From: Colombian Labor Monitor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 10:07:19 -0500 (CDT)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: MC: U.S. drug policies backfiring in Colombia
============================================
"As long as the U.S. continues to give aid
to Colombia, the terrible situation will
continue.... It is only the innocent people
who are the victims of this policy."
____________ ============================================
THE MORNING CALL [Allentown, Pennsylvania]
Sunday, 3 June 2001
U.S. drug policies backfiring in Colombia
-----------------------------------------
By Joanna Poncavage
Last summer, the United States pledged $1.3 billion in aid to the South
American country of Colombia to combat its narcotics industry and also to
promote peace, revive its economy and strengthen its democracy.
On paper, "Plan Colombia" has admirable goals. In reality, it perpetuates
a violent war that began long before the country started exporting drugs,
says a Colombian economist who came here to tell his story to churches and
peace groups in the mid-Atlantic region.
"As long as the U.S. continues to give aid to Colombia, the terrible
situation will continue," says Hector Mondragon, 46. "It is only the
innocent people who are the victims of this policy."
Mondragon spoke recently to a group of about 50 clergy, professors and
friends gathered at the City View Diner in Whitehall Township for a
breakfast meeting sponsored by the Lehigh Pocono Committee of Concern, one
of the oldest peace groups in the United States.
Mondragon, who works as an economic adviser to Colombia's National Peasant
Council, says his life and family have been threatened because he speaks
out for the poor and disenfranchised.
"Part of my work is to visit rural communities and give workshops about
economics and constitutional law," he said, speaking with the help of an
interpreter from Witness for Peace, a group that describes itself as a
politically independent group committed to nonviolence. Based in
Washington, D.C., the group seeks to educate Americans about the impact of
U.S. economic and military policy in Latin America.
Mondragon says Colombia is a country devastated by poverty, political
violence and social upheaval. The programs made possible by U.S. money do
little to improve things. Instead, he says the money indirectly allows the
country's warring factions to buy more weapons and escalate the violence.
Last year alone, there were 425 massacres, or more than one per day,
carried out by paramilitary groups against civilians, he reported.
He described the paramilitary groups as private armies supported by
wealthy landowners and industrialists conducting a social genocide of
campesinos (peasants) and ethnic Colombians. Union leaders also are
targets of the military and paramilitary.
Mondragon said he was tortured by the Colombian army because he was a
member of a community committee that supported a strike by oil workers.
The torture temporarily paralyzed his hands and arms.
"The officer in charge was a graduate of the School of the Americas," he
said. SOA, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation, is a training facility for Latin American soldiers at Fort
Benning, a U.S. Army base in Georgia. Several Lepoco members in his
audience said they have gone there to demonstrate against it.
The paramilitary groups also battle groups known as guerillas, which are
fighting against the Colombian upper class and the oil industry.
Last October, a paramilitary force mutilated and decapitated 75 people
with chain saws in a province that had elected its first indigenous
governor. "They've always killed the political opposition in Colombia,"
says Mondragon. Five thousand people who lived in the area abandoned their
land and fled in terror.
Aerial spraying of coca cultivation with herbicide doesn't work, said
Mondragon, because when one area is sprayed, the small farmers expand into
the forest and cut down more trees to plant their coca. Fumigation is just
one more method of taking campesinos' land and making them move farther
into the forest, Mondragon added.
In 1998, he said, 16 thousand hectares (1 hectare equals 2.47 acres) of
coca were fumigated, to be replaced with 38 thousand hectares. In 2000, 30
thousand fumigated hectares were replaced with 89 thousand hectares.
About 500,000 campesinos are cultivating coca, which is used to produce
cocaine, or poppies, which supply the raw material for heroin, said
Mondragon. Recently, 2 million campesinos, or peasant farmers, were
displaced from their homes.
The oil companies also are backing Plan Colombia, because land that is
fumigated is opened up to oil exploration when indigenous people abandon
it, says Mondragon.
Mondragon was introduced by Lauren Cliggitt, a recent Lehigh University
graduate who traveled to Colombia with a Witness for Peace delegation of
100 people. She spent time in a squatter's community in the southern
region of the country. "We saw how they have to live," she says, "people
have been displaced by violence and fumigation."
