- The United States has pledged $1.3 billion to help
Colombia
wipe out drugs. Congress approved the funds in 1999 to help halt cocaine
production, or so it said. The government claims that its billion-dollar
drug war will help keep cocaine off our streets.
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- But U.S. money must compete with floods of money from
another source. "Drug traffickers have flooded the Amazon Territory
with money so that farmers will grow coca there," said Carlos Alberto
Palacios, a representative of Colombia's Peace Informers' Network.
"Coca
brings farmers three times what, say, cassava would," said Linda
Panetta,
director of the School of the Americas Watch/Northeast, an organization
that educates the public about human-rights abuses associated with the
U.S. military's training of Latin American soldiers. "It's easy
money."
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- Panetta went to Colombia in January to learn firsthand
what our tax dollars are doing. What she saw suggests that the drug war
is a horrific disaster at best, and at worst, a disaster and a
cover-up.
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- "Colombia's military uses helicopters and airplanes
to spray rainforests with glyphosate, a chemical manufactured by
Monsanto,"
Panetta said. "They're supposedly killing coca plants, but they spray
indiscriminately. In La Hormiga, a small city in the Amazon Territory,
the spraying killed medicinal plants and food crops such as yucca. Yet,
the adjacent coca fields flourished. Glyphosate seeps into the soil and
water. Fish die in contaminated rivers."
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- People of the Amazon Territory's Putumayo region lose
cows and other farm animals to glyphosate. "We have no birds or
butterflies,"
said Palacios.
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- Residents, often indigenous people, develop diarrhea,
fever and other ailments. Besides dead crops and livestock, paramilitary
soldiers, working closely with the military, kidnap, torture and massacre
people to force them off the land. "Indigenous peoples leave their
sacred ancestral lands," said Palacios, who lives in Putumayo.
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- "If farmers stay, the paramilitary forces them to
grow coca to finance its operations," Panetta added. "The farmers
must also pay taxes to the paramilitary. But when the guerillas, who want
reforms, find out, they attack the farmers as collaborators."
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- Similar things are happening on the Pacific coast,
another
drug-war zone. "We . . . have lived here for 500 years," said
Oscar Gamboa Zuniga, a representative of Federation of Municipalities on
the Pacific Coast of Colombia. "Now violence drives our people away,
mainly to big cities. They face double discrimination there because they
are black and because they are poor. Many turn to crime to survive and
end up in prison."
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- For all its attendant upheaval, the war on drugs has
had poor results. Palacios rates it as 15 percent effective in killing
coca plants. Gamboa Zuniga also sees a wasted effort: "Think about
this: years have been spent fighting coca, but its production
continues."
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- Meanwhile, the violent war on drugs has driven 1 million
Colombians off their land. That may be the whole point.
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- "The U.S. has a hidden agenda in the war on
drugs,"
Panetta said. "It is getting and keeping control of Colombia's
resources:
gold, silver, copper. Colombia may have the largest oil reserve in the
Americas. The U.S. wants to control it." Gamboa Zuniga agreed:
"The
armed participants in this conflict are fighting for control of strategic
places for business."
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- But the so-called "drug war" continues.
"Research
has yielded new chemicals such as a mutating fungus which would adhere
to vegetation better," Panetta said. "Since it wouldn't wash
off in the rainforests' downpours, it would wreak ecological havoc. We
must urge our legislators to oppose this destruction . . . We don't need
mutating fungi. We need anti-drug and drug-treatment programs here [in
the United States]. Stop the demand and you stop the supply."
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- Palacios stressed pressuring legislators.
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- "We ask the American people to make a radical,
frontal
opposition to Plan Colombia," he said. "Tell them to find ways
to support farmers' growing alternative crops. Also send food and clothes
to displaced Colombians, but not through the government of Colombia,
because
we know what will happen in that case. Send help through
churches."
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- Today , a delegation of displaced Colombians will visit
the Jean Donovan Community Peace Center (also known as Maryknoll House)
at 6367 Overbrook Ave. in Philadelphia. A potluck dinner is at 6 p.m. with
a presentation at 7 p.m. For more information, call 215-473-2162.
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- Germantown writer Constance Garcia-Barrio
(cgarciabar@wcupa)
teaches at West Chester University.
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