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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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February 27th,
2002 - Ecuadorian Farmers Fight DynCorp’s Chemwar on the Amazon |
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Ecuadorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp’s Chemwar on the Amazon By Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn Counterpunch February 27, 2002 "Imagine that scene for
a moment - you are an Ecuadorian farmer, and suddenly, without notice or warning,
a large helicopter approaches, and the frightening noise of the chopper
blades invades the quiet. The helicopter comes closer, and sprays a toxic
poison on you, your children, your livestock and your food crops. You see
your children get sick, your crops die." These are the words of Bishop
Jesse de Witt, president of the International Labor Rights Fund, in a letter
to Paul V. Lombardi, CEO of DynCorp. DeWitt's organization has
filed suit in US federal court on behalf of 10,000 Ecuadoran peasant farmers
and Amazonian Indians charging Lombardi's company with torture, infanticide
and wrongful death for its role in the aerial spraying of highly toxic
pesticides in the Amazonian jungle, along the border of Ecuador and Colombia.
DynCorp's chances of squirming out the suit were dealt a crushing blow in
January when federal judge Richard Roberts denied the company's motion to
dismiss the case on grounds that their work in Colombia involved matters of
national security. DynCorp, the Reston,
Virginia-based all-purpose defense contractor, is rapidly acquiring the kind
of reputation for global villainy and malfeasance that used to be Bechtel's
calling card in the 60s and 70s. As we reported a few weeks ago, DynCorp has
been hit with a RICO suit by a former employee alleging that the company
fired him after he reported improprieties by company supervisors in Bosnia to
the Army CID. According to the lawsuit, those improprieties included
"coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their
own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and
talents of the individual slaves they had purchased." The very origins of the
company are somewhat murky. President Harry Truman established DynCorp
shortly after the end of World War II, supposedly to provide jobs for
veterans and to market surplus military equipment. Certainly, DynCorp has
never severed its umbilical relationship to the federal government. The
billion-dollar company enjoys contracts with the CIA, Pentagon, State Department,
EPA, IRS and DEA. It trains "police forces" in some of the US's
most brutal client states, including El Salvador, Panama, Haiti and Bosnia.
Many of its top employees were recruited from the Pentagon, the CIA or and
State Department. Indeed theories are rife across Latin America, in
particular, that DynCorp has always functioned as a cut-out for Pentagon and
CIA covert operations. As Ken Silverstein reports
in a profile of DynCorp in his excellent book Private Warriors, beginning in
the early 1990s the company went into Latin America big time, often working
under State Department contracts. Usually, the pretext was the drug war. But,
as is so often the case, the real objective seemed to be a kind of privatized
counter-insurgency operation against rebel groups. In Peru, for example,
DynCorp was awarded a contract to provide maintenance services on a fleet of
helicopters the State Department had loaned to Peruvian anti-drug forces. But in 1992, one of those
helicopters crashed in the jungle. On board were three DynCorp employees,
including a man named Robert Hitchman. As Silverstein notes, "Hitchman
was not in Peru to repair helicopters". He was a covert-ops specialist,
who had worked for the CIA's Air America in the war on Laos and ran former
CIA agent Edward Wilson's Libyan operation for Muammar Qaddafy. The State
Department said that the plane simply crashed due to "crew
fatigue". But Hitchman's son told Silverstein that in fact the plane had
been shot down by Shining Path guerillas and that then-Secretary of State
James Baker asked him to keep quiet about the true nature of his father's
death. Hitchman said that far from fixing planes, his father was flying DEA
agents and Peruvians on missions into guerrilla territory to destroy cocaine
labs, bomb coca and coordinate the herbicide spraying program. He said his
father was also training Peruvian pilots to fly combat missions. The Peruvian operation
turned out to be a kind of test run for DynCorp's much bigger role in
Colombia, where DynCorp employees not only fly fumigation planes, but train
Colombian soldiers and police to do battle with the FARC and other insurgent
groups. "It's very handy to
have an outfit not part of the U.S. armed forces," former US ambassador
to Colombia Myles Frechette, told the St. Petersburg Times, in December 2000.
"Obviously, if somebody gets killed or whatever, you can say it's not a
member of the armed forces. Nobody wants to see American military men
killed." Under Plan Colombia, DynCorp
was awarded a $600 million contract to fumigate coca fields across Colombia.
