Pubdate: Wed, 22 Jan 2003
Source: Green Left Weekly (Australia)
Copyright: 2002, Green Left Weekly
Contact:  http://www.greenleft.org.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2753
Author: Jeffrey St Clair 
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/colombia.htm
Note: This was also printed in CounterPunch ( http://www.counterpunch.org/ )

US CONSIDERS NEW BIOWEAPON ATTACK

Hostile intentions toward the people of another country. Deployment of
chemical weapons and biological agents. Pursuit of a scorched earth policy.
Sound like Saddam's Iraq? Think again. This neatly summarises US President
George Bush's administration's depredations in Colombia, all under the shady
banner of the "war on drugs".

As Bush offers pious homilies on Iraq's possible hoarding of so-called
weapons of mass destruction, his administration and its backers are poised
to unleash a new wave of toxins in the mountains of Colombia, including a
dangerous brew of biological weapons its proponents rather quaintly call
"mycoherbicides"; opponents have dubbed them Agent Green.

The leading biological warfare hawk in US Congress is Bob Mica, a House
Republican from Florida. In mid-December, Mica called on his pals in the
Bush administration to uncork a currently banned batch of killer fungi and
begin a campaign of saturation spraying of mycoherbicide in Colombia.

Of course, Agent Green also kills everything else it touches. There's not
even a pretense to call these biological bomblets "smart fungi". Mica's
bracing call for an unfettered biological war on Colombia should be jotted
down by junior legal eagles with dreams of becoming future prosecutors of
war crimes.

But Mica is far from a lone crazed voice. Even the perpetually conflicted US
Secretary of State Colin Powell is on record supporting the use of
biological agents as a key part of Plan Colombia. Indeed, Anne Peterson, the
US ambassador to Bogota, testified recently that she believed bioweapons had
already been deployed in Colombia. Soon after, she retracted this chilling
observation, saying that it had been made "under duress". Peterson didn't
say who had applied the thumbscrews.

Then there's Rand Beers, one of the few hold-overs at the state department
from Bill Clinton's time. It's easy to see why this bio-war zealot appealed
to the Bush crowd. Back in the late '90s, Beers was all for using bioweapons
on crops in drug-producing countries. Now, as assistant secretary of state
for narcotics, Beers trots across the globe to various international
conferences where he invariably is forced to defend this toxic footnote to
Plan Colombia against critics who charge that it violates, among other
treaties, the Biological Weapons Convention.

Beers often says that the toxic weapons are needed to fight international
crime syndicates. This heady bit of sophistry is hardly an exemption from
the prohibitions, which, it must be pointed out, the Bush administration
doesn't believe in anyway, even though they are trigger-happy to invoke its
provisions against enemy states such as Iraq.

Indiscriminate killers Agent Green is a genetically engineered pathogenic
fungi, conjured up by the US Department of Agriculture's experiment station
in Beltsville, Maryland. It is now being produced with US funds by Ag/Bio
Company, a private lab in Montana and at a former Soviet bioweapons factory
in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The labs are brewing up two types of killer fungi,
Fusarium Oxysporum (slated for use against marijuana and coca plants) and
Pleospora Papveracea (engineered to destroy opium poppies).

The problem is that both fungi are indiscriminate killers, posing threats to
human health and to non-target species. Add to this the fact that when
sprayed from airplanes and helicopters, Agent Green will be carried by winds
and inevitably drift over coffee plantations, fields, farms, villages and
water supplies.

Agent Green also threatens the ecology of the Colombian rainforest, one of
the most biologically diverse on the planet. These forests harbour a greater
variety of species per hectare than any other. But the Colombian forests are
already under frightful siege from gold mining and oil companies, logging
outfits and cattle ranching.

By one count, Colombia has already lost more than a third of its primary
forest and continues to lose forest at a rate of almost 7800 square
kilometres a year. It's possible that the Agent Green operation may saturate
more than 600,000 hectares of Colombian rainforest, devastating wildlife and
plants.

Amazonia could become collateral damage in the Bushites' biowar adventurism.

