Now is the time to stop Plan Colombia

In a few days the U.S. Senate will vote on President Bush’s counterdrug policy in Latin America known as the Andean Regional Initiative (ARI). Seventy-one percent of $576 million slotted for Colombia by the ARI ends up in the hands of security forces to wage counterinsurgency. My experience in Colombia tells me that it isn’t going to work: and it will further devastate the poor.

For 21/2 months I hung out with the ones who bear the brunt of Plan Colombia, the U.S.-aid package to Colombia worth $1.3 billion. I went into areas where US Embassy officials tell us to avoid. They say it with good reason: those who dare to do it will come up with another perspective on Plan Colombia that differs with the Bush Administration’s military solution.

I traveled to Putumayo, a guerrilla strong hold, as part of a hundred-person ten-day Witness for Peace Delegation in April. Throngs of peasants came out to denounce Plan Colombia. In the town of La Hormiga farmers and workers said they received little incentive to give up illicit crops that keep them a step away from starvation.

Indigenous farmers from the cooperative La Isla, on their own, decided to grow alternative crops. However, it backfired when Monsanto-made poison falling from the sky destroyed the community’s chickens and yucca. I photographed a young child with sores all over her body attributed to intense spraying. Now, reluctantly, the people are back growing and raking coca for a living.

Later, in May, I traveled to South Bolivar, another guerrilla- controlled area. Peasants showed me food and coca crops destroyed by chemicals falling from planes accompanied by Black Hawk helicopters. They like their counterparts in Putumayo have little incentive to give up growing illicit crops.

In the town of San Pedro where I lived for two weeks, residents told me 2,000 troops came into the community in April and stayed their for three weeks while fumigation took place. Many of the townspeople left out of fear. Those who stayed soldiers accused of collaboration with the guerrilla and harassed them.

The poor of South Bolivar know there is a relationship between their growing coca and violence done to the poor immersed in a drug culture. All the more reason they want out of growing illicit crops.

However, without financial assistance from the government it’s almost impossible to make the shift. Growing food to make ends meet makes little sense when market prices favor agribusiness corporations. It is impossible to get a decent price for their crops. It’s much easier, farmers told me, to grow coca crops and after six weeks carry the fruits of their labor under their arms and sell it for $2,000 to a middle person.

The poor I spoke with told me that of every dollar spent along the coca chain they end up with a cent in their pockets. The ones who make out are those who sell it as part of a globalized economy and who place their lucrative profits in unnumbered accounts. Yes, the banks that launder the money win out as well. As for Colombia’s poor, they are left with lots of sweat as they continue to eke out an existence. They also have to deal with the consequences of the massive devastation done to the Amazon area: considered the lungs of the hemisphere.

Government policy turns to the countryside only when it comes to eliminating the guerrilla. The poor receive few benefits; in fact they see themselves as excluded. They maintain that Plan Colombia is an effort to get them off the land so that transnational corporations can exploit the largest gold reserves outside of South Africa located in South Bolivar.

Intense fumigation took place in April, according to accounts of peasants I lived with in South Bolivar. Residents of San Pedro indicated that it destroyed not only coca crops but food as well. Half of 70,000 acres of land sprayed since January by the Monsanto declared dangerous in the United States chemical landed on food. A little deja vu of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Fortunately I didn’t get sprayed as Sen. Paul Wellstone did last December in Putumayo. But it’s a chilling experience to hear farmers describe the icy feeling of the poison when it lands on their bodies. But more disturbing, to stand before a child, with lesions all over her face due to the chemical Roundup, as I did.

According to residents of San Pedro, 2,000 troops accompanied the April fumigation. Many residents fled when the military came into the town. While planes sprayed the dangerous chemical over the land the military harassed those who stayed. Planes destroyed thousands of hectares of land, at times spraying a given area multiple times. When peasants demanded compensation government gave officials doled out 20 pounds of rice seeds.

The ARI, Plan Colombia under another name, only abets the worst in Colombia. It’s a policy unhinged from the aspirations of the poor. Now is the time to stop it.

Jim Harney works with Posibilidad, a Bangor-based nonprofit concerned about issues of globalization.

He can be reached at jimharney@posibilidad.ord.