Pubdate: Mon, 01 May 2000 Source: Register-Guard, The (OR) Copyright: 2000 The Register-Guard Contact: PO Box 10188, Eugene, OR 97440-2188 Website: http://www.registerguard.com/ Author: Larry Rohter, The New York times DRUG WAR BLAMED FOR HURTING VILLAGERS RIOBLANCO DE SOTARA, Colombia - The children and their teachers were in the schoolyard, they say, playing soccer and basketball and waiting for classes to begin when the crop-duster appeared. At first they waved, but as the plane drew closer and a gray mist began to stream from its wings, alarmed teachers rushed the pupils to their classrooms. Over the next two weeks, a fleet of counternarcotics planes taking part in a U.S.-sponsored program to eradicate heroin poppy cultivation returned repeatedly, residents charge, spraying buildings and fields that were not supposed to be targets, damaging residents' health and crops. ``The pilot was flying low, so there is no way he could not have seen those children,'' said Nidia Majin, principal of the La Floresta elementary school, whose 70 pupils were sprayed that Monday in June. ``I sent them home. But they had to cross fields and streams that had also been contaminated, so some of them got sick.'' In fact, say leaders of this remote Yanacona Indian village high in the Andes, dozens of other residents became ill, complaining of nausea, dizziness, vomiting, rashes, blurred vision. They say the spraying also damaged crops, undermining government efforts to support residents who have abandoned poppy growing. Such incidents are not limited to this village of 5,000, say critics in Colombia and the United States, but have occurred in many parts of Colombia and are bound to increase if the fumigation program is intensified, as the Clinton administration is proposing as part of a $1.6 billion emergency aid package to Colombia. ``The fumigation was done in an indiscriminate and irresponsible manner, and it did not achieve its objective,'' said Ivan Alberto Chicangana, who was the mayor when the spraying occurred. ``The damage done to the physical and economic well-being of this community has been serious,'' he said, ``and is going to be very difficult for us to overcome.'' He and other local leaders say that people were sick for several weeks. A few residents complained of lasting symptoms. Three fish farms with more than 25,000 rainbow trout were destroyed, residents said, and numerous farm animals, mostly chickens and guinea pigs, died, while others, including some cows and horses, fell ill. In addition, fields of beans, onions, garlic, potatoes, corn and other traditional crops were sprayed, leaving plants to wither and die. As a result, community leaders say, crop-substitution projects sponsored by the Colombian government have been hopelessly damaged and their participants left impoverished. The spraying around this particular village has since stopped, residents say, though it continues elsewhere in Colombia. Peasants in the coca-growing region of Caqueta, southeast of here, last year complained to the media that spray planes had devastated the crops they had planted after abandoning coca. Similar reports have emerged from Guaviare, another province to the east. Indeed, U.S.-financed aerial spraying campaigns like the one here have been the principal means by which the Colombian government has sought to reduce coca and opium-poppy cultivation for nearly a decade. The Colombian government fleet has grown to include 65 airplanes and helicopters, which fly every day, weather permitting. Yet despite such efforts, which have been backed by more than $150 million in U.S. aid, cocaine and heroin production in Colombia has more than doubled since 1995. In an effort to reverse that trend and weaken left-wing guerrilla and right-wing paramilitary groups that are profiting from the drug trade and threatening the country's stability, the Clinton administration is now urging Congress to approve a new aid package, which calls for increased spending on drug eradication as well as a gigantic increase for crop-substitution programs, to $127 million from $5 million. Critics, like Elsa Nivia, director of the Colombian affiliate of the Pesticide Action Network, see the eradication effort as dangerous and misguided. ``Spraying only exacerbates the drug problem by destabilizing communities that are trying to get out of illicit crops and grow legal alternatives.'' And Juan Hugo Torres, an official of Plante, the Colombian government agency supervising crop-substitution efforts, who works with farmers, said, ``You are building trust with people, they have hopes, and then the spraying does away with all of that.'' In Washington, R. Rand Beers, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, denied problems. He said aerial spraying flights are strictly monitored and targets chosen carefully. The fumigation program is designed so that pilots ``shouldn't be anywhere close to alternative development projects,'' he said. ``If that happened, the pilot who flew that mission should be disciplined.'' As for the complaints of illness, the U.S. Embassy official in Bogota who supervises the spraying said that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the pesticide, is ``less toxic than table salt or aspirin.'' He said it was proven to be harmless to humans and called the villagers' account ``scientifically impossible.'' The official said, ``being sprayed on certainly does not make people sick, because it is not toxic to human beings.'' Glyphosate ``does not translocate to water'' and ``leaves no soil residue,'' he added, so ``if they are saying otherwise ... they are lying.'' But in an out-of-court settlement in New York state in 1996, Monsanto, a manufacturer of glyphosate-based herbicides, though not necessarily identical to those used here, including one called Roundup, agreed to withdraw claims that the product is ``safe, nontoxic, harmless or free from risk.'' The company signed a statement agreeing that its ``absolute claims that Roundup `will not wash or leach in the soil' is not accurate'' because glyphosate ``may move through some types of soil under some conditions after application.'' In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has approved glyphosate for most commercial uses. But a 1993 EPA study noted that ``in California, where physicians are required to report pesticide poisonings, glyphosate was ranked third out of the 25 leading causes of illness or injury due to pesticides'' over a five-year period in the 1980s, primarily causing eye and skin irritation. In Rioblanco de Sotara, half a dozen local people say they felt so sick after the spraying that they undertook a 55-mile bus trip to San Jose Hospital in Popayan. There, they were attended by Dr. Nelson Palechor Obando, who said, ``They complained to me of dizziness, nausea and pain in the muscles and joints of their limbs, and some also had skin rashes.'' Once word got out about the illnesses, prices for milk, cheese and other products that are a mainstay of the local economy dropped by more than half. ``The rumors are that the land is contaminated ... the middlemen can now name their own price,'' said Fabian Omen, a farmer and town councilman. - --- MAP posted-by: Greg