This grim prospect may place the US squarely in violation of yet another
international treaty with which Bush, the former cocaine tooter, is
charmingly unacquainted: the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or
Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD).
ENMOD grew out of the worldwide outrage sparked by the use of Agent Orange
and other environmentally malign potions plastered across Southeast Asia
during the Vietnam War. Adopted by the UN in 1976 and signed by the US,
ENMOD prohibits any signatory from using the environment as a weapon of war,
which the spraying of Colombia constitutes by definition.

The US bio-bomblets will inevitably stray across the border into Ecuador and
Peru. Both countries vehemently oppose the US biowar plan and charge that it
violates international law. Specifically, they cite a non-proliferation
section of the Biological Warfare Convention that prohibits the transfer of
bioweapons and technology from one country to another.

"If Agent Green is used anywhere, it will legitimise agricultural biowarfare
in other contexts", says Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project,
the anti-biowar group that has done excellent work in exposing the
environmental consequences of toxic spraying in Colombia.

Eradication programs are a foolhardy way of addressing problems associated
with drug consumption. It doesn't work, it oppresses the weak and merely
plays into the pockets of the drug profiteers, from the cocaine generals to
the drug cartels and the banks who launder the money.

"In much of rural Colombia, there is simply no way to make a legal living",
notes Adam Isacson of the Centre for International Policy. "Security, roads,
credit and access to markets are all missing. The most that many rural
Colombians see from their government is the occasional military patrol or
spray plane. When the spray planes come, they take away farmers' illegal way
of making a living, but they do not replace it with anything. That leaves
the farmers with some bad choices. They can move to the cities and try to
find a job, though official unemployment is already 20%. They can switch to
legal crops and risk paying more for inputs than they can get from the sale
price. They can move deeper into the countryside and plant drug crops again.
Or they can join the guerrillas or the paramilitaries, who will at least
keep them fed."

Billions in US aid dollars and tens of thousands of litres of chemical
pesticides have been poured on Colombia without making a dent in coca
production. In fact, the flow of drugs from Colombia is increasing at a
rapid clip.

Back when the Clinton administration was pushing a somewhat reluctant
Congress to approve its multi-billion project dubbed Plan Colombia, none
other than Rand Beers swore that the spray and burn tactics would "eliminate
the majority of Colombia's opium poppy crop within three years". Congress
bought Beers' song and dance. As a pre-condition for receiving the money,
Congress required Colombia to begin operational testing of bioweapons.
Bowing to world pressure, President Clinton waived the requirement.

In the past five years, nearly 600,000 hectares of land in Colombia has been
blitzed by pesticides and fumigants, rendering them as sterile as the fields
of Carthage after Scipio Africanus' last cruel visit. But over the same
period production of cocaine in Colombia has more than tripled. Opium
production is also soaring, increasing by more than 60% since 2000. Colombia
now accounts for more than 30% of the heroin consumed in the US.

As the book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press has explained, war,
especially covert ones, and drugs go hand in hand. From the beginning, Plan
Colombia was really a way to use the drug war to underwrite the Colombian
military's savage war against the FARC and other rebel groups and secure US
control over Colombian oil, gas and mineral reserves. The so-called
eradication programs have targeted areas controlled by the FARC, rather than
even larger swaths of land held by paramilitaries who serve as vicious
proxy-warriors for the Colombian government.

Since the implementation of Plan Colombia, at least 22 US helicopters have
been shot down by Colombian rebels, a figure the Pentagon coyly refuses to
confirm or deny.

In December, Powell revealed his intention to increase the permanent fleet
of US attack helicopters in Colombia to 24. The State Department informed
Congress that new pilots were being trained at "a classified location" in
New Mexico.

Now, it appears that the Bush administration has given Mica the green light
to work his dark magic on the reauthorisation of Plan Colombia, inserting
language once again requiring the use of Agent Green as a condition of the
Colombian government getting its hands on US "aid" money.

There's plenty of evidence that Colombian government is now totally under
the sway of Washington and will be only too happy to oblige, even if that
means allowing the US to launch biological warfare attacks on its own
peasants.

In a bracing irony, in December Colombia presided over the UN Security
Council, which is poised to clobber Iraq over it past bioweapon development.
Indeed, it was the Colombian delegation that made the controversial call to
hand over an early copy of Iraq's weapons declaration, which the US
generously returned a week later, minus 8000 pages.
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