Franci sits on the veranda and whimpers. The little girl is
underweight. Her armpits are erupting in boils. Like most of her
people, she has suffered from respiratory problems and stomach
pains since the aircraft and the helicopter gunships came over at
Christmas and again at New Year dropping toxic pesticides on
their villages.
The tiny indigenous Kofan community of Santa Rosa de
Guamuez in Colombia had it hard enough with pressures from
settlers on their reservation, without Roundup Ultra containing
Cosmoflux 411F, a weedkiller that is being sprayed on their
villages in a concentration 100 times more powerful than is
permitted in the United States.
Aurelio, a Kofan village elder, shows us around his village. The
Kofan have been here 500 years. Now it looks as though their
time is up. Pineapples are stunted and shrivelled. The once
green banana plants are no more than blackened sticks. The
remains of a few maize plants can be seen here and there, but
the food crops have been devastated. There is hunger at Santa
Rosa. He is close to despair.
Colombian babies and children are falling ill. Peasants, already
miserably poor, are getting hungrier. Indigenous tribes are being
torn apart and whole communities pushed into exile.
The reason is the US-sponsored Plan Colombia, conceived by
President Bill Clinton and roundly embraced by President
George W Bush, designed to eliminate all cocaine production in
Colombia. A key element is the spraying from planes of a highly
concentrated chemical toxin on the coca bushes, whose leaves
provide the raw material for the drug.
The coca bushes have generally survived. In the front line of
America's war on drugs it is humans and the environment that
have become the victims.
Investigations by The Observer have revealed for the first time
the extent of the damage which both the Colombian and the US
governments have tried to keep secret since the scheme started
in late December. Against a growing mass of evidence to the
contrary, they claimed last month: 'The aerial spraying did not
cause any injury or significant damage to the environment.' The
reality is that the results on the ground are disastrous.
The small farmers in this rich tropical valley don't believe the
official accounts as they wonder how they can replace their
crops and the chickens and fish that have been poisoned in their
farmyards and ponds.
Meanwhile coca bushes are sprouting anew. Wherever the
farmers have been able they have cut off the poisoned leaves to
prevent the toxins reaching the bushes' roots and the coca is
reviving. On the hills of Putumayo their lime-green leaves are
holding the promise of new thrice-yearly harvests from which the
narcotic will be manufactured again: their flourishing presence
mocks the politicians and soldiers in Washington and Bogota.
At a village outside La Hormiga, a group of sick children are
gathered by their mothers at the gates of the school whose
small garden was ruined by the poison that rained on it early in
the mornings on 22 December and 6 January. 'The planes came
over at the height of a palm tree accompanied by helicopter
gunships which circled around,' said Juana, a young teacher at
the school. 'The plants the children were tending in the school
garden withered and the pullets they were looking after all died.'
Like other Colombians, she did not want her real name used for
fear of reprisals by government forces or their allies, the
'paracos' - the paramilitary death squads.
Children from local schools are showing signs of serious skin
infections, which heal over but continually recur.
Gloria, a teacher at the school at El Placer, reports similar
illness. 'About 230 of the 450 pupils at our school have gone
down with diarrhoea, and respiratory and constantly recurring
skin infections,' she said.
Domestic animals have fared even worse. The tilapia that have
brought a new prosperity to farmers who had built fish ponds are
dying in their thousands as are dogs, pigs and other livestock.
Plan Colombia, promoted by the US and Colombian
governments and gingerly accepted by the British and other
European Union countries, is dissolving in failure, death and vast
pollution of the Amazonian forest within months of its launch in
December.
Under the plan, the Colombian armed forces are being given US
weapons and training. These are same troops who over the
decades have accumulated honours and medals for their battles
with unarmed civilians and have frequently committed atrocities
with Western help.
Now Colombians, disillusioned alike with politicians, the
increasingly aimless guerrillas and the death squads, are
becoming enraged at America's 'war on drugs' whose front line is
in their villages.
Thousands have fled the Putumayo for neighbouring Ecuador,
adding to the estimated 2,100,000 Colombians who have been
displaced within the country by war.
Those who stay - and who dare to criticise the war on drugs -
complain that Washington is seeking to halt the production of
cocaine and heroin while doing nothing to stop the drug trade in
the US itself where the bulk of the profits are made - letting
senior racketeers go free while filling US prisons with minor
offenders from the ethnic minorities.
But what is scaring them most is what the chemicals are doing
to them. Consignments of the poison being used in Colombia
contain labels warning that it causes damage to crops, which
must be 'shielded with screens from aerial spraying to prevent
droplets falling on the green parts of useful plants'. The warning
also says that application must be done on windless days.
The people who do the spraying in this valley do not supply
screens and the peasants couldn't afford them if they could find
them. Nature does not often provide windless days in the
tropical Andean valleys. And the coca bushes are often planted
among other crops.
The chemical, based on the compound glyphosate, is
manufactured by the US Monsanto Corporation using British
ingredients, hexitan esters, supplied by ICI Specialty
Chemicals, and liquid isoparafins manufactured by Exxon. It
damages the human digestive system, the central nervous
system, the lungs and the blood's red corpuscles. Another
constituent causes cancer in animals and damage to the liver
and kidneys of humans.
The villagers' fears about the chemicals appear to be well
founded. The World Health Organisation has found that
glyphosate is easily transmitted to humans through foods such
as raspberries, lettuces, carrots and barley - with traces of the
chemical found in crops sown a whole year after the soil had
been dosed with it.
Elsa Nivía, a Colombian agronomist who works with the
Pesticide Action Network, ridicules the US government's claims
that Roundup Ultra is safe and no more poisonous than aspirin
or table salt.
She has written that in the first two months of this year local
authorities have reported 4,289 humans suffering skin or gastric
disorders while 178,377 creatures were killed by the spraying
including cattle, horses, pigs, dogs, ducks, hens and fish.
According to Colombian NGOs, the government, backed by
Washington, has done its best to discredit reports of damage
from Roundup Ultra, accusing complaining peasants of being in
league with the drug traffickers and guerrillas. The first Blair
government adopted a similar attitude to the complaints: during
and after several flying visits to Colombia, Mo Mowlam, the
Minister then in charge of drug problems, belittled reports of the
damage Roundup Ultra was causing. 'She kept on saying,
"Where's the evidence?" when we told her of the effects of the
poison,' remarked one senior member of a UK aid agency.
Human rights workers have expressed dismay at their treatment
by British officials. 'One official visited me. He was very
aggressive, dismissing our reports from the Putumayo of the
damage done as "rubbish". I felt insulted. He was trying to
intimidate me,' said one.
Luis Fernando Arango, a conservative lawyer and university
teacher who opposes the spraying, said: 'Anyone who protests
about this is labelled a drug dealer. Years into the future a lot of
old men with dandruff will get together in Geneva and talk about
it. But by then there will be no countryside left.'
The drug producers' big league
• Most recent UN Drugs Control Programme production figures
are from 1999, before Plan Colombia and the Afghan moratorium
Country | Supply (worth in US$ millions)
Coca base
Colombia 494
Peru 134
Bolivia 63
Opium
Afghanistan 251
Myanmar (Burma) 116
Colombia 20
Mexico 9
Laos 8
Other Asia combined 21
Related article
17.06.2001: UN ignores the seeds of disaster
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001