|
|
COLOMBIA:
A Hundred-Year War on Drugs
Analysis by Constanza
Vieira*
BOGOTA (IPS) - The anti-drug, anti-insurgent Plan Colombia is,
paradoxically, at the heart of the tragedy involving Awa indigenous
people who were murdered this month by the FARC guerrillas.
The Marshal Antonio Jose de Sucre Column of the leftist
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) acknowledged that it
had "executed" eight Awa people, accused of being army informants,
in the conflict-ridden department of Narino, in the southwest part
of the country.
Huge tracts of land on the way to Narino are now planted with coca
and populated by drug laboratories, displacing villagers, ever since
the Plan Colombia, financed by the United States, demolished drug
production in Putumayo and Caqueta successively over the course of
2000. The two regions are neighbours to Narino looking eastward and
north eastward.
The objective of Plan Colombia was to expel the coca-growing
population and isolate it from the FARC, which emerged in 1964.
But the strategy failed to take into consideration the "globalizing
effect", observed by drug experts. When you "oppress" the business
in one area, it will move to another. Now there are 20,000 hectares
of coca in Narino.
"The Awas probably have been hit hardest by this colonisation and
coca bonanza, since large fields of coca have been planted around
and within their lands," said anthropologist Efrain Jaramillo
Jaramillo.
The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which used to
present its annual report in March, this year moved the release
forward and it was published on Feb. 19.
The reason: Feb. 24 will be the 100th anniversary of the first
meeting of 13 countries in the Chinese port city of Shanghai to
study the international drug trade, as part of the International
Opium Commission.
Their recommendations were incorporated into the first worldwide
drug control treaty - the International Opium Convention - signed in
The Hague in 1912.
In 1909, it was estimated that there were 800,000 drug users. Today
there are more than 240 million, or 4 percent of the world
population, according to the INCB.
"We haven’t won (the war), but it’s not lost," said Dr. Camilo Uribe
in the report released in Bogota. Uribe is second vice-president of
INCB and president of the Permanent Committee in the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime.
The new report reveals that coca planning grew by 27 percent in
Colombia, the country which is the world’s largest producer of raw
cocaine.
Efforts by Colombian officials to eradicate coca, supported by the
Plan Colombia, ran up against "violent attacks by armed and criminal
groups using guns and anti-personnel mines to protect their illicit
plantings,’ wrote the INCB in its report.
This is "a war which will last as long as the human race," said Gen.
Alvaro Caro, director of narcotics police, at the presentation of
the report in Bogota, or at least for the next "400 years."
But not everyone agrees that war is the best way to fight the
consumption of drugs.
"Violence and organized crime associated with illicit drug
trafficking constitute one of the most serious problems in Latin
America," according to the report "Drugs and democracy in Latin
American: towards a change of the paradigm."
Released on the 11th of this month in Rio de Janeiro by a commission
headed by ex-presidents Cesar Gaviria (Colombia), Ernesto Zedillo
(Mexico) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil), the report calls
for a "correction in the strategy of a "war on drugs" which has been
applied over the last 30 years in the region."
Plan Colombia did not reach its goals, noted the ex-presidents’
report, which were "to end the armed conflicts in this country,
elaborate a strategy for confronting narcotraffick, eradicate the
production of coca, revitalize the economy of the country and offer
alternatives to the rural producers."
The cultivation of coca was nonexistent or marginal in Narino, but
the war on drugs of Plan Colombia triggered it, according to
regional statistics.
For the Awas, the fumigation of coca fields in Putumayo and Caqueta
unleashed a deluge of coca growers and people looking to buy acreage
in their ancestral lands.
Further, damage to the environment grew as forests were chopped down
and fertilisers and other chemicals were used by the growers of coca
and producers of cocaine, all added to the aerial spraying with a
powerful herbicide "glyphosate" - known as "matatodo" because of its
killing power.
But, "what will in the long run be most harmful to this population
is the violence and socio-cultural decay, produced by drug
manufacture," warned Jaramillo.
The sustainable economy that had given them good food and health was
replaced by an illegal one, which established norms of "cultural,
environmental and spiritual poverty", previously unknown to the Awa,
noted the anthropologist.
Today, in the former Awa paradise, "death is everywhere in the form
of drunken fighting and banditry," she added.
After each act of violence, the indigenous people have demanded the
de-militarising of their lands, as when at the Council of Indigenous
and Popular Resistance last October, a massive mobilisation of
native peoples was organised to challenge President Alvaro Uribe at
the end of last year.
This month, after the massacre at Columna Sucre by the FARC, the
indigenous Council declared: "We will catch the assassins and see
that justice is served."
"Our solidarity will be seen very soon," they warned.
*This article is part of a three-part series about the massacre of
some eight Awa people, committed in February by the Antonio Jose de
Sucre Column of the FARC. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
