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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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July 19th,
2009 - US Role in Massive Aerial Herbicide Spraying Revealed |
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US Role in
Massive Aerial Herbicide Spraying Revealed By Thomas D. Williams The Public Record July 19, 2009 Despite years of ongoing,
critical public health controversies in Colombia and Ecuador over the
US-assisted aerial herbicide spraying of coca and poppy crops while trying to
reduce illegal cocaine and heroin production, US State Department officials
are pursuing that very same spraying strategy. In fact, last year,
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s administration temporarily cast aside
the latest of several State Department exhortations to begin massive herbal
spraying operations on poppy crops producing heroin there. Colombian aerosol dusting of
a mix of Roundup Ultra, Cosmo-Flux and other plant-penetrating agents began
seven years ago. (In 2006 alone, the United Nations reported the spraying of
approximately 172,025 hectares of coca crops, producing cocaine. That equals
a bit over 664 square miles.) In the meantime, untold
thousands of Colombians and Ecuadorians have become sick from the blended
chemical spray. Studies have shown the environmental dangers of inhalation
and skin and eye saturation of the floating mist. And critically valuable
maize, yucca and plantains have been destroyed in large swaths of the fertile
country. For years, DynCorp
International of Fort Worth, Texas, has had the lucrative US
multimillion-dollar annual contract for Colombian aerial spraying operations. The company is being sued in
Washington, DC, and US District Court by a class of 3,000 Ecuadorians who
claim spray blown over the border from Colombia has sickened them. “Glyphosate is used all over
the world without these kinds of claims,” said Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp
spokesman. “We spray in Colombia, and there Glyphosate is used extensively.
But we don’t have any complaints where we spray it and what we do when we
spray it. If there are health problems in Ecuador, they are certainly caused
by something else.” The spray itself, said Lagana, “is prescribed by the
governments of Colombia and the United States. Monsanto makes the spray.” Monsanto, the herbicide
manufacturer, has from time to time been identified by various Internet sites
as the supplier of Roundup Ultra to Colombian spraying operations. But,
through spokeswoman Tamara J. Craig Schilling, Monsanto refused to say
whether the company is or was a supplier for Colombian spraying. Schilling
refused to disclose the differences between regular Roundup and Roundup
Ultra. The company claims Roundup is not harmful if instructions on the label
are followed. Schilling said a Monsanto official in Mexico referred all such
inquiries to the State Department. But, Monsanto also lists an office in
Colombia inside its website. Along with Dow Chemical,
Monsanto was one of several US Army suppliers of the infamous Agent Orange,
the herbicide used to deforest huge areas of jungle during the Vietnam War.
The chemicals were alleged by many in multiple lawsuits to have caused birth
defects and cancers among a large population of natives as well as US
soldiers and their families. Despite DynCorp spokesman
Lagana’s claims that Colombians are not being sickened by the spray, an
American Friends service report, as early as 2002, said there were indeed
health repercussions in Colombia as well. They cited the Putumayo Health
Department report as saying: “Three municipalities targeted by spray
campaigns from December 22, 2000, to February 2, 2001, indicated that medical
personnel in three local hospitals reported increased visits due to skin
problems, gastrointestinal infections, acute respiratory infection, and
conjunctivitis following spraying.” In August 2001, a commission
from a European Human Rights Organization found in a visit to the Province of
Santanter that: “Contrary to official declarations about the harmlessness of
Glyphosate, we were able to verify skin conditions (rashes and itching caused
by the skin drying to the point of cracking) in both children and adults who
were exposed directly to spraying while they worked their land or played
outside their homes.” In fact, in spite of
Lagana’s insistence that Colombians haven’t complained about the spray, a
Colombian judge temporarily stopped spraying operations in July 2001 as a
result of health complaints from indigenous groups. Then in January 2002, the
Economic and Social Council of the United Nations ruled “The UN (Human
Rights) Commission should urge the United States and Colombia to discontinue
the aerial herbicide application program and seek alternative eradication
methods.” Based on a complaint from
Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, the council concluded: “The combination of
(1) health, food resource, and environmental impacts to Colombians and
Ecuadorians, (2) the toxicity of the spray mixture and the failure of the
United States and Colombia to instruct sprayers to observe health and
environmental safety recommendations, (3) the failure of the United States
and Colombia to disclose sufficient information about the mixture and its
application, (4) the failure of the United States and Colombia to conduct
sufficient health and environmental assessments, and (5) the potential human
rights abuses that may result from future health studies, clearly places the
United States and Colombia in violation of the rights of Colombians and
Ecuadorians to a clean and healthy environment, health, life, sustenance,
property, privacy, and access to information.” Ecuador has threatened for
months to go to The International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands,
to pursue a case against the herbicide spraying by Colombia drifting across
their common border. Repeated attempts over several weeks by this writer to
contact an Ecuadorian government spokesperson concerning the herbicide
spraying controversy failed. “Colombia is convinced that
the herbicide used in aerial spray of coca and poppy crops is harmless for
human health and the environment,” said Jurgan Kaiser, a Colombian government
spokesman. “A scientific study recently undertaken under the auspices of the
Organization of American States (Inter-American Commission against Drug
Abuse) confirmed this. For more information about this, check the
commission’s web page at www.cicad.oas.org.” But a search of that site
