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(...and we need to find out who exactly in Big Chem/Pharma and Big Ag are profiting from the tens of millions of U.S. tax dollars to poison small peasant farms, their people, animals and crops.) (Aha! The answer was not hard to find. See below this article.) ------ Why Ecuador and South America despise the USA's "War on Drugs
(NaturalNews) The U.S. "War on Drugs" is despised by almost everyone except for those who benefit from it (the DEA, prison corporations, paramilitary contractors, etc.). In South America, the War on Drugs is especially disliked for many good reasons, but to understand those reasons, you first have to grasp the importance of the coca plant and its history throughout South America.
The coca plant is a cultural treasure of South America. Used in both indigenous medicine and cultural rituals, coca is a plant with an abundance of healing and nutritional qualities. As a significant portion of the South American population (in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, etc.) lives at high elevation, use of the coca plant for enhanced stamina and endurance has played a vital role throughout the history of the South American people.
Many North Americans think that coca has only one use: To be refined into a potent narcotic known as cocaine, but in fact this is not an indigenous use of the plant -- that is an abuse of the gifts this plant has to offer. The isolation, extraction and potency magnification of the original plant alkaloids to the point of toxicity is not the way this plant has been traditionally used throughout South American history.
Coca tea is very much a part of the culture, and it's coca tea that will keep you alive and conscious when you're scaling a mountain at 14,000 feet and feel like you're going to lose consciousness. I've been on numerous hikes through Ecuador and Peru that would have been impossible without the medicinal support of locally grown coca tea.
Coca tea is much like green tea: It's made from whole plant leaves, it has a green taste, and it's highly medicinal. Unlike cocaine, coca tea isn't addictive and is perfectly safe to consume. As a medicinal tea, it's also perfectly legal virtually everywhere in the Americas except for the United States -- a country with a bizarre fascination for throwing people in prison for smoking, drinking or just carrying unrefined herbs plucked right from the earth.
The United Nations has also been on a mission to eradicate the coca plant from the planet. As Wikipedia explains: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_plant)
The prohibition of the use of the coca leaf except for medical or scientific purposes was established by the United Nations in the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. The coca leaf is listed on Schedule I of the 1961 Single Convention together with cocaine and heroin. The Convention determined that "The Parties shall so far as possible enforce the uprooting of all coca bushes which grow wild. They shall destroy the coca bushes if illegally cultivated" (Article 26), and that, "Coca leaf chewing must be abolished within twenty-five years from the coming into force of this Convention" (Article 49, 2.e).
This is much the same way that the Spanish conquistadors systematically wiped out the planting and harvesting of quinoa, outlawing it and arresting or killing anyone caught planting it. Western European imperialists have always pursued efforts to destroy the native plants used by Central and South American cultures.
Dropping chemicals on family farms
As is typical of U.S. interventionist policies, the United States has spent many hundreds of millions of dollars (and many years) financing aerial drug raids against coca farms located in Colombia. This involves the spraying of highly toxic chemicals directly onto family farms, homes and even small children who happen to be present at the time of the spraying. Although much of this spraying is "officially" limited only to farms in Colombia, borders have been crossed and a significant portion of the poison has landed on family farms in Northern Ecuador (http://www.corpwatch.org/article.ph...). (You need to register for free to read the rest of the article.) -------------------------- ECUADOR: Farmers Fight DynCorp's Chemwar on the Amazon
by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch
February 27th, 2002
"Imagine that scene for a moment -- you are an Ecuadorian farmer, and suddenly, without notice or warning, a large helicopter approaches, and the frightening noise of the chopper blades invades the quiet. The helicopter comes closer, and sprays a toxic poison on you, your children, your livestock and your food crops. You see your children get sick, your crops die." These are the words of Bishop Jesse de Witt, president of the International Labor Rights Fund, in a letter to Paul V. Lombardi, CEO of DynCorp.
DeWitt's organization has filed suit in US federal court on behalf of 10,000 Ecuadoran peasant farmers and Amazonian Indians charging Lombardi's company with torture, infanticide and wrongful death for its role in the aerial spraying of highly toxic pesticides in the Amazonian jungle, along the border of Ecuador and Colombia. DynCorp's chances of squirming out the suit were dealt a crushing blow in January when federal judge Richard Roberts denied the company's motion to dismiss the case on grounds that their work in Colombia involved matters of national security.
