Agent Green Over The Amazon

Drug War Policy Threatens to Unleash Havoc in South America

An Investigative Report from Lago Agrio, Ecuador

By Jeff Conant

The Curse of Lago Agrio

Rumors of the impending release of a genetically modified fungus as part ofthe War on Drugs in Colombia have been raising concerns amongenvironmentalists and regional officials that a grave ecological and socialcrisis may be unfolding in the region. At the same time, heightenedviolence on the ground in Colombia is putting pressure on bordering nationsas they anticipate the arrival of thousands of refugees from the growingcivil war.
On July 19 the Ecuadorian daily paper El Comercio ran a front page articleentitled “Exodus Arrives at Sucumbios: the Wave of Refugees Grows.”According to the article, 5000 Colombian refugees had recently arrived inthe Ecuadorian state of Sucumbios, on the border of the two Andean nations,and an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 more were expected in the followingweeks. The cause of the mass exodus was heightened violence in theColombian civil war. More specifically, this wave of refugees was comingfrom the Putumayo region of Colombia, where massive doses of the U.S.-madepesticide glyphosate, better known as Roundup, are being sprayed to destroycoca and poppy plantations as part of the U.S.-sponsored War on Drugs.
A few weeks later, arriving in Lago Agrio, the capital of the state ofSucumbios - and capitol of the Ecuadorian oil industry - I found that theComercio had exaggerated the figures, but not the fear. According to LuisYanez of the Frente de la Defensa de La Amazona (The Front for the Defenseof the Amazon), there were as yet no “official” refugees, although thefumigations were, and are, well under way. With constant newspaper reportsabout the pesticide spraying, the refugees, and rumors of a mysteriousfungus being dumped over the Amazon basin by the U.S. DEA, people acrossEcuador fear the worst. On the eve of a prolonged conflict betweenColombia’s many factions and the growing U.S. military presence in theregion, Ecuador has little choice but to watch itself be dragged into themelee against its will.
The bishop of Sucumbios, Monseñor Gonzalo Lopez Mareñon, denied thenewspaper reports of 5000 refugees. But he had recently formed a groupcalled the Asemblea de la Sociedad Civil (Assembly of Civil Society),which, together with the Frente de la Defensa de La Amazona and the UN HighCommission on Refugees, was meeting to begin preparations for the impendingcrisis. Barring the closing of the border - which will only exacerbate thesituation—nobody doubts that refugees will arrive, and inever-increasing numbers.
Lago Agrio is not prepared to receive these refugees. The city itself has atroubled history, and is one of the poorest and most violent cities inEcuador. As little as thirty years ago Lago Agrio, then known as Nueva Loja- was the heartland of the Cofan people, an indigenous tribe renowned fortheir bravery, skill at warfare, and knowledge of traditional medicine. Butwhen Texaco struck oil there 1962 and changed the town’s name to Lago Agrio - after Sour Lake, Texas, site of their first oil deposit back home - theregion’s history took a sharp turn for the worse.
Forty years later the Cofanes have been reduced to a few thousand proud stragglers clinging to their traditions, and Lago Agrio, on the border of Colombia, has become one of the most polluted and fearful areas in this small, poor, but relatively peaceful nation. Regular border crossings by Colombian drug-traffickers and the presence of low-paid migrant workers, along with the difficultconditions of work in the oilfields, causes a general instability in thetown, and warnings to stay in at night. The complete absence of facilitiesfor an impending flood of refugees - especially refugees whose onlylivelihood is growing, processing, and transporting cocaine—has begun toraise fears, not only in Lago Agrio but throughout the nation, that theeffects of Plan Colombia will spill over the border, deepening Ecuador’salready grave social and economic crisis. The wave of pesticide fumigationsrumored to increase at any moment, but which, until now, seem to beshrouded in secrecy, will only make matters worse.
Plan Colombia
The fumigations, aimed at destroying plantations of poppy and coca and thelivelihoods that depend on illicit cultivation, are part of Plan Colombia.
Plan Colombia, developed by the U.S. and the European Union with thesupport of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has as itsobjective the opening of markets and the stimulation of foreign investmentin Colombia. According to its critics, the plan is given a different facedepending on its audience. But it seems to have several specific objectiveswhich remain more-or-less fixed:
* The implementation of measures to attract foreign investment and topromote the expansion of markets, strengthening treaties that protectforeign investment and free trade as promoted by the World Trade Organization.
* Destruction of illegal cultivars in the region of Putumayo and otherzones in Southern Colombia, and their substitution with “productiveprojects, principally permanent cultivars [coffee, banana, sugar, Africanpalm]…by way of strategic alliances” between investors and large and smalllandholders which will offer “alternative employment opportunities andsocial services to the population of areas under illicit cultivation.”
* Reestablishment of military control in these zones, and modernization ofthe Armed Forces.
* Institutional reform, including the struggle againstcorruption and the defense of human rights.
* Reactivation of the economy.
As basic tenets of globalization and WTO unilateral policy, these sameprincipals, applied in Mexico in the mid-1990´s, led to destabilization ofthe rural population and widespread civil unrest. The implementation ofNAFTA in Mexico hinged upon fundamental policy shifts, such as the erasureof article 27 from the Mexican Constitution. Article 27, the right to holdland in common, protected ancestral indigenous territories from beingbought and sold. Its removal from the constitution aimed to increaseinvestment and stimulate the economy. Instead, it lead to the Zapatistauprising of January 1994 and a prolonged war of attrition that continues tothe present day.

