Plan Colombia 'poisons' agrarian reform

The cold, flat white of a Canadian winter starkly contrasts to the heated greens of Colombia's Middle Magdalena Region.

Refugee Sandra Solano, 33, is making the adjustment, however. Her faith, strengthened through her work with peasants in the region, now serves her in Canada. In Colombia, Solano was caught up in the maelstrom that encompasses much of the country's rural population. In the early 1990s, the biologist and rural developer began working north of Bogota, where local paramilitaries, Colombian armed forces, drug barons and guerillas struggle for dominance and profit.

"I had never thought I might be killed," says Solano.

She was wrong. As her work amoung the peasant communities began to yield results, not everyone was pleased. Solano's troubles began when she was working for the World Wildlife Fund.

She was a consultant for the organization, working with Association de Campesinos del Valle de Cimitarra. Members of this group were being certified to harvest lumber for export using good forestry management practices.

"One of the things we had to do to have the forest certification was to make this area a special region," she explains.

Working with Colombia's agriculture ministry and the Agrarian Reform's Colombian Institute, she helped save 500,000 hectares of forest, which were declared a reserve under Colombian law in late 2002.

However, Solano suspects news of her activities reached the office of President Alvaro Uribe in Bogota. Uribe's friends, she says, were not pleased with the reserve designation. Her name was quickly placed on a local paramilitary's list.

Before, Solano could move throughout the region with impunity, as long as she informed the paramilitary or the guerrilla fighters of her intent. No longer. "My coworkers and my boss told me I could not come back--and I had seen before people who were killed," she says.

For a time, Solano continued working in the lawless areas of her country, accompanied by volunteers with the Toronto and Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams. They eventually advised her to seek refugee status at the Canadian consulate. Solano spent many long weeks in hiding, afraid to leave her apartment in the region's largest city, Barrancabermeja, before being allowed residency in Canada as a political refugee. Today, from the relative safety of Southwestern Ontario, Solano reflects on her country's turmoil.

The line is blurred between the paramilitaries and Colombia's official army, she maintains. Colombia's government controls the large urban centers of the country, while remote rural areas generally fall under the jurisdiction of The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)--the guerrillas. Complicating the situation is the trade in drugs, cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Drug money helps fund FARC, which taxes the traffickers in areas of their control, it is widely reported. It allegedly bolsters some political campaigns of the country's two main parties.

Peasants who grow coca (a plant used in cocaine production) or other illicit crops face a dilemma. While most disapprove of the drug trade, the illicit crops may deliver enough income to help meet their simple needs, according to Solano.

Plan Colombia

The situation has been further aggravated by "Plan Colombia," an U.S.-funded initiative carried out by the Colombian government. Part of that plan involves the widespread fumigation of coca. Unfortunately, the deadly rain of glyphosate--the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup--falls on coca, food crops, livestock, and people alike.

"The coca crops do not suffer much damage, even though some plants are burned. The land where food crops are cultivated will take three to five years to recover."

Solano witnessed fumigation operations from a distance: the planes fly accompanied by Army helicopters on either side, with machine guns pointed earthward. Everything is sprayed. Typically, small plots of coca are interspersed with corn, rice, vegetables, sesame, cocoa, sugarcane and other legitimate crops. Solano claims that after a few days, livestock and fish sicken and eventually die from ingesting poisoned grass and water. There have also been reports of children dying from similar exposure.

According. to biologist Dr. Elsa Nivia, the Colombia regional coordinator for the Pesticide Action Network, the herbicide used in the coca eradication program has a 26 per cent glyphosate concentration--compared to the one per cent concentration typically used by North American farmers. The surfactant used to increase the adhesiveness of herbicides, may be even more poisonous, or increase the toxicity of glyphosate.

As Solano sees it, Plan Colombia is simply a farce. Like the reported detentions, torture, assassinations and massacres in her country, it's another way to push the peasants from the land.

Ironically, Colombia's drug trafficking barons stand to benefit from the fumigation program. Since the Middle Magdalena Region was linked to Bogota with a modern highway in the 1980s, small landowners have been pressured to sell their land at low prices, so that large cattle operations could be established, Solano alleges. By investing in beef, the drug traffickers can launder their illegitimate gains.

Big drugs

In addition, she says the big drug laboratories have been left largely untouched by Plan Colombia, which has failed to significantly curb the export of drugs to North America.

According to the Centre for International Policy, a non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C., the funding of eradication and interdiction programs has grown from a few million dollars in the early 1970s to billions annually. Meanwhile, the street price of a pure gram of cocaine has dropped from $1,400 to less than $200. And the price of heroin has plummeted from about $4,000 to a few hundred dollars.

A better approach, Solano says, would be to work toward agrarian reform in her country.

"The government's complacency is evident in the merging of the interests of the multinationals, drug traffickers, and agribusinesses. Their ambitious plans to wipe out the peasant economy have put the country's food security at risk, ruining 10 million peasant producers," she alleges.

"The situation reflects the inability of the ruling classes of Colombia to accept that the solution to the problems generated by the cultivation of illicit crops, is the implementation of real, integral agrarian reform."

That kind of change, unfortunately, does not come easily in Colombia. The rich fear the loss of their privileged positions. Even when the democratic system is compromised, the status quo is consequently protected. The poor, Solano says, fear the terror of the paramilitaries and struggle for their daily existence. While peasant families sometimes own relatively large tracts of land, as they do in the Middle Magdalena Region, there's little access to capital and no government subsidies.

Despite her country's dilemma, hope hasn't diminished in Solano's heart.

"I am Catholic, but I have never felt, interpreted or understood God's designs and signs until I worked in the Middle Magdalena. I didn't know real poverty and suffering until I worked with the peasant communities," she says.

"When I understood the peasants' struggle, I began to understand Christ's struggle, because they have struggled for a better world with peace ... They don't lose faith, they don't fall into temptation and they don't abandon their struggle in the same way that Jesus Christ did."

Solano, who left a fiance and family back in Colombia, hopes there will be a change in the country's political climate, allowing her to return someday.

Meanwhile, she dreams of furthering her education in Canada--perhaps earning a doctorate--and is looking for work in her field.

Jeff Carter is a freelance writer from Dresden, Ont.

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