Fw: U.S. & Brit Imperialists poison Colombian countryside

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

Sunday June 17, 2001
The Observer

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 shrivelled. 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.
Investigations by The Observer have revealed for the
first time the extent of the damage which both the
Colombian and the US governments have tried to keep
secret since the scheme started in late December.
Against a growing mass of evidence to the contrary,
they claimed last month: 'The aerial spraying did not
cause any injury or significant damage to the
environment.' The reality is that the results on the
ground are disastrous.
The small farmers in this rich tropical valley don't
believe the official accounts as they wonder how they
can replace their crops and the chickens and fish that
have been poisoned in their farmyards and ponds.
Meanwhile coca bushes are sprouting anew. Wherever the
farmers have been able they have cut off the poisoned
leaves to prevent the toxins reaching the bushes'
roots and the coca is reviving. On the hills of
Putumayo their lime-green leaves are holding the
promise of new thrice-yearly harvests from which the
narcotic will be manufactured again: their flourishing
presence mocks the politicians and soldiers in
Washington and Bogota.
At a village outside La Hormiga, a group of sick
children are gathered by their mothers at the gates of
the school whose small garden was ruined by the poison
that rained on it early in the mornings on 22 December
and 6 January. 'The planes came over at the height of
a palm tree accompanied by helicopter gunships which
circled around,' said Juana, a young teacher at the
school. 'The plants the children were tending in the
school garden withered and the pullets they were
looking after all died.'
Like other Colombians, she did not want her real name
used for fear of reprisals by government forces or
their allies, the 'paracos' - the paramilitary death
squads.
Children from local schools are showing signs of
serious skin infections, which heal over but
continually recur.
Gloria, a teacher at the school at El Placer, reports
similar illness. 'About 230 of the 450 pupils at our
school have gone down with diarrhoea, and respiratory
and constantly recurring skin infections,' she said.
Domestic animals have fared even worse. The tilapia
that have brought a new prosperity to farmers who had
built fish ponds are dying in their thousands as are
dogs, pigs and other livestock.
Plan Colombia, promoted by the US and Colombian
governments and gingerly accepted by the British and
other European Union countries, is dissolving in
failure, death and vast pollution of the Amazonian
forest within months of its launch in December.
Under the plan, the Colombian armed forces are being
given US weapons and training. These are same troops
who over the decades have accumulated honours and
medals for their battles with unarmed civilians and
have frequently committed atrocities with Western
help.
Now Colombians, disillusioned alike with politicians,
the increasingly aimless guerrillas and the death
squads, are becoming enraged at America's 'war on
drugs' whose front line is in their villages.
Thousands have fled the Putumayo for neighbouring
Ecuador, adding to the estimated 2,100,000 Colombians
who have been displaced within the country by war.
Those who stay - and who dare to criticise the war on
drugs - complain that Washington is seeking to halt
the production of cocaine and heroin while doing
nothing to stop the drug trade in the US itself where
the bulk of the profits are made - letting senior
racketeers go free while filling US prisons with minor
offenders from the ethnic minorities.
But what is scaring them most is what the chemicals
are doing to them. Consignments of the poison being
used in Colombia contain labels warning that it causes
damage to crops, which must be 'shielded with screens
from aerial spraying to prevent droplets falling on
the green parts of useful plants'. The warning also
says that application must be done on windless days.
The people who do the spraying in this valley do not
supply screens and the peasants couldn't afford them
if they could find them. Nature does not often provide
windless days in the tropical Andean valleys. And the
coca bushes are often planted among other crops.
The chemical, based on the compound glyphosate, is
manufactured by the US Monsanto Corporation using
British ingredients, hexitan esters, supplied by ICI
Specialty Chemicals, and liquid isoparafins
manufactured by Exxon. It damages the human digestive
system, the central nervous system, the lungs and the
blood's red corpuscles. Another constituent causes
cancer in animals and damage to the liver and kidneys
of humans.
The villagers' fears about the chemicals appear to be
well founded. The World Health Organisation has found
that glyphosate is easily transmitted to humans
through foods such as raspberries, lettuces, carrots
and barley - with traces of the chemical found in
crops sown a whole year after the soil had been dosed
with it.
Elsa Nivía, a Colombian agronomist who works with the
Pesticide Action Network, ridicules the US
government's claims that Roundup Ultra is safe and no
more poisonous than aspirin or table salt.
She has written that in the first two months of this
year local authorities have reported 4,289 humans
suffering skin or gastric disorders while 178,377
creatures were killed by the spraying including
cattle, horses, pigs, dogs, ducks, hens and fish.
According to Colombian NGOs, the government, backed by
Washington, has done its best to discredit reports of
damage from Roundup Ultra, accusing complaining
peasants of being in league with the drug traffickers
and guerrillas. The first Blair government adopted a
similar attitude to the complaints: during and after
several flying visits to Colombia, Mo Mowlam, the
Minister then in charge of drug problems, belittled
reports of the damage Roundup Ultra was causing. 'She
kept on saying, "Where's the evidence?" when we told
her of the effects of the poison,' remarked one senior
member of a UK aid agency.
Human rights workers have expressed dismay at their
treatment by British officials. 'One official visited
me. He was very aggressive, dismissing our reports
from the Putumayo of the damage done as "rubbish". I
felt insulted. He was trying to intimidate me,' said
one.
Luis Fernando Arango, a conservative lawyer and
university teacher who opposes the spraying, said:
'Anyone who protests about this is labelled a drug
dealer. Years into the future a lot of old men with
dandruff will get together in Geneva and talk about
it. But by then there will be no countryside left.'




The Revolution will not be televised: News at 11...

Jim W. Jaszewski
Independent Marxist
Canada

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2001: 75th Anniversary of the 1926 British General Strike