Once a rich agricultural country, Colombia now imports food. Thanks to the
breakup of the cartel that helped small farmers get a fair price for their
coffee, the country that once was synonymous with coffee now imports it
from Peru.
"Our agriculture is in ruins," says Mondragon. The poor farmers have no
other opportunity than to grow coca or opium poppies, he adds. "The free
trade system has caused this abundance of illegal drugs."
If we really want to get rid of the drug trade, he said, we must follow
the lead of France and the plan proposed by its president, Jacques Chirac.
Americans should seek out programs that promote fair trade and ethical
consumer choices, and that work directly with farmers and artisans,
Mondragon said.
Examples are Equal Exchange, Level Ground and Ten Thousand Villages.
Working with groups such as these, campesinos can get a fair price for
their products. "Exchange free trade for fair trade," Mondragon said.
In addition to causing homelessness, aerial sprayings cause human health
problems. The herbicide can cause skin rashes, especially on children, he
said. Spraying has also killed cattle, he said, and contaminated water.
Spraying also destroys food crops growing close to the coca fields, as
well as nearby natural flora and forests.
The herbicide's active ingredient is glyphosate, the same Monsanto
chemical found in the world's most widely used agricultural herbicide,
Roundup.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies glyphosate as
non-carcinogenic, but according to Extonet, a pesticide information
project of several cooperative extensions and the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, it can cause significant eye irritation.
Mondragon says that the herbicide formula used for spraying in Colombia
also contains ingredients that cause it to adhere to surfaces to increase
its effects.
According to the U.S. State Department, aerial spraying has escalated
since December, when helicopters and herbicide paid for with U.S. aid
sprayed almost half of the coca fields in southern Colombia or about 25
thousand hectares.
In addition, more than 106 coca processing sites have been destroyed, says
Wes Carrington, spokesperson for the State Department's Bureau of Western
Hemisphere Affairs. Although the State Department stops short at declaring
the drug way in Colombia a success, "these measures have encouraged over
3,500 families to sign up for alternative development assistance," he
says.
Carrington admits that coca cultivation has been increasing in Colombia
because similar eradication efforts forced it out of Peru and Bolivia. "We
consider those countries a success," he says.
Carrington says the state department hasn't seen any evidence to
substantiate the claims that the spraying is harmful to human health.
According to the State Department, the violence level in Colombia is very
high and it involves illegal armed groups, including paramilitary groups
on the right, and groups originally founded as leftist guerilla groups on
the left.
Over the years, some groups, which battle each other, have gotten involved
in drug trafficking and mass kidnappings as ways to supplement their
income.
Carrington admits that Colombia is a very difficult issue to get a handle
on. "It is very complex. The violence and conflict have been going on for
so long, the narcotics aspect is an overlay."
Carrington also admits that the State Department was aware of human rights
abuses involving the Colombian army and paramilitary groups. "That is an
area Congress is very careful to put controls on," he says. "Only those
people who were uninvolved with human rights abuses could be involved in
units the U.S. was going to help train."
John Peeler, head of the political science department at Bucknell
University in Lewisburg, Union County, has been studying Colombia since
the 1970s. He also agrees that the situation in Colombia is convoluted.
The U.S. monetary aid is not helping the Colombian people, says Peeler.
"The problems in Colombia are far too complicated to be helped by such a
program like this that focuses on stopping the production of coca, the
transportation of coca and production of cocaine. You can stop it at any
given location but you will push it into some other location. You won't
stop it finally, until you stop the demand."
Cocaine penetrates all aspects of Colombian life, says Peeler. The
Colombian government puts cocaine control at a lower priority than the
United States, but because the U.S. will ante up money to fight drugs, the
Colombians will propose to fight drugs. "It is a way for the Colombians to
get some money and some arms, ostensibly for fighting drugs, but they may
be fighting guerillas," he says.
In Colombia, says Peeler, "Nothing is what it seems."
Copyright 2001 The Morning Call, Inc.
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