WITNESS: DRUG WAR SPRAYING COLOMBIA TO DEATH

Jena Matzen has a carousel of slides from her trip to Colombia, and she's
giving slide shows throughout the Triangle. These are not your standard
shots of smiling couples standing in front of national landmarks.

One image shows a farmer at the center of his 12-acre field, a former corn
crop now utterly decimated. Another shows a white flag raised over a black
pepper crop, as a signal to airplanes that this is a legal crop.

According to Matzen, a Hillsborough resident, the white flag did not have
the desired effect; the pepper crop was destroyed nevertheless, by planes
dropping enormous quantities of an herbicide called glyphosate -- marketed
by Monsanto in this country under the brand name Round-Up -- as part of the
U.S. war on drugs.

Another slide shows a mural painted by elementary school children,
depicting scenes before and after American airplanes spread poison across
Colombia's commercial and subsistence crops. The "before" portion of the
mural is a lush landscape with animals and green trees, and the "after" is
a barren desert with animal bones scattered around. Between the two
contrasting panels is a squadron of dark, menacing airplanes.

Matzen said our country's devastation of Colombia's agrarian economy is
costing taxpayers quite a bit of money.

"We now send over $1.3 billion, which makes Colombia the third largest
recipient of military aid behind Israel and Egypt," she said. "It's been
labeled anti-narcotics money, so most of it goes to the military to help
support their efforts in drug eradication. And the centerpiece of this
policy is this aerial spraying."

Matzen went to Colombia as part of a delegation from Witness for Peace, a
nonprofit human rights group founded in the 1980s to address Central
American policy issues. Invitations to visit Colombia had been extended for
a number of years, and Witness for Peace resisted because of the widespread
violence in Central America.

"Finally, when the U.S. had ratcheted it up to the degree it had, they
started sending delegations in 2001," Matzen said. She was part of the
fourth delegation sent, on the heels of two citizen delegations and one
congressional delegation.

There were 35 in Matzen's delegation, eight from North Carolina and four
from the Triangle, who joined forces with labor organizers and
environmentalists from 15 other states. In January they spent a total of 10
days traveling to Bogota and then splitting into two smaller groups to
visit Putumayo and Barancabermeja. Matzen's group focused on agricultural
issues and visited Putumayo, where it got a crash course in foreign policy.

Of the $1.3 billion of U.S. aid to Colombia, a small portion is designated
to go to "alternative development projects" -- in other words, to help
small farmers make the switch to legal crops. The Colombian government
started in December 2000 asking farmers to sign manual eradication
agreements, social pacts to pull up their own coca or poppy crops by hand
and plant something else. Many farmers complied.

In exchange, they were promised some financial assistance, Matzen said,
"equivalent to less than a thousand U.S. dollars." These are, for the most
part, small farmers with less than six acres of land, who can make about
$10,000 a year growing coca.

The farmer with the decimated corn crop and the fellow with the white flag
waving over the black pepper had signed the pacts, ripped up their own
fields, invested substantial sums of money to plant new crops, and hadn't
seen a cent of the promised subsidy.

"Their subsistence crops got sprayed along with their marketable crops, so
they're going hungry," she said.

"Many people are internally displaced, not just from the fumigation but
from the violence in general. Colombia has the highest level of internal
displacement in the Western Hemisphere. Out of a population of 30 million,
there are 2 million internal refugees."

Some move to the cities, and many who signed the pacts and were fumigated
anyway have gone into virgin rain forest areas to cut down large swaths of
forest lands and go back to raising illegal crops.

Thousands of farming families have had no choice but to abandon land they
have occupied for decades, she said, because after the land has been
sprayed, it can't be used for anything for anywhere from 30 to 120 days.
Pasture lands are wiped out so that livestock dies, and people also are
sprayed.

"As soon as they started [the spraying], thousands of complaints started
coming in," Matzen said, "nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and skin conditions."

The Colombian government insists it has very sophisticated electronic
equipment that pinpoints the exact locations of illegal crops to be
eradicated. Farmers refute that claim, particularly those whose legal crops
have been sprayed. In fact, when U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone from Minnesota
visited Putumayo last fall, even he was sprayed.

The fumigation missions are nothing new, Matzen said; they've been going on
for years, only recently reaching such a fevered pitch. Also for years, the
United States has found other ways of negatively impacting Colombia's
fragile economy. The United States has flooded the world market with cheap
corn, making it impossible for this once-popular crop to be grown
profitably in Colombia, Matzen said.

Witness for Peace set up an itinerary for the delegation that included
visits with U.S. drug policy experts, military and church leaders, human
rights agencies, indigenous groups, academics and economists. Interpreters
were provided, though Matzen speaks Spanish fluently.

"The number one issue was our security and number two was our emotional
well-being, because it's a very stressful place," she said. "It's a war
zone. I couldn't take pictures of a lot of things because of our security
protocol."

Their plane arrived at an airport also used as a military base where the
crop-dusting planes are filled with hazardous chemicals.

"So as we landed, immediately in the air above us there were six huge
helicopters swirling around. And then the fumigation planes came around and
kind of squirted out a bit of chemicals. It was quite impressive to see that."

Traveling by bus, the delegation was often stopped at checkpoints.

"There were roadblocks and men with guns who got on the bus and checked us
out," Matzen said. "One time we had to get off the bus. It was definitely
scary -- it felt very oppressive, and I just cannot imagine what it's like
to live there."

While her segment of the delegation visited with agricultural workers, the
other half traveled to scheduled stops with trade unionists. The issues of
the two segments of the delegation are linked: there is widespread concern
that most of the U.S. aid is going to the Colombian army, which has
repeatedly been linked to brutal paramilitary groups and accused of serious
human rights violations. The other group encountered roadblocks and armed
guards along its route as well.

"Human rights in general is very dangerous, local rights, environmental
rights, indigenous rights -- you work on any of those issues, your life is
in danger," she said. "Many people are working under death threats, people
dying because of advocacy work they've done."

Matzen and others from the delegation are on a personal crusade to raise
America's consciousness about the spraying and thereby get it stopped --
thus the slide shows. And this is certainly not her first human rights
campaign. She is an attorney and for the last two years has been chairwoman
of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, a volunteer board that
advises the Board of County Commissioners and the Department of Human
Rights and Relations.

"I wanted to participate in this delegation because I am concerned about
how Congress has chosen to spend more than a billion of our tax dollars on
a military intervention that will not solve our domestic drug problem, but
will likely escalate a very complicated, decades-old armed conflict while
it destroys fragile ecological systems and does precious little to improve
the lives of the many Colombians who live in poverty," Matzen said.

Her trip expenses were funded by the Florida-based Institute for Regional
Conservation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to biodiversity and to the
prevention of regional extinctions of rare plants, animals and natural
communities.

Matzen is available to church and social action groups interested in seeing
the slides and hearing her recap of the Witness for Peace delegation to
Colombia. Visit the Witness for Peace Web Site at:
http://www.witnessforpeace.org