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A Colombian national police plane sprays poppy crops in the state of Huila.
Half the country’s coca plantations are located near the southern border.
Children
playing in a sprayed coca field in January 2001.
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Cocaine
in Colombia
Colombia is
the world’s main producer of cocaine, coca paste and cocaine base. U.S. State Department
figures from March 2000 say 140,000 hectares in Colombia are planted with coca bushes,
producing about 580 tonnes of pure cocaine a year. Coca does not hold the same cultural
importance in Colombia as it does in Bolivia and other Andean countries, although
it has always been used for medicinal reasons, especially by the Indians living in
Amazonia. But it is still not legal to use it, as it is in some parts of Bolivia.
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“We’re the embittered children of this damn coca thing. It’s left some of us ruined
and others in jail or in the cemetery.”
“The drug traffickers are the ones who damage the environment and nobody protests
against that.”
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The
so-called “war on coca” in Colombia, backed by the United States, is destroying jungles
and forests, and threatening the health of half a million peasants and indigenous
peoples
At first sight, a coca
leaf is nothing more than an ordinary light-green leaf that grows on a rather ugly
bush. But if you hold one up to the light, it turns yellow and a system of veins
appears that seems to carry a substance towards the centre. This is the narcotic
over which 15,000 leftist guerrillas and 8,000 far-right paramilitary troops are
fighting in Colombia. Each side’s secret military structure rests on the underground
economy of growing and refining coca leaves. Drug trafficking has set off a war in
Colombia just as diamonds have in Sierra Leone.
Over the last 15 years, trafficking has turned Colombia into a top national security
issue for the United States, the world’s largest consumer of cocaine. As such, the
U.S. has a direct influence on Colombia’s fight against drugs through hefty budgets,
military hardware and other aid, along with the threat of political and economic
sanctions. American involvement has increased to the point that the so-called Colombia
Plan, the main programme of President Andres Pastrana’s government, now receives
$1.3 billion in U.S. aid.
According to Pastrana’s reasoning, if all the coca planted in the country is destroyed,
there will be no money left to fight the war, allowing peace to be negotiated with
the outlawed groups. No more cocaine would be sold on the streets of American cities.
Washington supports this scenario. To achieve the goal within five years, a military
offensive was drawn up, including the creation of three anti-drug battalions and
a fleet of planes to spray the plants with a poison called glyphosate.
Is this a good thing? Environmental NGOs such as Acción Andina see it as a
scorched-earth policy and the European Union criticizes the programme because it
provides no long-term solution for the survival of communities that live off growing
coca. The government says at least half a million people–450,000 peasants and 50,000
indigenous people–depend directly on the crop for their livelihood. Yet last December,
the authorities began large-scale secret spraying of coca plantations with glyphosate,
a pink liquid herbicide used against all crop diseases.
A
desolate scene
Colombian officials from the antinarcotics directorate of the national police say
30,000 hectares of coca were sprayed with the poison last January. Glyphosate has
been used since 1984 to kill marijuana plants. A decade later, the government authorized
its use in the Andean highlands to eradicate a violet poppy whose buds produce a
thick white liquid that forms the rubbery substance from which opium, morphine and
heroin are refined.
Although glyphosate is banned in several U.S. states, including Florida, where it
was rejected as a way to eradicate marijuana plants in the Everglades region “because
of its unclear effects on the environment,” the Colombian authorities cited research
funded by the country’s national farming institute that ensures the chemical does
not pose a health risk to humans and is only slightly toxic for animals and plants.
To appease the growing chorus of criticism, the authorities promised to implement
an environmental management plan that would limit use of the chemical to destroying
illegal plants, without harming the rest of the environment or people. Six years
later, this plan remains a draft document on the desk of environment minister Juan
Mayr. Meanwhile, the poisonous rain has now been sprayed over more than 300,000 hectares
of jungle and forest.
National watchdog bodies such as the office of the ombudsman have since shown that
glyphosate causes irreparable harm to people and the environment wherever it is used.
The ombudsman’s most recent study was of the Colombia Plan’s launch in Putumayo province,
which borders Ecuador and where half the country’s coca is grown.
Representatives of four indigenous communities protested last January 11 against
the damage glyphosate had done to their staple crops (maize, bananas, manioc and
other vegetables), their health and the lives of their animals. A delegation from
the ombudsman’s office, along with experts from the UN High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR), visited the area between January 15 and 25 and reported on what they described
as a “desolate scene.” There had been “indiscriminate destruction of the jungle,
legal crops, medicinal plants and fish-ponds. There is clear evidence that wildlife
has fled, rivers are contaminated and production in the region has fallen.”
Skin and gastro-intestinal problems, fevers, headaches, nausea, colds and vomiting
were common among the inhabitants, the mission observed. The police and the national
anti-narcotics authority, which are in charge of the spraying, argue that the herbicide
is dropped very accurately thanks to satellite imagery and aerial photography that
pinpoint the exact location of the coca plantations. But wind and the weather means
that the chemical can overshoot the fields by up to 150 metres, the ombudsman said.
The social consequences of this are huge. Villages have been abandoned and about
20,000 people have fled their land in the face of the military campaign against coca.
