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Colombia VP: US 'war on drugs' failing, wants less herbicide spraying

Posted by Benjamin Melançon - September 12, 2007 at 8:26 am
Interesting, this coming out of Colombia.  Just lip service for Colombians or?

Colombia's vice president said on Sept. 9 that a US-backed program to fumigate coca fields is failing to stem cocaine trafficking and called for anti-drug efforts to shift away from the practice.

[...]

"After a five-year frontal attack against drug trafficking, the results aren't the most successful or the ones we hoped for," Santos told a news conference.

He said Bogota is committed to fighting drug cartels, but "at the end of the day, the benchmark is whether the street price of cocaine in New York, London or Madrid rises or the quality falls. So far, we haven't found any statistics that bear this out."

Read it all at the Asheville Global Report

Despite record herbicide spraying of coca fields last year, the White House drug czar's office said in June that Colombia is producing more of the plant used to make cocaine than when Washington enacted the $5 billion Plan Colombia in 2000.

According to recent government figures, coca production rose 9 percent last year -- its third consecutive annual rise -- to 388,000 acres. A recent dip in the US street price of cocaine and a rise in purity also point to abundant supply.


Source: (AP)
From: http://www.agrnews.org/?section=news&news_sect ion=2&briefs=2&

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Comments

Saving face

Submitted September 15, 2007 - 1:17 am by Dan Feder
There is much to be said about this, but basically what is going on here is that the money for fumigations has been cut - not completely, but significantly - by the U.S. Congress, and Colombia simply doesn't have the resources to continue fumigating at the same level. So, after 6 years of singing fumigation's praises as long as the money and support for them kept flowing in, the Uribe administration is (rather pathetically, in my opinion) changing its tune to make it look like this was all their idea. What, no more money for spraying? Well, guess what, we've decided spraying doesn't work anyway!

But don't be fooled, spraying is still happening at massive levels, poisoning the air and water and destroying peoples' livelihoods. Just in the last few weeks we have heard from leaders in two different regions of northeast Colombia of devastating new waves of fumigation in their regions.

On August 30, for example, the Campesino Association of Arauca reported:

Since Friday, August 24, a new wave of Plan Colombia Fumigations have been advancing over the Araucan fields. The spraying have been accompanied since this week with troop landings, indiscrimanite shootings and the militarization of rural areas of the Arauquita, Fortúl, Saravena and Tame municipalities.

Stay tuned, as more on these developments is on the way...

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