Exporting Democracy or Undermining Human Rights?

Frida Berrigan and Michelle Ciarrocca are Research Associates at the World Policy Institute, New School University, New York.

The US Senate's reluctance to rush approval of a $1.7 billion-plus aid package to fight the drug war in Colombia is commendable. However, the Senate's narrow concerns, over whether an attached emergency housing package is bloated, miss a more pressing issue: that the legislation includes funds to train and arm two 1000-man counternarcotics units.

It's not surprising that this provision isn't raising more eyebrows; after all, the US military trains up to 100,000 foreign police and soldiers each year. But is this training really "exporting democracy," as President Clinton claims? Or is it giving tacit approval for brutal militaries to act with impunity?

In Latin America, US military involvement has done anything but "export democracy." In Colombia, as in other Latin American countries, US-trained officers have been responsible for egregious human rights violations. A recent Human Rights Watch report found that seven Colombian officers implicated in such violations, and linked to Colombia's notorious paramilitaries, were graduates of the US Army's School of the Americas.

The Colombia aid bill does include funding for alternative crop development and economic aid, but most goes to the military. And despite drastic increases in aid to Colombia over the past four years, drug cultivation has skyrocketed.

The aid package will double the number of Colombian troops trained by the United States; more than 5000 will receive training, in programs with almost no congressional oversight. The few reporting requirements and vetting procedures that do exist are riddled with loopholes that Colombian generals are quick to exploit. This makes it difficult to ensure that US training and weapons will not play a role in Colombia's civil war.

Given the record of the Colombian Armed Forces on human rights, and on skirting oversight, Clinton's assurance that this aid package will reduce "the drug flow into America" while not leading to "another Vietnam" rings hollow. Robert White, US Ambassador to El Salvador during its protracted civil war, said this proposal "amounts to intervention in another country's civil war."

Colombia needs US help in bringing about a lasting peace, but not this kind of help. A new policy should focus on providing aid for alternative development programs, humanitarian assistance, and the strengthening of judicial and civil institutions. That would truly be "exporting democracy."

Microbe Wafare

The Sunshine Project, a new international non-profit dedicated to exposing abuses of biotechnology, called on the Nairobi meeting of the UN Biodiversity Convention to halt US experiments with so-called "Agent Green" fungi, designed to kill drug crops. These microbes, intended to kill opium poppy, coca, and cannabis plants, endanger human health and biodiversity. They have already been used experimentally on opium trade states and Central Asia; the next release site could be in Latin America, with Colombia topping the list of potential targets.

The fungi could infect and kill plants other than illegal drug crops in ecologically sensitive areas of Asia and the Americas. The US Department of Agriculture has done only limited testing of them, on a narrow range of commercial crops. This gives little indication of how they will behave in ecosystems where they are actually used. Some strains of the fungi can be highly poisonous to animals and humans. Once released into the environment, they cannot be recalled. Indeed, the coca fungus appears to have escaped scientists' grasp when it jumped into control plots during field tests in Hawaii.

Within the United States, the Florida EPA has rejected a proposal to use the Fusarium oxysporum fungus against marijuana in that state. But through the offices of the UN Drug Control Programme, US drug warriors are pressuring other countries, Colombia especially, to allow release of the fungi within their borders.

The Sunshine Project is suggesting several options for action including a resolution calling for a halt to the US program and condemning use of any microbe to eradicate cultivated crops.

For more information, Sunshine Project <www.sunshine-project.org> or 206/633-3718.

"Resistance Is Useless"

In the first officially confirmed case of its kind, weeds in Canada have become resistant to three kinds of herbicide. The plants picked up genes from three different, genetically modified varieties of the rapeseed crop canola. In 1997, a farmer in Alberta planted separate fields, each 30 metres apart, with canola that resisted either Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, Cyanamid's Pursuit, or Aventis's Liberty. In 1998, he found weeds that resisted two herbicides, and last year, weeds that resisted all three. Only more toxic herbicides, such as 2,4-D, will control them. Companies that market herbicide-resistant crops have claimed their products would make such toxic chemicals unnecessary.

--from the 19 February 2000 issue of New Scientist magazine