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CounterPunch
December
24, 2002
The
Drug War According to Dr. Mengele
Agent Green Over the Andes
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Hostile intentions toward the people of another
country. Deployment of chemical weapons and biological agents.
Pursuit of a scorched earth policy. Sound like Saddam's Iraq?
Think again. This neatly capsulizes the Bush administration's
ongoing depredations in Colombia, all under the shady banner
of the war on drugs.
The big difference is that Saddam's hideous
use of poison gas against the Kurds and, most likely, against
Iran occurred more than 15 years ago. Since the Gulf War, Saddam's
mad pursuits have been more on the order of chemistry experiments
in bombed out basements. But the Bush administration's toxic
war on Colombian peasants is happening now, day after day, in
flippant violation of international law.
Indeed, as Bush offers pious homilies
on Iraq's possible hoarding of so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction,
his administration and its backers from both parties in congress
are poised to unleash a new wave toxins in the mountains of Colombia,
including a dangerous brew of biological weapons its proponents
rather quaintly call mycoherbicides. Let us call it: Agent Green.
The leading germ war hawk in the congress
these days is Rep. Bob Mica, a Republican from Florida. In mid-December,
Mica called on his pals in the Bush administration to uncork
a currently banned batch of killer fungi and begin a campaign
of saturation spraying. "We have to restore our mycoherbicide,"
Mica fumed. "Things that have been studied for too long
need to be put into action. We found that we can not only spray
this stuff, but we found that we can also deactivate it for some
period of time-it will do a lot of damage-it will eradicate some
of these crops for a substantial period of time."
Of course, Agent Green also kills everything
else it touches. There's not even a pretense to call these germ
bomblets "smart fungi." This is the drug war as it
might be waged by Dr. Mengele. Mica's bracing call for an unfettered
germ war on Colombia should jotted down by junior legal eagles
with dreams of becoming future prosecutors of war crimes.
But Mica is far from a lone crazed voice.
Even the perpetually conflicted Colin Powell is on record supporting
the use of biological agents as a key part of Plan Colombia.
Indeed, Anne Peterson, the US ambassador to Bogota, testified
recently that she believed bio-weapons had already been deployed
in Colombia. Bizarrely, she later retracted this chilling observation,
saying that it had been made under duress. Ms. Peterson didn't
say who had applied the thumbscrews.
Then there's Rand Beers, one of the few
holdovers at the State Department from Clintontime. It's easy
to see why this biowar zealot appealed to the Bush crowd. Back
in the late 90s, Beers was all for using germ weapons on crops
in drug-producing countries. Now, as Assistant Secretary of State
for narcotics, Beers trots across the globe to various international
conferences where he invariably is forced to defend this toxic
footnote to Plan Colombia against critics who charge that it
violates, among other treaties, the Biological Weapons Convention.
Beers often says that the toxic weapons are needed to fight international
crime syndicates. This heady bit of sophistry is hardly an exemption
from the prohibitions, which, it must be pointed out, the Bush
administration doesn't believe in anyway, even though they are
trigger-happy to invoke its provisions against enemy states,
such as Iraq.
So, as in Macbeth, sin plucks on sin.
Agent Green is a genetically engineered
pathogenic fungi, conjured up by the US Department of Agriculture's
experiment station in Beltsville, Maryland. It is now being produced
with US funds by Ag/Bio Company, a private lab in Bozeman, Montana
and at a former Soviet bioweapons factory in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
The labs are brewing up two types of killer fungi, Fusarium oxysporum
(slated for use against marijuana and coca plants) and Pleospora
papveracea (engineered to destroy opium poppies).
The problem is that both fungi are indiscriminate
killers, posing threats to human health and to non-target species.
Add to this the fact that when sprayed from airplanes and helicopters,
Agent Green will be carried by winds and inevitably drift over
coffee plantations, fields, farms, villages, and water supplies.
Agent Green also threatens the ecology
of the Colombian rainforest, one of the most biologically diverse
on the planet. These forests harbor a greater variety of species
per acre than any country's. But the Colombian forests are already
under frightful siege from gold mining, oil companies, logging
outfits and cattle ranching. By one count, Colombia has already
lost more than a third of its primary forest and continues to
lose forest at a rate of 3000 square miles (or nearly 2 million
acres) a year. It's possible that the Agent Green operation may
saturate more than a million acres of Colombian rainforest, with
potentially devastating ecological consequences for endemic wildlife
and plants.
So it's likely that Amazonia could become
collateral damage in the Bushites' bio-war adventurism.
This grim prospect may place the US in
squarely in violation of yet another international treaty with
which Bush, the former cocaine tooter, is charmingly unacquainted:
the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile
Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD). ENMOD grew
out of the worldwide outrage sparked by the use of Agent Orange
and other environmentally malign potions plastered across Southeast
Asian during the Vietnam war. Adopted by the UN in 1976 and signed
by the US, ENMOD prohibits any signatory nation from using the
environment as a weapon of war, which the spraying of Colombia
constitutes by definition.
The US bio-bomblets can't even be made
to stay in Colombia, but, like the pesticides and fumigants already
dropped, will inevitably stray across the Colombian border into
Ecuador and Peru. Both nations vehemently oppose the US biowar
plan and charge that it violates international law. Specifically,
they cite a non-proliferation section of the Biological Warfare
Convention that prohibits the transfer of germ weapons and technology
from one nation to another. Presumably, the Bush administration
now considers Colombia a wholly owned colony, where even remote
Andean valleys are in the toxic grip of the US empire.