It is hard to imagine that further militarization of theWar on Drugs, and the leveling of prices that will come with Plan Colombiaand the pending Free Trade Agreement for the Americas will not have asimilar effect. As the example of Mexico has shown, Free Trade favors thecorporations and large landholders - those that can show immediate profitand whose economies of scale can withstand the leveling of prices on theglobal market. The small landholder is moved off his land and the landlesspeasant is forced to work at less-than-subsistence wages. The landlesspeasants and small landholders in Southern Colombia, who currently subsistby planting and processing coca, and who have been increasingly caughtbetween the guerillas and the paramilitaries, will continue to be forced tomigrate to other zones, both to find work and to escape the escalatingviolence and the aerial fumigation.

Over the past ten years more than 1.5 million Colombians have beendisplaced, and at least 35,000 have been killed. An estimated 2 percent ofColombia´s population - some 800,000 people - have fled the country since1996, most of them to the United States. But while the middle classes takerefuge in the U.S., those with less resources are forced across the borderinto Panama and Ecuador. A refugee community of some 800 people, andgrowing, has taken root in Panama´s dense and nearly impassable jungleprovince of Darien, at the bottom of the Central American isthmus, bringinga new source of destabilization to that wracked and recently demilitarizednation. And, like in Ecuador´s impoverished Oriente, the existinginfrastructure barely supports the local population, let alone the arrivalof immigrants and refugees.

As long as cocaine remains at once illegal and in high demand - primarilyin the U.S. - it will be impossible to compete with its viability as a cashcrop. Its destruction may in fact have the reverse effect - it will raiseprices and increase the incentive to produce. Despite the massive campaignto destroy illegal cultivars in Colombia over the last several years,production has doubled, and the violence accompanying it has increased.

U.S. State Department figures show that in spite of intensive herbicidespraying and other forms of forced eradication, the area in productionincreased by 200% between 1992 and 1999. In 1999 alone, the area undercultivation increased by 20,200 hectares (50,500 acres). It seems clearthat a strategy of eradication, without the accompaniment of a plan toreduce poverty and secure livelihoods for the people of the zone, is boundto fail.

Operation Roundup

David Hathaway, a U.S. economist and expert in matters of biosecurityworking in Brazil, affirms that “the application of Roundup in rural areashas been a disaster overall. It is a disaster because the problem is badlydiagnosed. Or, I should say, the problem is well-diagnosed: the problem isto sell more Roundup.”

He continues, “It is possible and viable to eradicate coca and poppies in agiven field. This much is true. What is not possible is to eradicate thesecultivars in general.”

Monsanto´s Roundup, chemical name glyphosate, was introduced to the marketin 1974 as a wide-spectrum herbicide. It is currently one of the mostwidely used herbicides in the world, with sales reaching twelve billiondollars annually. It is also one of the most toxic. According to the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the ingestion of 200 mililiters ofRoundup is immediately lethal. Aside from such immediate effects of acuteexposure, long-term exposure has been shown to cause damage to humanreproductive systems and genetic material. Among the effects of exposureare convulsions, acute respiratory problems, loss of muscle control,unconsciousness, destruction of red blood cells, cardiac depression andloss of fertility. The EPA has shown Roundup to increase levels ofphosphorous, potassium and Urea in the blood, and to produce pancreaticlesions and abcesses in the kidney, liver and heart.