DynCorp, the Reston, Virginia-based defense contractor, is rapidly acquiring a reputation for global villainy and malfeasance
DynCorp, the Reston, Virginia-based all-purpose defense contractor, is rapidly acquiring the kind of reputation for global villainy and malfeasance that used to be Bechtel's calling card in the 60s and 70s. As we reported a few weeks ago, DynCorp has been hit with a RICO suit by a former employee alleging that the company fired him after he reported improprieties by company supervisors in Bosnia to the Army CID. According to the lawsuit, those improprieties included "coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased."
The very origins of the company are somewhat murky. President Harry Truman established DynCorp shortly after the end of World War II, supposedly to provide jobs for veterans and to market surplus military equipment. Certainly, DynCorp has never severed its umbilical relationship to the federal government. The billion-dollar company enjoys contracts with the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, EPA, IRS and DEA. It trains "police forces" in some of the US's most brutal client states, including El Salvador, Panama, Haiti and Bosnia. Many of its top employees were recruited from the Pentagon, the CIA or and State Department. Indeed theories are rife across Latin America, in particular, that DynCorp has always functioned as a cut-out for Pentagon and CIA covert operations.(SNIP) Under Plan Colombia, DynCorp was awarded a $600 million contract to fumigate coca fields across Colombia. As of January of this year, the corporation's crop dusters had sprayed more than 14 percent of the entire land area of Colombia.
The suit brought on behalf of the Ecuadoran farmers and tribes is based on an investigation by Accin Ecolgica of pesticide drift from DynCorp's Colombian spraying operations. The study found that DynCorp had been using a souped-up version of Monsanto's Round-Up herbicide, called Round-Up Ultra. The effects of Round-Up Ultra are not that much different from Agent Orange, the defoliant used to such malign effect by the US in Southeast Asia. It is an indiscriminate killer, poisoning not only cocoa fields by vegetable crops, wildlife, forests, waterways and people.
"These fumigations are contaminating the Amazon, destroying the forest and killing our people," says Emperatriz Cahuache, president of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon.
The primary toxin in Round-Up is glyphosate. Both the State Department and DynCorp have said that this is a relatively harmless concoction. But Monsanto itself warns that it should not be used near humans or water sources. But the toxic punch of the herbicides that DynCorp has been using has been amplified by the addition of surfactants. These additives increase the plant killing power of the fumigations and also its lethality to humans.
"These fumigations are contaminating the Amazon, destroying the forest and killing our people."
-- Emperatriz Cahuache, Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon
The Accion Ecolgica study uncovered significant pesticide drift in the Sucumbos region of Ecuador, a patchwork of Amazonian forests and villages populated by the Quechua subsistence farmers. It concluded that the spraying had caused "harm to the health and crops of 100 percent of the population within five kilometers of the border with Colombia." More than 1,100 cases of illness have been documented, including the deaths of at least two children.
Again DynCorp and the State Department appear to have flouted Monsanto's own guidelines. In order to minimize pesticide drift, Monsanto advises that aerial spraying not be done any higher than three meters from the tops of the tallest plants. But in Colombia, DynCorp's planes routinely fly as high as 15 meters above the vegetation, greatly expanding the drift of the poison.(MORE) http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1988-------------------------------------------- As with marijuana, the outlawing of the simple coca leaf--a highly nutritious tea and an essential herb for survival in the high altitudes of the Andes, and an indigenous medicine for thousands of years--criminalizes much bigger swaths of populations, including every small farmer who grows a few coca leaves for local use, and anybody who possesses or trades in this beneficial plant. Thus, Dyncorp, and the Colombian military and its death squads, can "cleanse" vast areas of Colombia of the traditional farmers who have lived their for many generations, so the land can be used by the big protected drug lords with ties to the Colombian government and military, by Monsanto, Chiquita and other global corporate predators, and to prepare for the Pentagon's war against Venezuela and Ecuador (to corral all that oil for its humungous war machine). There are some three million displaced small farmers in Colombia, tens of thousands of whom have fled over the borders into Venezuela and Ecuador--creating a refugee crisis for those governments. The displacements are from those fleeing the toxic pesticide spraying, and the Colombian military and closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads, who have killed and terrorized peasant farmers all over Colombia. U.S. taxpayers are being extorted for $6 BILLION in military aid to Colombia, to pay for these horrors. |
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