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July 16, 2001 The State Department's Misinformation Campaign In Rand Beers' July 9 editorial published in the Boston Globe and titled, Plan Colombia is Well Worth U.S. Support, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs claims that U.S. support for Plan Colombia has been "frequently misunderstood and misconstrued." But in making his case, it is Mr. Beers who either willfully misrepresents or ignores the on-the-ground realities of Plan Colombia. In his attempts to justify the U.S. aid package, the assistant secretary of state is guilty of misinforming the U.S. public through the omission and distortion of essential facts. Mr. Beers characterizes the U.S. support for Colombia as a "comprehensive, balanced assistance package." He points out that $230 million is earmarked for humanitarian and development purposes, but his own figures tell the tale: $230 million represents only 27 percent of Colombia's $860 million share of the $1.3 billion aid package; while more than 72 percent of this "comprehensive, balanced assistance" is going to the Colombian security forces and counternarcotics operations.
Furthermore, Mr. Beers is simply incorrect in asserting that small-scale farmers who agree to switch to alternative crops "are not subject to spraying." Doctor Ruben Dario Pinzón of the National Plan for Alternative Development (PLANTE), Colombia's agency in charge of the alternative crop program in Putumayo, admitted to this writer that, "Growers financed by PLANTE have been fumigated because they are in a small area in the middle of coca growers. It is impossible to protect them because the pilots can't control exactly where they fumigate. They fumigate the whole area." The salutary claims made by Mr. Beers regarding the herbicide being used in the Colombian crop eradication amount to blatant misinformation. It is true that glyphosate is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved herbicide and that coca and poppy fumigation accounts for only ten percent of the glyphosate used in Colombia. But what Mr. Beers neglects to mention is that the glyphosate used for illicit crop fumigation is mixed with another chemical called Cosmo Flux 411F, and the human and environmental safety of this chemical cocktail has not been approved or tested by the EPA or any regulatory agency. The safety hazards of the glyphosate-Cosmo Flux mix were highlighted when the British chemical company, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), recently announced it was withdrawing from the U.S. fumigation campaign in Colombia because of reports of children becoming ill from exposure to the chemicals. ICI is the manufacturer of a key ingredient in Cosmo Flux. And while I agree with Mr. Beers that many analysts have gone overboard
in claiming the U.S. role in Colombia will result in "another
As Mr. Beers points out, "Colombia's ills" go well beyond drug production and trafficking. In fact, most of the country's ills--human rights abuses, population displacement, poverty, unemployment, limited democracy--are not rooted in the drug trade, but in Colombia's unequal distribution of wealth and land, which is among the highest in the world. However, contrary to the assistant secretary of state's claims, the social and economic components of the U.S. aid package and Plan Colombia are doing little to cure these inequities, in fact, they are exacerbating them. The economic component of Plan Colombia is nothing more than the economic adjustment program imposed on Colombia by the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) in return for a $2.7 billion loan issued in December 1999. As a result of the loan's austerity requirements, the Colombian government is simply not in a position to develop its own economic program. Meanwhile, the IMF-imposed austerity measures open up the Colombian economy to greater exploitation by multinational corporations while further impoverishing the majority of Colombians. Any attempt to portray the U.S. aid package and Plan Colombia as "comprehensive" and "balanced," is nothing more than a misconstruction of the facts. More than 80 percent of the $1.3 billion is funding the creation, training and operations of three new Colombian army battalions, as well as aerial spraying with an untested mix of chemical substances. Meanwhile, less than eight percent of the aid will go to alternative crop programs, which are desperately needed if impoverished peasants are to adopt legal alternatives to coca and poppy cultivation.
This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).
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While
Mr. Beers is correct that the areas to be fumigated are carefully
selected, his statement that "spraying is tightly concentrated
on coca" has no basis in fact. The reality in the department
of Putumayo in southern Colombia is that peasants have had their
food crops destroyed by the aerial fumigation and many have been
forced to abandon their farms as a result of the crop destruction.
Vietnam," one cannot ignore the horrifying similarities regarding
the aerial spraying of the countryside with chemical substances.