"If Agent Green is used anywhere,
it will legitimize agricultural biowarfare in other contexts,"
says Edward Hammond, director of The
Sunshine Project, the anti-biowar group that has done
excellent work in exposing the environmental consequences of
toxic spraying in Colombia. "Reasoning in a similar manner
as the US, others might prepare a biological attack on the US
tobacco crop, which poisons millions worldwide, or those opposed
to alcohol might target grapes or hops."
Eradication programs are a foolhardy
way of addressing problems associated with drug consumption.
It doesn't work, it oppresses the weak, and merely plays into
the pockets of the drug profiteers, from the cocaine generals
to the drug cartels and the banks who launder the money.
"In much of rural Colombia, there
is simply no way to make a legal living," says Adam Isacson,
of the Center for International Policy. "Security, roads,
credit, and access to markets are all missing. The most that
many rural Colombians see from their government is the occasional
military patrol or spray plane. When the spray planes come, they
take away farmers' illegal way of making a living, but they do
not replace it with anything. That leaves the farmers with some
bad choices. They can move to the cities and try to find a job,
though official unemployment is already 20 percent. They can
switch to legal crops on their own and risk paying more for inputs
than they can get from the sale price. They can move deeper into
the countryside and plant drug crops again. Or they can join
the guerrillas or the paramilitaries, who will at least keep
them fed."
Of course, the drug war has little do
with the real motives of this ghastly program. The truth of this
can be divined in the numbers. Billions in US aid and thousands
of gallons of chemical pesticides have been poured on Colombia
with little dent in coca production. In fact, the flow of drugs
from Colombia is increasing at a rapid clip.
Back when the Clinton administration
was pushing a somewhat reluctant congress to approve its multi-billion
project dubbed Plan Colombia, none other than Rand Beers swore
that the spray and burn tactics would "eliminate the majority
of Colombia's opium poppy crop within three years." Congress
bought Beers' song and dance, approving $1.3 billion dollars.
(As a pre-condition for receiving the money, Congress required
Colombia to begin operational testing of bioweapons. Bowing to
world pressure, President Clinton waived the requirement.)
In the past five years, nearly a million
acres of land in Colombia has been blitzed by pesticides and
fumigants, rendered as sterile as the fields of Carthage after
Scipio Africanus' last cruel visit. But over the same period
production of cocaine in Colombia has more than tripled. Opium
production is also soaring, increasing by more than 60 percent
since 2000. Colombia now accounts for more than 30 percent of
the heroin consumed in the US.
The reason for this will be obvious to
anyone who has read our book Whiteout:
the CIA, Drugs and the Press. War, especially covert
ones, and drugs go hand in hand. Colombia is mired in a three-way
civil war, with each side, guerillas, paramilitaries and the
government troops, funding their operations from proceeds from
the sale of drugs. The bloodier the conflict, the greater the
flow of drugs.
But from the beginning Plan Colombia
was only ostensibly about drugs. It was really a way to use the
drug war to underwrite the Colombian military's savage war against
the FARC and other rebel groups and secure US control over Colombian
oil, gas and mineral reserves. The so-called eradication programs
have targeted areas controlled by the FARC, rather than even
larger swaths of land held by paramilitaries, serving as vicious
proxy-warriors for the Colombian government.
According to Rep. Bob Barr, since the
implementation of Plan Colombia at least 22 US helicopters have
been shot down by Colombian rebel groups-a figure the Pentagon
coyly refuses to confirm or deny. However, the State Department
confirmed that last month 3 US planes were struck by groundfire
on the same day.
The US presence in the war is being waged
under the jurisdictional banner of the State Department, so often
in the past a sign of the darker presence of the CIA and other
covert warriors. In December, Colin Powell revealed his intention
to up the permanent fleet of US attack helicopters in Colombia
to 24. The State Department informed congress that new pilots
were being trained at "a classified location" in New
Mexico.
Now, it appears that the Bush administration
has given Congressman Mica the greenlight to work his dark magic
on the reauthorization of Plan Colombia, where he would insert
language once again requiring the use of Agent Green as condition
of the Colombia government getting its hands on US billions.
These days they don't even go to the bother of trying to hide
the strings.
There's plenty of evidence that Colombian
government is now totally under the sway of Washington and will
be only too happy to oblige, even if that means allowing the
US to launch biological warfare attacks on its own peasants.
In a bracing irony, Colombia now presides
over the UN Security Council, which is poised to clobber Iraq
for hiding its history of bioweapon development. Indeed, it was
the Colombian delegation that made the controversial call to
hand over an early copy of Iraq's weapons declaration, which
the US generously returned a week later-minus 8,000 pages.
This scandalous project drones on under
the radar of the mainstream press, ever loath to tackle seriously
any topic wrapped in the holy robes of the drug war. Yet, what
it really adds up to is a form of environmental terrorism. The
toxic wasteland and human suffering left in the wake of these
operations is not accidental, not, to use the fetching term of
the economists, a uncomfortable externality of an otherwise benign
project. Instead, it is a calculated tactic, designed to evoke
fear and terror-the carpetbombing of the drug war.
Don't say the toxic warriors in the Bush
administration aren't bibliophiles. Obviously they've read Silent
Spring. Only not as the stark warning Rachel Carson intended,
but as a war plan which they are now bent on putting into global
action.
Jeffrey St. Clair can be reached at: stclair@counterpunch.org.
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