Plan Colombia's Loving Gestures in Putumayo

On October 3, a peaceful mobilization of peasant farmers of the municipality of Orito, Putumayo department, blocked the main road going into that municipality’s urban center. The reasons for the protest have to do with what is now an old issue in Colombia: the consequences of indiscriminate herbicide fumigations, one of Plan Colombia’s most clever strategies for getting rid of the country’s rural population through diseases, destruction of legitimate food crops and the environment in general, and forced displacement.

According to statements by the protest’s leaders to W Radio, the fumigations are leaving them in a state of complete misery, while they continue to wait for the government to start applying truly effective and mutually coordinated alternative development strategies. Nevertheless, since before Plan Colombia came into effect, the situation in Putumayo has been critical, especially due to the region’s oil. This has let to the presence of foreign companies like Occidental Petroleum and the consortiums Petrotesting Colombia and Colombia Energy, which, as an article published recently in Actualidad Étnica explains, continue to operate in the Lower Putumayo area where, according to Colombian state oil company Ecopetrol, there are approximately 20 wells and daily production of 10,000 barrels.

The presence of these oil companies in the area and their explorations, including inside sacred indigenous territories, has of course sparked a rise in U.S. military aid for counterinsurgency fighting and for a pretext that provides even more funding for the same: the war on drugs. This manifests itself in the forced eradication of illicit crops (which have become a main source of work for the rural population in one of the regions most forgotten by the Colombian state) through glyphosate fumigations.

That intensification of counterinsurgency operations has led to the systematic violation of human rights in Putumayo, focused on eliminating organized communities and campesino leaders who have questioned the true purpose of this military strategy: guaranteeing protection to foreign countries based in the department. Among those rural leaders  are the same coca growers who organized the great marches of 1994 in Putumayo, to demand more effective alternative development programs and fewer fumigations with poisonous chemicals in their towns.

Their demands today are still the same, as the situation hasn’t changed. In fact, in Orito  – with the implantation of Plan Colombia and it’s daughter program, the military offensive to retake zones of guerrilla influence in the south dubbed “Plan Patriot” – the situation has just been getting worse.

In just the last month, the army murdered three campesino leaders from the same municipality, presenting them as guerrillas killed in combat. And despite the government’s promises to replace the fumigations with manual eradication, especially along the border, they have only increased, generating serious health problems among the farmers of the municipality’s rural areas.

According to the article on the W Radio website, the spraying has affected towns such as San José de los Pinos, Alto Amarradero, Argentina, Nueva Argentina and El Empalme. On August 8, 18 members of the indigenous community of Villanueva showed up at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Hospital suffering from diarrhea,  vomiting, nausea, and burning sensations in the eyes and skin. They all claim to be victims of the fumigations.

Of course, the Uribe administration didn’t give these testimonies the slightest bit of credence and quickly assigned the the National Institute of Health (INS, in its Spanish initials) to send a research commission to the area, to look into just how true the campesinos’ claims were. The INS organized the commission and, with the help of the local authorities and police, concluded “scientifically” that the fumigations had not caused the patients’ symptoms. So far, so good. Once again, a community expressing dissent – and, according to a statement by the police commander of Putumayo, Colonel Harold Martín Lara, encouraged by armed groups and drug traffickers – had failed in its attempt to dirty the drug war’s image.

But what no one said at the time was that the United States government had its own stake in this supposedly neutral team of researchers, as analyst Laura Gil mentioned in her column in the Bogotá daily El Tiempo on September 17:

There are reasons to believe that the United States government  participated directly in this investigation. The Preliminary Report #3 is signed by three physicians – one of which, Jorge Hernán Botero Tobón, acts as an external advisor to the INS. But, in a report labeled 08-07 by the Anti-Narcotics Police,  Dr. Botero is identified as a toxicologist with the Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS) of the U.S. Embassy.

What was a paid functionary of the United States government doing participating in an INS field investigation? Why did he sign an INS document without identifying himself as such?

Even worse, the INS report shows that water samples were delivered to the Chemical Laboratory for Environmental Monitoring in Bogotá, a private organization. In that laboratory’s report, dated August 27, it is clear that it was the U.S. Embassy that delivered the samples, requested the tests and paid the costs.

But despite these questions, in the eyes of the Colombian government the peasant-farmers of Putumayo are still a bunch of liars who can’t see the gestures of good will made toward them, such as the reparation of damages they have suffered due to the fumigations. Take, for example, the benefits awarded to one Putumayo farmer, quoted in a 2001 article on the Voltaire Network website:

One day in July, five helicopters flew over his farm. “I thought, they’ve come back to fumigate once again,” said Lucía, Castillo’s wife. Instead, the helicopters landed, and a group of soldiers surrounded the farm. Several Colombian and U.S. officials got out of the helicopter and approached them, saying that they were their to verify the damages that Castillo had reported and that they only had 20 minutes on the ground, due to the danger of the conflict zone.

Days later, they offered him 5 million pesos (about $2,300) in compensation. They told him they had only been able to verify the damages from the third fumigation (in May of 2003). When he asked if he could appeal the discussion, requesting the 60 million ($27,000) in losses that he had calculated, they warned him that he would have to wait five years for his appeal and that “the process could turn against you.” The officials did not explain what that meant. “Not having any education,” said Castillo during a conversation, “you don’t know how to defend yourself, you get scared and end up accepting whatever they offer you.”

Supposedly, Plan Colombia’s promoters do nothing but watch over the well-being of Putumayo’s rural population. Nevertheless, in the Departmental Assembly of Social Organizations held last year in that department, it was revealed that the Concentrados Putumayo agricultural processing plant (part of a government-run alternative development plan in this municipality) is no longer working. It now serves only as a classroom for the “forrest ranger families” program (the flagship alternative development strategy promoted by the Colombian government, which employs rural families to maintain specific areas free of illicit crops), while the processing machines that should have benefited local producers have given way to bugs and rust.