COLOMBIANS SAY DRUG SPRAYING CREATING HEALTH CRISIS

Mistakes, abuses reported in plan sponsored by U.S.

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 here repeatedly. Time and time again, residents charge, the
government planes also sprayed 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 rural
elementary school, whose 70 pupils were sprayed that Monday morning
last June. ``We had no way to give them first aid, so 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 Yanacona Indian village high in the
Andes, dozens of other residents also became ill during the spraying
campaign, complaining of nausea, dizziness, vomiting, rashes, blurred
vision and ear and stomachaches. They say the spraying damaged
legitimate 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,
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.

Critics say they frequently receive reports of mistakes and abuses by
the planes' Colombian pilots that both the U.S. and Colombian
governments choose to ignore. State Department officials deny
indiscriminate spraying takes place, with a U.S. Embassy official in
Bogota describing the residents' claims of illnesses as
``scientifically impossible.''

But to local leaders, the situation brought on by the spraying remains
a crisis. ``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
after the spraying, and in interviews 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 here say, crop-substitution projects
sponsored by the Colombian government have been irremediably damaged
and their participants left impoverished.

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

U.S.-financed aerial spraying campaigns have been the principal means
by which the Colombian government has sought to reduce coca and
opium-poppy cultivation for nearly a decade. The government fleet has
grown to include 65 airplanes and helicopters, which fly every day,
weather permitting, from three bases. Last year, the spraying effort
resulted in the fumigation of 104,000 acres of coca and 20,000 acres
of opium poppy.

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
advocacy organization Pesticide Action Network, see the eradication
effort as dangerous and misguided. ``These pilots don't care if they
are fumigating over schools, houses, grazing areas or sources of
water,'' she said in an interview at the group's headquarters in Cali.
``Furthermore, spraying only exacerbates the drug problem by
destabilizing communities that are trying to get out of illicit crops
and grow legal alternatives.'' The U.S. Embassy official who
supervises the spraying program said in an interview in Bogota that
glyphosate, the active ingredient in the pesticide used here, is
``less toxic than table salt or aspirin.'' Calling it ``the most
studied herbicide in the world,'' he said it was proven to be harmless
to human and animal life and called the villagers' account
``scientifically impossible.''

But in an out-of-court settlement in New York state in 1996, Monsanto,
a leading 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 EPA has approved glyphosate for most
commercial uses.