Plan Colombia: Let's Just Say `No'

As the helicopters approached, Lt. Col. Marcos Pedreros had insisted that the Agent Orange of the new millennium would stay on a 170-foot wide path over "precise geographical coordinates." Instead, the senator's chemical shower mimicked the daily experience of Colombian subsistence farmers, campesinos.

Wellstone was investigating Plan Colombia, a bipartisan plan to spend $1.3 billion U.S. taxpayers' dollars on a violent military campaign against the Colombian poor, some of whom grow the coca that helps satisfy the United States' perpetual demand for drugs.

Part of the plan funds military helicopters for aerial spraying of glyphosate, a chemical herbicide sold as "Roundup" by the American chemical giant Monsanto.

Fortunately for Senator Wellstone, the Roundup.com Web site proclaims that glyphosate "does not cause cancer, birth defects, mutagenic effects, neurotoxic effects or reproductive problems" in human victims.

Still, I don't think I'll enjoy a glass of Roundup with dinner. Even if it's safe for me, they also maintain that glyphosate "will kill almost any green plant that is actively growing" and "results may be seen within hours."

Food comes from green plants. So campesinos like a 71-year-old widow in La Hormiga are left crying, "Who will feed me, I wasn't growing anything wrong, who will take care of me?," when her vegetable gardens encountered the helicopters' path.

Monsanto recommends "that grazing animals such as horses, cattle, sheep, goats, rabbits, tortoises and fowl remain out of the treated area for two weeks." Campesinos can't have cattle? And who will tell the 1,800 local species of birds to stay away?

"Roundup should not be applied to bodies of water, ... as (it) can be harmful to certain aquatic organisms." Abundant water is a salient feature of the area, the world's second most diverse biosystem.

Colombia shelters some 10 percent of Earth's flora and fauna in less than 1 percent of its surface. Colombian waterways are second in the world in varieties of amphibians. One, Phyllobates terribilis, a tree frog, recently led to a promising new painkiller. The botanist R.E. Schultes found nearly 2,000 unique species used in the Colombian Amazon for medicinal purposes.

Yet helicopters regularly inject this ecosystem with another chemical dose of "non-selective, systemic killer."

The chemical attacks have failed to diminish U.S. supply -- every eliminated coca field is quickly replaced. So the politicians turned to a biological weapon: Fusarium oxysporum. Florida, once offered this fungus to fight its war on drugs, refused even to perform controlled tests because the mycoherbicide can mutate, spread rapidly and kill off other plants, including food crops. Rare circumstances cause lethal human infections and it can survive in the soil for years.

What's too dangerous for Florida was just fine for the campesinos of Colombia, until Colombia's neighbors objected.

Bill Clinton, leaving office, finally retracted American demands that Colombia employ the fungus. He called it a biological weapon and implied that it had no "peaceful" use. He should know, since he also removed the human rights conditions that once limited the military aid.

The human rights abuses are severe. On Jan. 26, Commandante Beatriz of the United Self Defense Force (AUC) led an assault on Chengue, Colombia, that became the largest of 23 January mass killings. The Washington Post reports that the Colombian military put U.S. funds to work aiding the massacre.

So we're responsible that Marlena Lopez's three brothers, nephew and brother-in-law were left in pools of blood, their heads crushed by large stones. When her pink house burned, she joined the nearly 2 million Colombians "internally displaced" by the violence and herbicides, wondering, "We are humble people. Why in the world are we paying for this?"

Yet she might have been lucky. More than 25,600 Colombians died violently last year. How many deaths involved U.S. helicopters?

U.S. politicians, claiming to want to help the campesinos, suggest they grow alternative drugs like coffee. Perhaps instead of employing war criminals to spray death from helicopters, they should ban coffee in the United States.

It's addictive, so prohibition has precedent. It would make thousands unemployed, at least for a few minutes until they relocated into the more-lucrative black market. Then the drive-by shootings would start.

Our prisons would overflow with minorities and the poor, but politicians would note that 95 percent of convicted criminals had used caffeine in the month before their crime.

Police would racially profile potential coffee runners. On fake tips from strung-out informants, innocent tea-drinkers would be massacred in their homes by police storm troopers.

Few would surrender their coffee habit, despite the price increase. Rich addicts would spend a lot more money -- welfare for coffee dealers -- satisfying their urges. Poor addicts would steal their coffee money from you. The flow of violent money from our cities would be so overwhelming that the trickle reaching Colombian campesinos would finally offer real incentive to switch from coca to coffee.

Or maybe that would be a bad idea. So much for the panacea.

Russ Helms, a doctoral candidate in

biostatistics from Chapel Hill, salutes the

libertarians who participated in the Fort Bragg PeacePlanColombia.org protest on Saturday. To find out more or peruse his sources, visit www.unc.edu/student/orgs/tl or e-mail rhelms@bios.unc.edu.