As of January of this year, the corporation's crop dusters had sprayed more
than 14 percent of the entire land area of Colombia. The suit brought on behalf
of the Ecuadoran farmers and tribes is based on an investigation by Accin
Ecolgica of pesticide drift from DynCorp's Colombian spraying operations. The
study found that DynCorp had been using a souped-up version of Monsanto's
Round-Up herbicide, called Round-Up Ultra. The effects of Round-Up Ultra are
not that much different from Agent Orange, the defoliant used to such malign
effect by the US in Southeast Asia. It is an indiscriminate killer, poisoning
not only cocoa fields by vegetable crops, wildlife, forests, waterways and
people. "These fumigations are contaminating
the Amazon, destroying the forest and killing our people," says
Emperatriz Cahuache, president of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of
the Colombian Amazon. The primary toxin in
Round-Up is glyphosate. Both the State Department and DynCorp have said that
this is a relatively harmless concoction. But Monsanto itself warns that it
should not be used near humans or water sources. But the toxic punch of the
herbicides that DynCorp has been using has been amplified by the addition of
surfactants. These additives increase the plant killing power of the
fumigations and also its lethality to humans. The Accion Ecolgica study
uncovered significant pesticide drift in the Sucumbos region of Ecuador, a
patchwork of Amazonian forests and villages populated by the Quechua
subsistence farmers. It concluded that the spraying had caused "harm to
the health and crops of 100 percent of the population within five kilometers
of the border with Colombia." More than 1,100 cases of illness have been
documented, including the deaths of at least two children. Again DynCorp and the State
Department appear to have flouted Monsanto's own guidelines. In order to
minimize pesticide drift, Monsanto advises that aerial spraying not be done
any higher than three meters from the tops of the tallest plants. But in
Colombia, DynCorp's planes routinely fly as high as 15 meters above the
vegetation, greatly expanding the drift of the poison. The lead lawyer for the
Indians is Cristobal Bonifaz, an Amherst, Massachusetts attorney. Bonifaz
used the Alien Tort Claims Act to sue Texaco in 1993 on behalf of another
group of Ecuadorian tribes whose land had been despoiled by the oil company's
rampages in the rainforest. The DynCorp spraying has contaminated roughly the
same area. "It is a tragedy of
major proportions that, in the same region where Texaco devastated the
environment and caused untold suffering to the people of the rainforest, a
new enemy now comes from the air, poisoning the people, killing their crops
and destroying their land," says Bonifaz. In addition to the Alien
Tort Claim, Bonifaz's complaint against DynCorp also charges that the company
violated the US Torture Victim Protection Act. It seeks an immediate halt to
the spraying and millions in compensatory damages. The lawsuit had the
misfortune to be filed on September 11. While it has largely been ignored by
the US press, it did not escape the attention of DynCorp's CEO. Indeed,
Lombardi seemed to take a personal interest in the case and took it upon
himself to try to bully one of the plaintiffs, the International Human Rights
Fund, into pulling out. On October 25, 2001,
Lombardi fired off a letter to each board member of the International Labor
Rights Fund, an AFL-CIO affiliated group. Lombardi suggested that the Rights
Fund was being used as a front for the Colombian drug cartels.
"Considering the worldwide support for the elimination of harmful drugs
from our cities and schools, it has been suggested by those who are aware of
the lawsuit that the most logical supporters of such an action would be the
drug cartels themselves. Notably, consistent with the drug cartel's
objectives, the complaint also seeks to permanently enjoin further spraying
of coca and opium poppy," Lombardi wrote. Lombardi didn't stop there.
He went on to suggest the in the post-September 11 world the Rights Fund's
lawsuit was unpatriotic and might serve to undermine the war on terrorism.
"Considering the major international issues with which we are all
dealing as a consequence of September 11, none of us need to be sidetracked
with frivolous litigation the aim of which is to fulfill a political
agenda." But the Rights Fund didn't
back down. Indeed, its chairman, Bishop DeWitt, responded by telling Lombardi
that if he didn't stop these strong-arm tactics they would amend the
complaint and "charge you personally with knowingly conducting aerial
attacks on innocent people". Here's hoping that one
federal judge and 10,000 Ecuadoran Indians can achieve what the Democrats in
congress have failed to do: halt the US's chemical war on the Amazon. External link: http://www.counterpunch.org/dyncorpsuit.html |