COLOMBIA-ECUADOR:
Coca Spraying Makes for
Toxic Relations
By Constanza Vieira
PUERTO ASÍS, Putumayo,
Colombia, (IPS) -
Ecuador is making its
final preparations to
bring suit against
Colombia in the
International Court of
Justice at The Hague
over anti-coca spraying
carried out by Colombia
along their shared
border. Quito had
already given notice of
its intentions.
"I would go so far as to
say that solving the
spraying issue through
diplomatic channels is
no longer possible,"
Ecuador's Foreign
Minister María Fernanda
Espinosa said in Quito.
Colombia's
representatives would
not even make a written
record of a meeting held
at the beginning of July
with an Ecuadorean
scientific commission,
presenting evidence of
the harm to human and
animal health, crops and
the environment caused
by Colombian anti-drug
spraying, the minister
said on Monday.
Now Ecuador must move on
from "the diplomatic and
scientific levels, to a
legal level," Espinosa
said.
Aerial spraying of a
concentrated solution of
glyphosate herbicide and
other substances
potentiating its effect,
a toxic mix that kills
any plant it touches, is
part of the anti-drug
and counterinsurgency
Plan Colombia, financed
by the United States.
Spraying is not limited
to coca plantations,
which produce the raw
material for cocaine.
Food crops are also
destroyed, according to
Colombian campesinos
(peasant farmers).
Colombia is the world's
leading cocaine
producing country, and
the U.S. is the largest
consumer.
Ecuadorean farmers never
know whether they should
sow their fields as,
despite their
government's protests,
Colombia was spraying
along the border again,
after a period when it
abstained from spraying
within 10 kilometres of
the international
boundary.
Bogotá claimed that
Ecuadoreans were growing
coca close to the
border, but this was
belied even by special
envoys from El Tiempo,
the Colombian newspaper
with the largest
circulation.
Spraying operations in
guerrilla-controlled
areas are carried out by
DynCorp aeroplanes,
contracted by the U.S.
Department of Defence.
The spray planes are
escorted by Black Hawk
helicopters specially
rigged for
counterinsurgency
operations, which are
also part of Plan
Colombia.
There has been no
glyphosate spraying
along the border since
January. This is partly
due to the protests from
Quito, and partly
because spraying is
carried out when the
coca leaf is ready for
harvesting.
In contrast, here in the
southern Colombian
department of Putumayo,
forced manual
eradication of the crops
began in March. What
appears to be a solution
to the differences with
Ecuador is, however,
experienced as a
nightmare by Colombian
coca growers' families.
"When the planes pass
overhead, campesinos can
seek shelter in their
houses," said Nydia
Quintero, treasurer of
the Campesino
Association of
South-Western Putumayo (ACSOMAYO).
But when a forced manual
eradication operation
takes place, "the army
arrives, surrounds your
farm and invades your
land," she said. "The
eradicators come and
start pulling up your
plants, without
permission from the
owner of the farm,
trampling on all the
rights of the family who
lives there," she added.
"The children are
terrified, and people
run and hide. What's
more, they steal the
chickens and the
campesinos' food
stores," said Quintero,
who lives in the
community of La
Carmelita, in the
municipality of Puerto
Asís.
The ACSOMAYO member said
that eradication teams
in her region are made
up of 300 soldiers and
about 100 civilians.
In Puerto Vega-Teteyé,
between the Putumayo
River and the border
with Ecuador, forced
eradication began this
month. The operation was
preceded by the burning
of houses and
laboratories, Quintero
told IPS.
In June, Colombian
television channel RCN
announced in a newscast
that a new method of
eradication, using
tractors, would be used
in Putumayo. Images
showed one of these
tractors entering a farm
and destroying
everything in is path.
The community's own plan
to substitute illegal
coca growing has not
been taken into account,
Quintero said.
"Our proposal,
basically, is that the
(Colombian) government
focus on programmes of
farm production, road
building, investment in
basic services in rural
areas, things that
generate employment for
the campesinos," said
Quintero.
That way, "campesinos
would voluntarily uproot
the coca, which has
become our means of
survival and the way we
can feed our children."
"If the government
started to invest in the
countryside, we would
stop growing coca," she
said.
La Carmelita is a jungle
area, 23 kilometres from
the border with Ecuador.
Agriculture and coca are
the way of life there.
There is a central
highway, with a few
branch roads in poor
state of repair, which
the communities have to
maintain themselves.
Along that central
highway, 16 tanker
trucks transport oil
from the Cohembí well.
They belong to the
Colombia Energy
consortium, which took
over the concession in
1998 from Ecopetrol, the
state oil firm, now in
the process of being
privatised by the
rightwing Álvaro Uribe
government.
Oil usually means wealth
-- but not here.
"Subcontractors in the
oil industry take on
workers by the month or
by the fortnight. About
three or four people get
work out of every 10 or
11 rural communities.
Only 0.3 percent of the
people here have jobs
with the company," said
Quintero.
The Colombian Institute
for Family Welfare (ICBF),
the main children's
protection agency,
recently published a
nutritional study of
more than 400 children
under five in 24
communities of the San
Miguel and La Hormiga
municipalities in
Putumayo.
The study found that
42.75 percent of the
children had low
weight-for-age, a sign
of general malnutrition;
20.6 percent had low
weight-for-height,
indicating acute
malnutrition; and 47.6
percent had chronic
malnutrition (low
height-for-age).
Quintero has five
children. IPS asked her
what is her main
concern, as a mother, in
this region? "The future
of my children, what is
to become of them if we
do not secure people's
right to live in this
area, if the oil
industry grows," she
answered.
"What will happen later
on? Will our children
have to leave, and be
displaced to somewhere
else? That worries me,"
she said.
The oil well was worked
by Ecopetrol some years
ago, and then it was
closed. Colombia Energy
began extracting oil
again in 2003.
"Quite a large oil
industry was built up.
At the same time, the
area was militarised,"
Amaury Padilla, of the
Alternative Social
Development Association
(MINGA), a
non-governmental
organisation that has
existed for 10 years,
told IPS.
Leftwing insurgents of
the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC),
the campesino guerrilla
movement which took up
arms in 1964, operate in
Putumayo and for the
last 11 years have
supported coca growers'
protests. They often
extort money from
companies established in
their territories.
Plan Colombia spraying,
begun in Putumayo in
2000, pushed people into
extreme poverty.
As soon as the community
saw activity around the
oil well once again,
they organised and
demanded solutions from
Colombia Energy "for
basic problems of
education, health and
infrastructure."
"And the response was
the murder of the leader
of that protest," an
expert on this area,
Ricardo Vargas, the head
of Andean Action, told
IPS.
In December 2005, the
president of ACSOMAYO,
Luis Melo Bastidas, 55,
a respected local
leader, was killed by
ultra-rightwing
paramilitaries, who work
in league with the
government security
forces.
His death was followed
by six months of numb
disbelief in the
organisation, but then
their meetings resumed.
In June, with help from
MINGA and the Office of
the United Nations High
Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR), they
managed to make their
voices heard before an
inter-institutional
human rights mission
which visited La
Carmelita. |
