(13 Mar 2001) Spanish/Eng/Nat
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Four governors from coca-growing areas of Colombia criticized the U-S-backed drug war on Tuesday, denouncing the effort for increasing the violence, uprooting peasants and causing environmental damage.
Governor Ivan Gerardo Guerrero, of the Putumayo province, called for approval of a "social pact" under which, with government help, coca farmers would be able to farm and market alternate crops.
Guerrero was particularly critical of pesticide spraying targeted at coca, the plant used to produce cocaine.
He said a census shows that about half of the 75,000 acres sprayed were planted with basic food crops.
Joining Guerrero at the news conference were governors from Tolima, Cauca and Narino provinces, and all agreed with Guerrero that the U.S.-Colombian counternarcotics effort must undergo drastic revisions.
Criticism of the program has escalated since the Colombian Army waged an extensive December-February campaign to spray herbicides over tens of thousands of acres in several southern Colombian provinces.
State Department officials have defended the program, saying the defoliant used in Colombia is safe and effective despite allegations that it wipes out legal as well as illegal crops.
William Brownfield, a senior State Department official, has acknowledged that some legal crops may have been destroyed by the pesticide, which contains a powerful chemical called glyphosate.
But he said legal crops may have been interspersed with coca plants.
Brownfield also rejected arguments that the pesticide harms people as well as animals – criticisms repeated on Tuesday by the governors.
Brownfield and several other officials were speaking at a news briefing set up to explain all aspects of the U.S.-backed effort to curb narcotrafficking.
Critics see the U-S operation as a veiled attempt to intervene militarily in the country’s 3 decade long civil war which has claimed thousands of lives.
SOUNDBITE (Spanish)
"We condemn and reject the military component, the fumigation process of Plan Colombia."
SUPERCAPTION: Floro Alberto Tunubala Paja, Governor of the Province of Cauca
SOUNDBITE:(Spanish)
"Fumigation eliminated the small licit economy cultivations which existed in three municipalities, they are: San Miguel, Valle de Guamas and Orito."
SUPER CAPTION: Ivan Gerardo Guerrero, Governor of the Province of Putumayo
SOUNDBITE (Spanish)
"The results are visible. The extensions of cultivations of coca and amapola poppy instead of diminishing, have grown."
SUPER CAPTION: Parmenio Cuellar, Governor of the Province of Narino
SOUNDBITE: (Spanish)
"It is therefore understandable that the investment made by the United States, prinicipally, in the military area equals to throwing logs in the fire."
SUPER CAPTION: Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo Martinez, Governor of the Province of Tolima
SOUNDBITE: (English)
"If a campesino peasant plants a row of coca and then a row of a legal crop and then a row of coca and a row of a legal crop and so on ad infinitum he is presumably doing it, one, in full knowledge of what he is doing, and two, to protect the illegal crop by one of two means, either by concealing it or by forcing the government authority to have to decide whether to destroy the legal crop along with the illegal crop. In those sorts of situations, or in similar situations where you have an illegal field surrounding by a legal field the answer is yes, it is quite possible that legal crops have been sprayed at the same time as illegal crops."
SUPER CAPTION: William Brownfield, senior State Department official
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