U.S. WAR ON DRUGS IN COLOMBIA IS RAVAGING FARMERS AND LAND

The United States has pledged $1.3 billion to help Colombia wipe out drugs.
Congress approved the funds in 1999 to help halt cocaine production, or so
it said. The government claims that its billion-dollar drug war will help
keep cocaine off our streets.

But U.S. money must compete with floods of money from another source. "Drug
traffickers have flooded the Amazon Territory with money so that farmers
will grow coca there," said Carlos Alberto Palacios, a representative of
Colombia's Peace Informers' Network. "Coca brings farmers three times what,
say, cassava would," said Linda Panetta, director of the School of the
Americas Watch/Northeast, an organization that educates the public about
human-rights abuses associated with the U.S. military's training of Latin
American soldiers. "It's easy money."

Panetta went to Colombia in January to learn firsthand what our tax dollars
are doing. What she saw suggests that the drug war is a horrific disaster
at best, and at worst, a disaster and a cover-up.

"Colombia's military uses helicopters and airplanes to spray rainforests
with glyphosate, a chemical manufactured by Monsanto," Panetta said.
"They're supposedly killing coca plants, but they spray indiscriminately.
In La Hormiga, a small city in the Amazon Territory, the spraying killed
medicinal plants and food crops such as yucca. Yet, the adjacent coca
fields flourished. Glyphosate seeps into the soil and water. Fish die in
contaminated rivers."

People of the Amazon Territory's Putumayo region lose cows and other farm
animals to glyphosate. "We have no birds or butterflies," said Palacios.

Residents, often indigenous people, develop diarrhea, fever and other
ailments. Besides dead crops and livestock, paramilitary soldiers, working
closely with the military, kidnap, torture and massacre people to force
them off the land. "Indigenous peoples leave their sacred ancestral lands,"
said Palacios, who lives in Putumayo.

"If farmers stay, the paramilitary forces them to grow coca to finance its
operations," Panetta added. "The farmers must also pay taxes to the
paramilitary. But when the guerillas, who want reforms, find out, they
attack the farmers as collaborators."

Similar things are happening on the Pacific coast, another drug-war zone.
"We . . . have lived here for 500 years," said Oscar Gamboa Zuniga, a
representative of Federation of Municipalities on the Pacific Coast of
Colombia. "Now violence drives our people away, mainly to big cities. They
face double discrimination there because they are black and because they
are poor. Many turn to crime to survive and end up in prison."

For all its attendant upheaval, the war on drugs has had poor results.
Palacios rates it as 15 percent effective in killing coca plants. Gamboa
Zuniga also sees a wasted effort: "Think about this: years have been spent
fighting coca, but its production continues."

Meanwhile, the violent war on drugs has driven 1 million Colombians off
their land. That may be the whole point.

"The U.S. has a hidden agenda in the war on drugs," Panetta said. "It is
getting and keeping control of Colombia's resources: gold, silver, copper.
Colombia may have the largest oil reserve in the Americas. The U.S. wants
to control it." Gamboa Zuniga agreed: "The armed participants in this
conflict are fighting for control of strategic places for business."

But the so-called "drug war" continues. "Research has yielded new chemicals
such as a mutating fungus which would adhere to vegetation better," Panetta
said. "Since it wouldn't wash off in the rainforests' downpours, it would
wreak ecological havoc. We must urge our legislators to oppose this
destruction . . . We don't need mutating fungi. We need anti-drug and
drug-treatment programs here [in the United States]. Stop the demand and
you stop the supply."

Palacios stressed pressuring legislators.

"We ask the American people to make a radical, frontal opposition to Plan
Colombia," he said. "Tell them to find ways to support farmers' growing
alternative crops. Also send food and clothes to displaced Colombians, but
not through the government of Colombia, because we know what will happen in
that case. Send help through churches."

Today , a delegation of displaced Colombians will visit the Jean Donovan
Community Peace Center (also known as Maryknoll House) at 6367 Overbrook
Ave. in Philadelphia. A potluck dinner is at 6 p.m. with a presentation at
7 p.m. For more information, call 215-473-2162.