DRUG WAR BLAMED FOR HURTING VILLAGERS

RIOBLANCO DE SOTARA, Colombia - The children and their teachers were
in the schoolyard, they say, playing soccer and basketball and waiting
for classes to begin when the crop-duster appeared.

At first they waved, but as the plane drew closer and a gray mist
began to stream from its wings, alarmed teachers rushed the pupils to
their classrooms.

Over the next two weeks, a fleet of counternarcotics planes taking
part in a U.S.-sponsored program to eradicate heroin poppy cultivation
returned repeatedly, residents charge, spraying buildings and fields
that were not supposed to be targets, damaging residents' health and
crops.

``The pilot was flying low, so there is no way he could not have seen
those children,'' said Nidia Majin, principal of the La Floresta
elementary school, whose 70 pupils were sprayed that Monday in June.
``I sent them home. But they had to cross fields and streams that had
also been contaminated, so some of them got sick.''

In fact, say leaders of this remote Yanacona Indian village high in
the Andes, dozens of other residents became ill, complaining of
nausea, dizziness, vomiting, rashes, blurred vision. They say the
spraying also damaged crops, undermining government efforts to support
residents who have abandoned poppy growing.

Such incidents are not limited to this village of 5,000, say critics
in Colombia and the United States, but have occurred in many parts of
Colombia and are bound to increase if the fumigation program is
intensified, as the Clinton administration is proposing as part of a
$1.6 billion emergency aid package to Colombia.

``The fumigation was done in an indiscriminate and irresponsible
manner, and it did not achieve its objective,'' said Ivan Alberto
Chicangana, who was the mayor when the spraying occurred.

``The damage done to the physical and economic well-being of this
community has been serious,'' he said, ``and is going to be very
difficult for us to overcome.''

He and other local leaders say that people were sick for several
weeks. A few residents complained of lasting symptoms. Three fish
farms with more than 25,000 rainbow trout were destroyed, residents
said, and numerous farm animals, mostly chickens and guinea pigs,
died, while others, including some cows and horses, fell ill.

In addition, fields of beans, onions, garlic, potatoes, corn and other
traditional crops were sprayed, leaving plants to wither and die. As a
result, community leaders say, crop-substitution projects sponsored by
the Colombian government have been hopelessly damaged and their
participants left impoverished.

The spraying around this particular village has since stopped,
residents say, though it continues elsewhere in Colombia.

Peasants in the coca-growing region of Caqueta, southeast of here,
last year complained to the media that spray planes had devastated the
crops they had planted after abandoning coca. Similar reports have
emerged from Guaviare, another province to the east.

Indeed, U.S.-financed aerial spraying campaigns like the one here have
been the principal means by which the Colombian government has sought
to reduce coca and opium-poppy cultivation for nearly a decade. The
Colombian government fleet has grown to include 65 airplanes and
helicopters, which fly every day, weather permitting.

Yet despite such efforts, which have been backed by more than $150
million in U.S. aid, cocaine and heroin production in Colombia has
more than doubled since 1995.

In an effort to reverse that trend and weaken left-wing guerrilla and
right-wing paramilitary groups that are profiting from the drug trade
and threatening the country's stability, the Clinton administration is
now urging Congress to approve a new aid package, which calls for
increased spending on drug eradication as well as a gigantic increase
for crop-substitution programs, to $127 million from $5 million.

Critics, like Elsa Nivia, director of the Colombian affiliate of the
Pesticide Action Network, see the eradication effort as dangerous and
misguided. ``Spraying only exacerbates the drug problem by
destabilizing communities that are trying to get out of illicit crops
and grow legal alternatives.''

And Juan Hugo Torres, an official of Plante, the Colombian government
agency supervising crop-substitution efforts, who works with farmers,
said, ``You are building trust with people, they have hopes, and then
the spraying does away with all of that.''

In Washington, R. Rand Beers, the U.S. assistant secretary of state
for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, denied
problems. He said aerial spraying flights are strictly monitored and
targets chosen carefully.

The fumigation program is designed so that pilots ``shouldn't be
anywhere close to alternative development projects,'' he said. ``If
that happened, the pilot who flew that mission should be
disciplined.''

As for the complaints of illness, the U.S. Embassy official in Bogota
who supervises the spraying said that glyphosate, the active
ingredient in the pesticide, is ``less toxic than table salt or
aspirin.'' He said it was proven to be harmless to humans and called
the villagers' account ``scientifically impossible.''

The official said, ``being sprayed on certainly does not make people
sick, because it is not toxic to human beings.'' Glyphosate ``does not
translocate to water'' and ``leaves no soil residue,'' he added, so
``if they are saying otherwise ... they are lying.''

But in an out-of-court settlement in New York state in 1996, Monsanto,
a manufacturer of glyphosate-based herbicides, though not necessarily
identical to those used here, including one called Roundup, agreed to
withdraw claims that the product is ``safe, nontoxic, harmless or free
from risk.''

The company signed a statement agreeing that its ``absolute claims
that Roundup `will not wash or leach in the soil' is not accurate''
because glyphosate ``may move through some types of soil under some
conditions after application.''

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has approved
glyphosate for most commercial uses. But a 1993 EPA study noted that
``in California, where physicians are required to report pesticide
poisonings, glyphosate was ranked third out of the 25 leading causes
of illness or injury due to pesticides'' over a five-year period in
the 1980s, primarily causing eye and skin irritation.

In Rioblanco de Sotara, half a dozen local people say they felt so
sick after the spraying that they undertook a 55-mile bus trip to San
Jose Hospital in Popayan. There, they were attended by Dr. Nelson
Palechor Obando, who said, ``They complained to me of dizziness,
nausea and pain in the muscles and joints of their limbs, and some
also had skin rashes.''

Once word got out about the illnesses, prices for milk, cheese and
other products that are a mainstay of the local economy dropped by
more than half. ``The rumors are that the land is contaminated ... the
middlemen can now name their own price,'' said Fabian Omen, a farmer
and town councilman.