Among its unfortunate side effects in the environment is high toxicity toearthworms, bacteria and rhizomatic fungus - all of which are essential tothe long-term health of agricultural soils. It is up to 100 times moretoxic to fish than it is to humans and, like other pesticides, it issubject to bioaccumulation - meaning that the level of toxicity grows witheach step up the food chain. A person who regularly eats fish poisoned withRoundup receives a dose much greater than direct exposure. A 1993 study bythe University of Colorado revealed that Roundup is the leading cause ofpesticide poisoning in home gardeners in the U.S., and the third mostdangerous pesticide in commercial agriculture.

Due to such high toxicity both to humans and to the natural environment,the use of Roundup as an agent in the War on Drugs bears strong resemblanceto the infamous use of the defoliant Agent Orange in South Vietnam.

Operation Ranch Hand - the code name for the application of Agent Orangeover 6 million acres of Vietnamese jungle between 1961 and 1972 - has lefta legacy of at least 500,000 reported birth defects, as reported by the TuDu hospital of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Saigon. The use of Roundup overColombia threatens to leave a similar legacy.

In 1998, under pressure from the U.S., Colombia began the testing andapplication of a second herbicide in the Putumayo region. The herbicide,tebuthiuron, manufactured and sold by Dow Agrosciences as Spike 20P, isused in the U.S. mostly to control weeds on railroad beds and under highvoltage lines far from crops and people. American and Colombian officials,complaining that the liquid Roundup has only destroyed about 30% of theplants sprayed, have been moving toward use of tebuthiuron, which comes ina granular form. Because Roundup must be sprayed from a low-altitude earlyin the morning when winds are calm and temperatures are lower, guerillasoften fire at the low-flying planes. Tebuthiuron pellets, dropped fromhigher altitudes in any weather, day or night, make planes less vulnerableto ground fire.

However, the environmental risks of this chemical agent make Colombianofficials wary. Former Colombian Environmental Minister Eduardo Verano hassaid the effects of tebuthiuron on agricultural areas are still unknown,and its use will increase deforestation by forcing coca growers deeper intothe jungle.

In a 1998 interview with the New York Times, Mister Verano said, “We needto reconsider the benefits of chemical warfare. The more you fumigate, themore the farmers plant. If you fumigate one hectare, they´ll grow coca ontwo more. How else do you explain the figures?”

Even Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of the herbicide, has spoken outagainst its use in Colombia. “Tebuthiuron is not labeled for use on anycrops in Colombia, and it is our desire that the product not be used forcoca eradication,” the company said in a public statement. Dow cautionedthat the chemical should be used “carefully and in controlled situations,”because “it can be very risky in situations where terrain has slopes,rainfall is significant, desirable plants are nearby and application ismade under less than ideal circumstances.”

After years of lawsuits and public outcry over the use of Agent Orange -also produced by Dow - the company said that it would refuse to selltebuthurion for use in Colombia. However. According to the New York Timesreport, American officials have noted that Dow´s patent on the chemical hasexpired, allowing others to manufacture it.

Agent Green

The application of a second “Agent Orange” over the Colombian Amazon, hascaused tremendous alarm among international environmentalists andinhabitants of the region. But residents of Southern Colombia and theEcuadorian border region of Sucumbios are now expecting a new and evengreater threat to their health and their ecosystem - the release of abiological control that environmental activists are referring to as “AgentGreen”.

Fusarium Oxysporum is a fungus native to temperate and tropical zones. Inits natural state it is well-known as a plant pathogen that affects theroots and vacular systems of a variety of cultivated plants, causingdisintegration of cells leading to withering, rot and death. Doctor DavidC. Sands, a plant pathologist at the University of Montana and one of thechief researchers on Fusarium Oxysporyum (FO) calls it “an Attila the Hundisease,” noting that there are strains of fusarium for virtually everycultivated plant and many wild ones. Some species of fusarium have alsobeen known to cause illness in humans, especially those with depressedimmunity from cancer or HIV-AIDS.

The fungus was first identified as a possible weapon in the drug war by CIAscientists in the early 1980´s. In 1987 Doctor Sands was working in hisMontana laboratory when he received a call from the U.S. Department ofAgriculture, asking him to contribute his knowledge of plant pathology tothe War on Drugs. The department had been experimenting on a legal cocaplantation in Peru - previously owned by the Coca Cola company, butabandoned for greener, and safer, pastures in Hawaii. The USDA had takenover the plantation from Coca Cola to use as a test plot for herbicides.