COLUMBIAN SPRAY PROGRAM MISSING ITS TARGET

In July 2000 President Clinton signed into law Plan Colombia, a $1.3
billion aid package for Colombia and its neighbors, aimed at decreasing
illegal drug use in the United States.

Plan Colombia will fund a large military buildup and a massive herbicide
spraying campaign in Colombia, a country already beset with problems, where
more than a million people have been displaced by violence, and poverty is
rampant. A civil war has been raging for four decades in Colombia. In this
war between the Colombian military, guerrilla forces and paramilitaries,
most of the casualties are civilians.

Difficult though this situation is to understand, it is imperative that we
all become informed about it, because right now we have an opportunity to
affect U.S. policy in Colombia.

Last year Sen. Patty Murray supported Plan Colombia, but she has indicated
to concerned constituents that she would withdraw her support if Plan
Colombia resulted in human rights violations or significant environmental
degradation.

Observers are reporting extensive environmental damage and human rights
violations and more are inevitable. We now have the opportunity to convince
Sen. Murray to see this for herself.

One of the goals of Plan Colombia is to wipe out half of the 300,000 acres
of coca (the plant used to produce cocaine) estimated to be growing in
Colombia. Between December 2000 and February 2001, an area of the Amazon
basin jungle about the size of the Methow Valley floor from Winthrop to
Lost River--about 74,000 acres--was sprayed. As of February, on good days,
the spraying was proceeding at about 3,000 acres per day.

Environmentalists have several reasons to be concerned about this. First,
most of the spraying is taking place in the Amazon jungle with planes
flying too high to accurately aim the spray. In one area, spraying
destroyed 42 acres of yucca.

"The planes didn't come right over us," a resident told a reporter. "They
came close by," he said pointing to a field of coca 100 yards away.
Observers report that more than half of the vegetation killed is legal
crops, that wells are being contaminated, livestock killed and forests
destroyed.

In addition, the spraying is leading to increased clearing of the Amazon
rainforest because farmers who have lost their crops often move deeper into
the jungle. "In this sense," warned Linda Farley, American Birds
Conservancy Science Officer, "glyphosate spraying is already having a
significant detrimental effect on the endemic and threatened birds of
Colombia, as 95 percent of the 75-plus threatened species are
forest-dependent." Loss of habitat in Colombia might also affect Methow
Valley birds--such as the nighthawk and the American redstart--that winter
in northern South America.

The herbicide being sprayed is commercially known as Roundup, but the
version being used in Colombia contains an unidentified surfactant that
makes it more effective at killing vegetation and apparently more harmful
to humans and animals than the version used in the United States.
Representatives from the Center for International Policy who visited a
sprayed area in April 2001, reported that the spraying had sharply
increased cases of skin, gastrointestinal and respiratory disorders,
particularly in children.

Most of the funding in Plan Colombia is for military aid. Robert E. White,
a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, has warned that Plan
Colombia "puts us in league with a Colombian military that has
long-standing ties to the drug-dealing, barbaric paramilitaries that commit
more than 75 percent of the human rights violations" in Colombia.

According to the Washington Post, one paramilitary group in Colombia killed
more than 983 civilians last year. In February a Colombian general was
convicted of allowing a paramilitary group to massacre at least 22
civilians in a province southeast of Bogota.

Witness for Peace, an organization that promotes social and economic
justice in Latin America, is leading a delegation to Colombia for senators
and their aides in August. One of Patty Murray's aides is considering
going. We need to let Sen. Murray know that it is vital that she send a
representative to see the situation in Colombia firsthand.

You can contact Sen. Murray at: 173 Russell Senate Office Building,
Washington, D.C. 20510, or call her at (202) 224-2621, or e-mail her at
senator_murray@murray.senate.gov, or fax to (202) 224-0238.