leads to a report on that scientific study that mentions many conflicting
conclusions about the environmental impact of the herbicide mix sprayed in
Colombia. It intricately discusses the pros and cons of a scientific treatise
essentially concluding that the poppy spray is harmless to humans and the
environment. The US State Department
believes the spraying of herbicide in Colombia is not harmful to the
environment or to humans, said its spokeswoman Susan Pittman. Contrary to government
officials’ and manufacturers’ claims of non-toxicity, at least five inquiries
have found that Roundup causes serious human health problems. Specifically, seven
scientific investigators, studying symptoms of Ecuadorians exposed to a mix
of Roundup Ultra and other additive chemicals, concluded: “A total of 24
exposed and 21 unexposed control individuals were investigated using the
comet assay. The results showed a higher degree of DNA damage in the exposed
group compared to the control group. These results suggest that in the
formulation used during aerial spraying Glyphosate had a genotoxic effect on
the exposed individuals.” Mitra’s Natural Innovation
blog cites four more studies: “A group of scientists led by biochemist
Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini from the University of Caen in France found
that human placental cells are very sensitive to Roundup at concentrations
lower than those currently used in agricultural application. “An epidemiological study of
Ontario farming populations showed that exposure to Glyphosate, the key
ingredient in Roundup, nearly doubled the risk of late miscarriages. Seralini
and his team decided to research the effects of the herbicide on human
placenta cells. Their study confirmed the toxicity of Glyphosate, as after
eighteen hours of exposure at low concentrations, large proportions of human
placenta began to die. Seralini suggests that this may explain the high
levels of premature births and miscarriages observed among female farmers using
Glyphosate … They found that the toxic effect increases in the presence of
Roundup ‘adjuvants’ or additives. These additives thus have a facilitating
role, rendering Roundup twice as toxic as its isolated active ingredient,
Glyphosate. “Another study, released in
April 2005 by the University of Pittsburgh, suggests that Roundup is a danger
to other life forms and non-target organisms. Biologist Rick Relyea found
that Roundup is extremely lethal to amphibians. In what is considered one of
the most extensive studies on the effects of pesticides on non-target
organisms in a natural setting, Relyea found that Roundup caused a 70 percent
decline in amphibian biodiversity and an 86 percent decline in the total mass
of tadpoles. Leopard frog tadpoles and gray tree frog tadpoles were nearly
eliminated. “In 2002, a scientific team
led by Robert Belle of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
biological station in Roscoff, France showed that Roundup activates one of
the key stages of cellular division that can potentially lead to cancer.
Belle and his team have been studying the impact of Glyphosate formulations
on sea urchin cells for several years.” Notwithstanding the billions
of US and Colombian dollars spent on hazardous aerial spraying of crops that
some scientific studies insist adversely impact humans, animals and fish,
United Nations estimates say Colombian illicit drug production in metric tons
has actually doubled in the decade ending in 2006. As well, says the UN,
Colombia still remains the world’s biggest coca grower, producing 62 percent
of the world’s supply of cocaine. Sometimes, when Colombia’s
illegal drug totals dropped, those in Bolivia and Peru, where aerial spraying
is illegal, went up, UN reports say. Even when narcotics-enforcing officials
are successful one year, the demand for illicit drugs is so strong in the
United States and elsewhere, the poppy crops pop up again and again from year
to year. In the meantime, these
annual United Nations inquiries show the Far East, once a booming drug black
market for the world, has dramatically cleaned up its act without major
environmental harm. “Thailand has been
opium-free for a long time. Vietnam is also opium-free. Laos has cut opium
production by 94 percent in less than a decade (down to 1,500 hectares, or
about 5.79 square miles). Burma’s share of the world opium market has
collapsed from 30 percent in 1998 to under six percent in 2007. A
decades-long process of drug control is clearly paying off. Thailand, in
particular, stands out as an inspiration to its neighbors and a role model
for other countries trying to overcome their drug problems,” says the UN
report. Thailand worked over three
decades to eventually replace poppies with other valuable agricultural
production, says the UN. The government concentrated on battling the drug
trade with a more comprehensive two-pronged approach: a crop replacement
program and stronger police control over drug dealing. “In 1969, the Thai
efforts were pioneered by King Bhumibol Adulyadej who introduced a crop
replacement project after the establishment of his new Phubing Palace in
Chiang Mai adjacent to an opium poppy-growing village on the mountain Doi
Pui. He promoted a long-term and cooperative approach to opium control that
encouraged finding income-generation alternatives rather than law
enforcement,” the report says. Contrasting with Colombia,
the US government, which assisted Thailand in its efforts, “removed Thailand
from the US list of major drug-producing countries in the late 1990s because
of the country’s success in limiting opium cultivation to its current low
levels, and from the list of major drug transit countries in 2004 when it was
apparent that local trafficking in and through Thailand had no significant
impact on the United States. There is, effectively, no cultivation or
production of heroin, methamphetamine or other drugs in Thailand today,” said
the US State Department’s own report. Herbicide manufacturers and
officials from the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency and Drug
Enforcement Administration, plus Colombian officials, have been claiming for
about seven years that the chemical cocktail including Roundup Ultra, in fact
sometimes deadly to plants and often fish, is harmless to humans. Safe, they
say, provided it is sprayed properly with just the right mixture; assuming
humans are not covered with the mist more than several times; and supposing
the chemicals don’t repeatedly make their way into drinking water supplies.
