COLOMBIA: GETTING BEYOND THE STEREOTYPE OF THE NARCO-TRAFFICKER

Both presidents Clinton and Bush have given the third highest amount
of military aid in the world to the right-wing Colombian government
in the name of "fighting the war on drugs ." In reality, the aid
the U.S. sends is spent on a counterinsurgency war against the
Colombian people. Along with other local and national activists, I
went to Colombia this past summer to investigate the reality of the
"war on drugs."

This particular "war" has been used to label leftist rebels and
farmers as "narco-traffickers" or "narco-guerrillas." But Colombia is
also a country rich with natural resources, including oil,
its location is a
geo-politically strategic one for transportation between North and
South America, and it is a site of interest for any future canal
connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; for these reasons it is
of particular interest to the ruling elite of the U.S.

The truth is, many peasant farmers (campesinos) do grow coca. Their
families have grown it for generations--historically not for export
but rather for its medicinal uses. They also grow coffee, corn,
yucca, bananas and plantains.

Although they do not earn much from growing coca, it earns them far
more than their other crops, which perpetuates their need to grow it.

Eberto Diaz, the president of FENSUAGRO, the national
campesino union that hosted our tour this summer, explained, "Coca is
a primary component of cocaine, like wheat is to flour.

It is not a drug by itself ... only 10 percent of the value even goes
to Colombians. Ninety percent of the profits go to drug dealers in
the U.S. You've seen the poverty and misery of the campesinos....They
have no alternative to growing coca."

In our interviews this summer in southwestern Colombia, and in 2004
in the department of Arauca and in the Magdelena Medio region,
campesinos explained why they grow coca. First, they can farm this
hardy plant on their small plots of poor-quality soil up the side of
a mountain.

They don't have access to the good land and infrastructure of the
large landowners in the valleys.

Second, because of the demand in the U.S, they get more money for
coca than for even growing coffee.

They repeatedly said that they would be interested in a crop
substitution program, if they could afford it economically. Finally,
in the most remote areas, the coca buyers actually come to them to
buy their coca leaves. Many farmers told me of times that they had
tried to take their other legal crops to market but that the crop was
ruined by the time they could get through the horrible roads and the
dangerous government and paramilitary check points.

By contrast, in the area around the FENSUAGRO national training
center a couple hours outside of Bogota, I saw NO coca fields and I
was surprised. I asked the FENSUAGRO activists about this, and they
said that folks here didn't need to grow coca because the roads were
maintained and they could get their produce to market.

Not only do the campesinos have no alternatives to growing coca, any
supposed benefits in this fight against drugs have not been
forthcoming. The Washington Office on Latin America's (WOLA) memo to
Congress this June concluded that U.S. efforts are a truly failed
policy: "The U.S. government's own data indicate that coca
cultivation is expanding in Colombia, cocaine remains readily
available in the United States, and cocaine use is steady, if not
rising, including among youth." Nor are there data supporting aerial
fumigation as a practical method of eradicating coca or for
decreasing the demand for cocaine in Colombia nor in the rest of
Latin America, as shown by recent WOLA Rand Corp. studies.

In Colombia we heard repeated testimony of the effects of the failed
six-year policy that is Plan Colombia. When the Colombian government,
using U.S. forces, support, training and materials, fumigates the
crops of campesinos, it destroys all the food crops in the
area--including those of campesinos not growing coca. The rainforest
is damaged because the chemicals drift.

The government sprays over people in their homes and fields, and over
rivers and streams that provide needed water and that feed the Amazon River.

The spraying displaces already poor farmers because the land becomes
toxic and military repression follows.

The campesinos move further into the jungle, or into protected
rainforest areas and continue to grow coca. This further contributes
to deforestation of the ecologically crucial rainforest. This
environmental damage has yet to be fully understood. When we asked
people when food crops could be grown again on fumigated land, people
said they didn't know--they had not yet been able to replant successfully.

As one campesino explained to us, "I would love to stop growing coca.
Your government assumes I want to grow coca. In reality, I want to
feed my family.

If I had roads to get my crops to market and could feed my family off
of what I'd earn growing something else then I wouldn't grow coca.
Why can't your country just help with that instead of threatening to
fumigate my land?" So, why does the U.S. government send in chemicals
and armed helicopters when building roads would do better?

It's important to understand how fumigation is used in the so-called
"war on drugs." Even though there is a lot of coca grown in Colombia,
the areas that have been the most fumigated are areas where the
Colombian government views the civilian population as "guerrilla
sympathizers." Fumigation is used like Agent Orange was in
Vietnam--as a defoliant to expose the rebels and to starve their
supporters. It is also used in areas where the land is contested and
multi-national corporations are interested in pushing the poor off
their land for "mega-projects." Spraying is not done in the northern
areas under paramilitary control and where large landowners grow
coca. (Or where the paramilitary or the military are themselves
involved in trafficking coca.) In reality, the U.S. is not fighting a
war on drugs, the U.S. is funding and fighting a counterinsurgency
war on the Colombian people, and most of this war takes place in the
countryside.

Fumigation is a threat that campesinos in Colombia face every day. At
La Miranda farming collective in Cauca, we were shown their
alternative organic farming projects and told, "All of this could be
lost tomorrow if they came and fumigated." But people don't give up.
In Colombia, you never get any guarantees, except that when the
people work together beautiful things happen.

Organizations like FENSUAGRO and the Miranda Collective are two
striking examples of resistance in the face of adversity.