Editorial: Should We Laugh, or Cry?
drcnet.org
David Borden, Executive Director, borden@drcnet.org
It couldn't have been better timed if it were in a movie or TV
show -- as Colombian officials boast to US Senator Wellstone
about the "precise flight lines" and "precise geographical
coordinates" used in their aerial anti-coca spraying program, the
Senator and his delegation are doused with a batch of dangerous
herbicide, glyphosate, dumped from a helicopter flying 200 feet
overhead on a coca spraying mission.
The incident vividly illustrates how laughable are Colombian and
US officials' claims that aerial coca eradication is being done
safely. But should we laugh, or cry?
Pamela Costain, Executive Director of the Resource Center of the
Americas and a member of Wellstone's delegation, wasn't laughing.
"I'm fearful about what they're using, and I really didn't want
to get it on me," she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Omayra Morales didn't laugh either, when the sprayers came to her
small town of Milleflores in southeastern Colombia a few years
before. When Morales heard the low flying airplane approach, she
ran outside to call her children in. "[T]here was no way I could
protect them," she told Robin Lloyd, who recounted the interview
for the winter 1998 issue of the Drug Policy Letter. "As our
houses are made from wood, the poison filters in. It lands on
the water and on the food crops." Her children vomited from the
glyphosate, and later their hair fell out.
Just as incredible, perhaps, are the vigorous denials made by New
Jersey law enforcement officials that their police officers would
ever use race as a basis for highway stops and searches. These
denials, many of them extremely self-righteous in tone, are
replete throughout the 91,000-page New Jersey Racial Profiling
Archive released by the state's Attorney General office last
week. But as we know by now, the archive shows that racial
profiling not only took place, but was widespread, even
encouraged in the name of the war on drugs.
Should we find it laughable that police officials and defenders
would deny and deny such practices, thinking they would never get
caught in the lie? Or should we shake our heads that it took
lawsuits, statistical analyses and nationwide advocacy campaigns
to prove that which any black American has lived and any white
American has seen? Profiling's victims, whose tales of
discrimination and indignity are also replete in the archive,
weren't laughing. They were angry, and we should be too.
It may be that such deceptions are inevitable whenever ideology
converges with politics and money. Laugh or cry, but let the
truth be told and the injustices stopped. |