Apparently, however, there are few, if any, independent overseers to make
sure the spray is consistently totally non-toxic or is targeted just to the
coca and poppy crops. Despite the benign chemical
claims, Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics
& law enforcement affairs, testified in 2002 in the federal court case
against DynCorp ongoing today, that there had been no scientific tests of the
environmental impacts of the combinations of chemicals used for the extensive
Colombian sprayings, then two years old. Most tellingly, the US State
Department has been unable to convince other nations to follow Colombia’s
lead. After once again considering the repetitious US proposal to spray the
lucrative drug-producing Afghan harvests, President Hamid Karzai’s
administration cast aside the offer in October. “We have rejected the
spraying of poppy in Afghanistan for good reasons: the effect on the
environment, other smaller crops and on human genetics,” the acting minister
for counter-narcotics, General Khodaidad, told Britain’s The Guardian. However, says the article,
Karzai promised to continue the difficult manual plant eradication, ongoing
with help from US forces for six years, not long after US and Afghan troops
began their continuing war with terrorists. Scores of US contract employees,
soldiers and Afghan security men have used sticks, tractors and all-terrain
vehicles with harrows to destroy poppies. But, this plan proves to be as
dangerous as spraying; contractors have been regularly fired upon by
terrorists or those allied with farmers, or otherwise blocked in their
poppy-bashing efforts by corrupt officials bent on favoring farmers with
powerful political connections, a plethora of news reports say. The incredible difficulties
with manual eradication apparently left Karzai with some doubts, so he has
not yet completely eliminated the possibility of reconsidering a US-sponsored
effort to spray the poppy crops from the air with weed and plant killer
Roundup and the typical additives accompanying it. In February 2006, William B.
Wood moved from his post as US ambassador to Colombia to become the
ambassador to Afghanistan. At that point in time, Sam Logan of ISN Security
Watch editorialized: “it is worrying that (Wood) might promote the same
failed drug policies used in Colombia … Fumigation alone - the leading method
for reducing the supply of coca plants - has eradicated other, legitimate
crops and caused international disputes between Colombia and Ecuador.
Environmental concerns linked to the use of herbicide to kill coca bushes
inside Colombia’s national parks underline the lengths the US government will
go to target small, clandestine coca plantations in Colombia. Aircraft
spraying chemicals in Colombia must fly at high altitudes to avoid damage due
to small arms fire from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC).” It appears, however, that
back-to-back wars in Afghanistan have created intense public animosity to
airborne chemicals. Many Afghans are fed up with the decades of hazardous
pollutants welling up from US aerial bombardments and bunker-busters,
home-made terrorist bombs, radioactive depleted uranium dust from fired US
munitions, smoke from oil and other chemical fires and a host of other sorts
of dangerous chemical contaminations. “The US government was
pushing for this to happen,” said Said Mohammed Azam, a former Afghan
Ministry of Counter-Narcotics official. “But the Brits were reluctant,
particularly when it (developed) that the spray (could) have happened in
Helmand province. Nearly half of the opium that was produced last year came
from Helmand alone … most (Afghan officials) were afraid of nodding yes to
(the spray) because they were not very much aware of the (contents) … This
concern among Afghan officials underpinned when the two sectarian ministries,
public health and agriculture opposed the idea because they reasoned the
chemicals could harm the environment in areas where the spray took place. I
heard the eradication of poppy started (in early 2008) in Helmand province
and the Interior Ministry has deployed 500 extra troops from center for this
purpose. Apparently the eradication will happen through traditional means:
hand, tractor or using oxen or other animals.” Thomas “Dennie” Williams is
a former state and federal court reporter, specializing in investigations,
for the Hartford Courant. Since the 1970’s, he has written extensively about
irregularities in the Connecticut Superior Court, Probate Court systems for
disciplining both judges and lawyers for misconduct, and failures of the
Pentagon and the VA to assist sick veterans returning from war. External link: http://pubrecord.org/world/2547/aerial-herbicide-spraying-colombia/ |