HOW GLOBAL BATTLE AGAINST DRUGS RISKS BACKFIRING

The international war on narcotics is going awry. Chemical spraying
of coca bushes is poisoning Colombian villages. By Hugh O'Shaughnessy
in Bogota

Special report: George Bush's America

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 Nivia, 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 Drug Producers' Big League

Most recent UN Drugs Control Programme production figures are from
1999, before Plan Colombia and the Afghan moratorium

Country | Supply (worth in US$ millions)

Coca Base

Colombia 494

Peru 134

Bolivia 63

Opium

Afghanistan 251

Myanmar (Burma) 116

Colombia 20

Mexico 9

Laos 8

Other Asia combined 21