, Monsanto developed "Roundup" to replace "Lasso."

Aura Cristina, a Cofan indigenous baby, suffers from a painful rash over much of her body after her family's lands were aerially fumigated. Photo: Eleanor Oakley

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. In extreme cases, Roundup exposure has caused kidney failure and the loss of red blood cells.

To add insult to injury, fumigation doesn't reduce coca production. 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.

The primary effect of fumigation is to drive coca producers deeper into the rainforest, destroying more land.

Many in Putumayo speculate that the fumigations have the same goal as the paramilitary massacres: to drive people off their land so wealthy people and big corporations can snatch up abandoned farms. Even though the region's biggest oil boom has come and gone, there is still a lot of oil under the ground in Putumayo. Occidental Petroleum lobbied hard for Plan Colombia. The apparel industry stands to gain from the war in Colombia too: Sen. Bob Graham of Florida has suggested that the US should lift tariffs on clothing imports so multinational corporations can build factories to employ people who have been driven off their land by violence and fumigation. Once again, the US is putting corporate interests ahead of human rights and the life of the rainforest. We need to organize to stop Plan Colombia and the fumigations before more lives are ruined and more forests are destroyed.

Note:Some names have been changed for the protection of people in Colombia

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