Role of U.S. in Colombia continues to challenge

Coca crop spraying still evokes ire, while a new study supports a greater U.S. role in the country's civil war.

By PAUL DE LA GARZA and DAVID ADAMS

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 17, 2001

WASHINGTON -- For the drug war in Colombia, these are signs of trouble:

Angry coca farmers.

An irritated environmental minister.

An influential study calling for deeper U.S. involvement in that nation's civil war.

Last month, the minister of the environment in Bogota issued a resolution castigating the country's drug policy office for failing to provide adequate data on the environmental impact of a U.S.-sponsored aerial spraying program.

Over the past several days, about 3,000 farmers in northeastern Colombia have protested the spraying of their coca crop.

And on Wednesday, an Air Force-backed study by the Rand Corp. said that Plan Colombia, a $7.5-billion internationally funded program designed to pluck the Andean nation from the abyss, was inherently flawed.

Last month, the St. Petersburg Times reported on the impasse between Washington and Bogota over President Andres Pastrana's refusal to allow further aerial spraying in the coca-rich states of Putumayo and Caqueta in the south. Now, U.S. officials worry that Pastrana, a lame-duck president with an eye on his legacy, will cave in to domestic and international pressure and scrap the aerial program entirely.

Aerial spraying is key to U.S. anti-drug strategy in Colombia, a nation at war with Marxist rebels. American law enforcement officials think it is the most effective way of fighting the proliferation of coca and poppy, the sources of cocaine and heroin. The lucrative drug trade helps fuel a decades-old war that pits the government against the rebels and right-wing paramilitaries.

The United States is contributing $1.3-billion in aid to Bogota under Plan Colombia, the majority of it in military aid. In December, Colombia extended a controversial aerial eradication program with $115-million in U.S. money.

The spraying program, however, which is administered by the U.S. State Department, is on shaky ground. On May 4, a resolution sponsored by Colombia's Minister of the Environment Juan Mayr opened aerial eradication to legal challenge.

In the resolution, Mayr took the drug policy office to task for failing to provide adequate data on the program's environmental impact.

The resolution sounded a tone of exasperation.

"It can be concluded," the resolution said, "that the documents delivered until now by the drug policy office to define an adequate environmental management plan for the spraying of illicit crops . . . have not responded to the scopes and objectives requested in repeated opportunities by this Ministry."

Among other things, the six-page resolution asked that the drug policy office, or DNE, find immediate alternatives to spraying in populated and watershed areas, as well as in areas with established infrastructure. Although the resolution did not call for a halt in spraying, Mayr said in an interview that, theoretically, any Colombian citizen armed with the resolution could take the drug policy office to court to try to stop the program.

It would be up to a judge, he said, to decide if the resolution is enough to support a lawsuit.

"We have received many complaints claiming damage to forests and wildlife" from the spraying, Mayr said, adding that measures laid out in the resolution will ensure "that there won't be fumigation in (protected) areas by accident."

He said, "I think it is very positive for everyone. It will improve the quality of the program."

Astrid Puentes of the public interest group Fundepublico said environmental activists are studying the resolution. "We haven't decided yet whether to sue or not," she said.

What was clear, she said, was that the government was not enforcing environmental law.

A number of Colombia experts who have reviewed the resolution said that it spelled trouble for the future of aerial spraying in Colombia.

"It's not the end of the fumigation process," said Myles Frechette, a former American ambassador to Colombia, "but it's a real monkey wrench."

Frechette said the resolution could slow down the program, which, to U.S. officials, would prove disastrous because of the wasted time.

In southern Colombia, for example, coca farmers already are replanting coca seed beds just weeks after the crop dusters barreled through.

Steve Johnson, a Colombia analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, agreed with Frechette. He pointed out that the resolution sets a timetable of six months for the drug policy office to meet the ministry's environmental impact requirements. According to the resolution, he said, "DNE did not do its homework."

U.S. officials argue that the resolution is not intended to stop spraying in Colombia, or, for that matter, to enable or promote it. It is intended, they say, to "fill gaps" in the DNE's environmental management plan.

To meet environmental concerns for greater transparency, Britain has proposed the creation of an international commission to monitor the spraying. London has offered $150,000 to initiate the program.

Frechette and Johnson and some Western diplomats in Colombia, meanwhile, insist that the herbicide used in the spraying, glyphosate, has been proven safe in scientific tests. Frechette characterized peasant tales of deformities in children as a result of spraying as "folk stories."

The peasants disagree. In some cases, they have provided investigators with pictures of children with chemical burns they say are linked to spraying.

Environmental groups in Colombia also reject the scientific studies. They say the problem is that glyphosate, or RoundUp, is being used in higher concentrations than officially recognized with complementary chemicals to make it stick better.

The immediate problem for Pastrana is not in the courts, but in the fields.

In the village of Tibu in the Catatumbo region, he must figure a way to appease thousands of coca farmers angered by a 3-week-old spraying campaign.

The protesters, who destroyed a refueling depot for crop dusters, have offered to eradicate the coca crop by hand if the government promises to step in with alternative crop programs. A major obstacle for the government, analysts say, is that it doesn't have the money to meet their demands.

With all its woes, Colombia increasingly is under the microscope. On Wednesday, the Rand Corp. released a study sure to spark debate. It argued for a larger U.S. role in Colombia's civil war, including better counter-insurgency training of Colombian troops.

"The threat of political and military deterioration in Colombia could soon confront the United States with its most serious security crisis in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s," the study said.

"Yet U.S. policy continues to focus almost exclusively on bolstering Colombia's anti-drug efforts and misses the point that the political and military control that the guerrillas exercise over an ever-larger part of Colombia's territory and population is at the heart of their challenge to the Bogota government's authority."

-- Sibylla Brodzinsky reported from Bogota.

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