Anticipating the arrival of refugees, the UNHCR set up camps in the border area of
Lake Agrio (Ecuador) halfway through 2000. “The evidence is strong, so we’re calling
for an immediate halt to the spraying and for the compensation of the victims whose
livelihoods are seriously threatened,” says ombudsman Eduardo Cifuentes. There is
no effective coordination, he observes, between the various state bodies involved
in the government’s anti-drug campaign and those whose job it is to protect the environment.
Peasants like Aicardo Loaiza have to live in the 35-degree heat of the coca plantations
and under the constant threat of the guerrillas, the paramilitaries and the crop-spraying
planes. Loaiza, 48, came to Putumayo in 1968 drawn by fortunes to be made out of
rice growing. Today, he has a wife, 13 children and has had enough of growing coca
“for the big shots.” He lives in the Santana district and is trying to persuade 500
of his neighbours that the only solution is to sign an agreement with the government
to pull up the coca plants by hand themselves in exchange for an end to spraying
and subsidies to grow legal crops.
“Look at us. We’re the embittered children of this damn coca thing,” he says. “We’ve
been doing it for 20 or 30 years. It’s left some of us ruined and others in jail
or in the cemetery.” He has the hands of an expert coca gatherer, a raspachín,
as the drug traffickers call them, and they were the first to sign an accord with
the government to destroy the coca plants “voluntarily and not under threat of the
poison.” For Loaiza, this is the only solution.
In recent months, 5,000 families–small-time growers with no more than 10 hectares
of coca–have chosen this path. These are people who harvest the leaves between three
and six times a year, pack them in bags and take them by river to the nearest processing
plant. Amid or alongside the coca bushes, they grow bananas, manioc, maize, fruit
and medicinal plants. If these crops are sprayed from the air, the families’ lives
are destroyed in one stroke.
The agreements signed by the farmers stipulate that they must uproot all their coca
plants within a year in exchange for being included in alternative development schemes.
The deal works in Loaiza’s village, where a factory to process palm-oil and fruit
has been set up to enable the villagers who carry out the deal to earn a living.
This would seem to be the ideal solution for getting rid of coca without further
damaging the eco-system, at least in the eyes of peasants and environmental organizations.
But the funds set aside in the Colombia Plan for such alternative development are
small compared with the amount for military operations and spraying. The U.S. is
supplying only $300 million for social and economic substitution compared with $1
billion for military purposes.
A
new strategy?
Another obstacle to the agreements with the peasants is that they do not attract
the big-time coca growers, those who have 100 hectares or more planted, with hidden
arsenals to protect them. Gonzalo de Francisco, an aide to President Pastrana, runs
the Colombia Plan in Putumayo province. There, he says, “the government has no choice
but to use military means and aerial spraying.”
The head of the national anti-narcotics authority, Gabriel Merchán, told the
Unesco Courier that “the drug-traffickers are the ones who damage the environment
and nobody protests against that. The arguments are all about condemning the use
of glyphosate despite the fact we’ve used it in accordance with national law and
international rules.” Environment minister Juan Mayr agrees, and both men insist
the “drug traffickers have deforested 600,000 hectares of jungle and forest land
and use 75 chemicals more poisonous than glyphosate.”
Tomás León Sicard, a Colombian National University researcher and expert
on the environment and development, thinks the parties involved should stop being
politicians for a moment and get to the heart of the matter. This is urgent, he says,
because the fighting is taking place in very fragile and biologically diverse rural
eco-systems, such as Amazonia. He calls on the combatants to save them since “there
is enough room for everyone on land in the agricultural regions.”
Implementation of the Colombia Plan, massive spraying and peasant protests have spurred
the environmentalists to intervene. After a lot of pressure, the U.S. State Department
recently admitted for the first time that “errors” were perhaps being made in the
spraying operations and that a new eradication strategy might be considered if an
effective one could be found.
Court
action
For the time being, the figures used by the anti-narcotics officials themselves show
that the more land is sprayed, the more new land is planted with coca. The plantations
simply move from one province to another because the conditions for growing it are
still all there–poverty, unemployment, absence of the state, social conflict and
a growing demand for cocaine from foreign markets.
In these circumstances, one non-repressive solution is the law. Environmental lawyers
Claudia Sampedro and Héctor Suárez have persuaded a Colombian administrative
court to allow a demand from a grassroots group for the government to take responsibility
for the damage the spraying has done to the environment and to people.
“For the first time, Colombian society is using the law to check that the government
respects the environment, not just by recognizing the damage caused, but by suspending
the spraying and taking preventive measures,” says Sampedro, an expert in international
environmental law.
How can the authorities have been spraying for more than 15 years without taking
any steps to protect the environment? Who will take responsibility for that and for
the irreversible damage that has been done? The court will try to answer that very
soon because the debate is moving onto a legal plane. The protesters’ next step will
be to make an international complaint against the anti-narcotics authorities for
damaging a region that is the heritage of all humanity, Amazonia.
http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/ar/colombia
http://www.presencia.gov.co
http://www.mediosparalapaz.org |
