Pubdate: Wed, 06 Mar 2002
Source: Herald-Sun, The (NC)
Copyright: 2002 The Herald-Sun
Contact:  http://www.herald-sun.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1428

WITNESS: DRUG WAR SPRAYING COLOMBIA TO DEATH

Jena Matzen has a carousel of slides from her trip to Colombia, and she's 
giving slide shows throughout the Triangle. These are not your standard 
shots of smiling couples standing in front of national landmarks.

One image shows a farmer at the center of his 12-acre field, a former corn 
crop now utterly decimated. Another shows a white flag raised over a black 
pepper crop, as a signal to airplanes that this is a legal crop.

According to Matzen, a Hillsborough resident, the white flag did not have 
the desired effect; the pepper crop was destroyed nevertheless, by planes 
dropping enormous quantities of an herbicide called glyphosate -- marketed 
by Monsanto in this country under the brand name Round-Up -- as part of the 
U.S. war on drugs.

Another slide shows a mural painted by elementary school children, 
depicting scenes before and after American airplanes spread poison across 
Colombia's commercial and subsistence crops. The "before" portion of the 
mural is a lush landscape with animals and green trees, and the "after" is 
a barren desert with animal bones scattered around. Between the two 
contrasting panels is a squadron of dark, menacing airplanes.

Matzen said our country's devastation of Colombia's agrarian economy is 
costing taxpayers quite a bit of money.

"We now send over $1.3 billion, which makes Colombia the third largest 
recipient of military aid behind Israel and Egypt," she said. "It's been 
labeled anti-narcotics money, so most of it goes to the military to help 
support their efforts in drug eradication. And the centerpiece of this 
policy is this aerial spraying."

Matzen went to Colombia as part of a delegation from Witness for Peace, a 
nonprofit human rights group founded in the 1980s to address Central 
American policy issues. Invitations to visit Colombia had been extended for 
a number of years, and Witness for Peace resisted because of the widespread 
violence in Central America.

"Finally, when the U.S. had ratcheted it up to the degree it had, they 
started sending delegations in 2001," Matzen said. She was part of the 
fourth delegation sent, on the heels of two citizen delegations and one 
congressional delegation.

There were 35 in Matzen's delegation, eight from North Carolina and four 
from the Triangle, who joined forces with labor organizers and 
environmentalists from 15 other states. In January they spent a total of 10 
days traveling to Bogota and then splitting into two smaller groups to 
visit Putumayo and Barancabermeja. Matzen's group focused on agricultural 
issues and visited Putumayo, where it got a crash course in foreign policy.

Of the $1.3 billion of U.S. aid to Colombia, a small portion is designated 
to go to "alternative development projects" -- in other words, to help 
small farmers make the switch to legal crops. The Colombian government 
started in December 2000 asking farmers to sign manual eradication 
agreements, social pacts to pull up their own coca or poppy crops by hand 
and plant something else. Many farmers complied.

In exchange, they were promised some financial assistance, Matzen said, 
"equivalent to less than a thousand U.S. dollars." These are, for the most 
part, small farmers with less than six acres of land, who can make about 
$10,000 a year growing coca.

The farmer with the decimated corn crop and the fellow with the white flag 
waving over the black pepper had signed the pacts, ripped up their own 
fields, invested substantial sums of money to plant new crops, and hadn't 
seen a cent of the promised subsidy.

"Their subsistence crops got sprayed along with their marketable crops, so 
they're going hungry," she said.

"Many people are internally displaced, not just from the fumigation but 
from the violence in general. Colombia has the highest level of internal 
displacement in the Western Hemisphere. Out of a population of 30 million, 
there are 2 million internal refugees."

Some move to the cities, and many who signed the pacts and were fumigated 
anyway have gone into virgin rain forest areas to cut down large swaths of 
forest lands and go back to raising illegal crops.

Thousands of farming families have had no choice but to abandon land they 
have occupied for decades, she said, because after the land has been 
sprayed, it can't be used for anything for anywhere from 30 to 120 days. 
Pasture lands are wiped out so that livestock dies, and people also are 
sprayed.

"As soon as they started [the spraying], thousands of complaints started 
coming in," Matzen said, "nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and skin conditions."

The Colombian government insists it has very sophisticated electronic 
equipment that pinpoints the exact locations of illegal crops to be 
eradicated. Farmers refute that claim, particularly those whose legal crops 
have been sprayed. In fact, when U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone from Minnesota 
visited Putumayo last fall, even he was sprayed.

The fumigation missions are nothing new, Matzen said; they've been going on 
for years, only recently reaching such a fevered pitch. Also for years, the 
United States has found other ways of negatively impacting Colombia's 
fragile economy. The United States has flooded the world market with cheap 
corn, making it impossible for this once-popular crop to be grown 
profitably in Colombia, Matzen said.

Witness for Peace set up an itinerary for the delegation that included 
visits with U.S. drug policy experts, military and church leaders, human 
rights agencies, indigenous groups, academics and economists. Interpreters 
were provided, though Matzen speaks Spanish fluently.

"The number one issue was our security and number two was our emotional 
well-being, because it's a very stressful place," she said. "It's a war 
zone. I couldn't take pictures of a lot of things because of our security 
protocol."

Their plane arrived at an airport also used as a military base where the 
crop-dusting planes are filled with hazardous chemicals.

"So as we landed, immediately in the air above us there were six huge 
helicopters swirling around. And then the fumigation planes came around and 
kind of squirted out a bit of chemicals. It was quite impressive to see that."

Traveling by bus, the delegation was often stopped at checkpoints.

"There were roadblocks and men with guns who got on the bus and checked us 
out," Matzen said. "One time we had to get off the bus. It was definitely 
scary -- it felt very oppressive, and I just cannot imagine what it's like 
to live there."

While her segment of the delegation visited with agricultural workers, the 
other half traveled to scheduled stops with trade unionists. The issues of 
the two segments of the delegation are linked: there is widespread concern 
that most of the U.S. aid is going to the Colombian army, which has 
repeatedly been linked to brutal paramilitary groups and accused of serious 
human rights violations. The other group encountered roadblocks and armed 
guards along its route as well.

"Human rights in general is very dangerous, local rights, environmental 
rights, indigenous rights -- you work on any of those issues, your life is 
in danger," she said. "Many people are working under death threats, people 
dying because of advocacy work they've done."

Matzen and others from the delegation are on a personal crusade to raise 
America's consciousness about the spraying and thereby get it stopped -- 
thus the slide shows. And this is certainly not her first human rights 
campaign. She is an attorney and for the last two years has been chairwoman 
of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, a volunteer board that 
advises the Board of County Commissioners and the Department of Human 
Rights and Relations.

"I wanted to participate in this delegation because I am concerned about 
how Congress has chosen to spend more than a billion of our tax dollars on 
a military intervention that will not solve our domestic drug problem, but 
will likely escalate a very complicated, decades-old armed conflict while 
it destroys fragile ecological systems and does precious little to improve 
the lives of the many Colombians who live in poverty," Matzen said.

Her trip expenses were funded by the Florida-based Institute for Regional 
Conservation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to biodiversity and to the 
prevention of regional extinctions of rare plants, animals and natural 
communities.

Matzen is available to church and social action groups interested in seeing 
the slides and hearing her recap of the Witness for Peace delegation to 
Colombia.  Visit the Witness for Peace Web Site at: 
http://www.witnessforpeace.org
- ---
MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager