And let's start an environmental catastrophe while we are at it...
Columbian Fusarium Conundrum: Colombia Accepts/Rejects
(choose one) US Biowar Plan
drcnet.org
On July 6th, the New York Times reported that Colombia had agreed
to a US program to test and potentially deploy the mycoherbicide
fusarium oxysporum (http://www.drcnet.org/wol/136.html#fungus) as
an integral part of the US's $1.3 billion Colombian and Andean
aid package. Last week, the State Department confirmed the Times
report.
But Colombian Environment Minister Juan Mayr, who has the
authority to veto or approve the project, says his government has
no intention of testing or studying fusarium. He told the
Associated Press in a June 15th interview that the State
Department "told lies" when it said Colombia had acquiesced in
the plan.
"We will not accept the introduction of any foreign element,
which is what they have offered us under the name fusarium
oxysporum," Mayr told the AP. "We have told them to forget it."
"I think it makes no sense to permit the entry of an external
biological agent that can have an adverse effect on our
ecosystems," said Mayr. He added that his position was based on
an examination of the plan by government, academic and private
sector researchers in Colombia. He said they rejected the plan
categorically, warning of possible mutations and harm to people,
livestock and the environment.
The plan to use high-flying planes to dump mass quantities of the
mycoherbicides on Colombia's vast coca and opium poppy producing
regions has been pushed by an unholy alliance of Republican
congressional drug warriors, the drug czar's office, the US
Southern Command and self-interested scientists.
Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) even successfully introduced an
amendment requiring the president to certify that Colombia was in
compliance with US directives to implement such a program. In
conference committee, however, that amendment was transformed and
in its current language now calls for the Secretary of State to
report to Congress by early November with details on "the effects
on human health and the safety of herbicides used on illegal
crops with funds from the aid package."
So, just what is going on here? The short answer seems to be
that no one knows. The State Department stands by its position.
The Colombian Embassy has not responded to DRCNet's phone calls
requesting clarification.
"We don't know," Ingrid Vacius, an analyst for the Center for
International Policy (http://www.ciponline.org) told DRCNet.
"We're seeing the same things you're seeing, all the conflicting
information. There's a big controversy, but that's all we know."
That same response was repeated by all of the interested
organizations that DRCNet contacted. Winifred Tate of the
Washington Office on Latin America (http://www.wola.org),
however, provided some suggestions as to what could be behind the
confusion.
"The contradictions between the US and Colombian governments here
reflect a lack of transparency by the US and the fact that the US
government slipped this into the legislation without proper
consultation with their Colombian counterparts," she told DRCNet.
If Tate is correct, US policy-makers' arrogance may prove to be
the undoing of the misbegotten fusarium program. But, as the
battle of the press accounts suggests, the end result is still up
in the air, and US leverage over the Colombians will probably
only increase as the flow of dollars and weapons from Washington
to Colombia quickens.
Still, Rep. Gilman's amendment has mutated from a demand for the
program into a potential obstacle to it. As WOLA's Tate noted,
it may be impossible to certify that the mycoherbicide is safe
and effective. "These are programs that were shut down in the US
for environmental reasons. It seems dubious that there is
sufficient evidence these programs can be carried out safely."
================
7. All the News That Fits: The New York Times and Colombia
drcnet.org
The Times' reporting around efforts by the US to prod Colombia to
accept US plans to research and implement the fusarium scheme is
indicative of the paper's approach. A front-page story on June
6th described US efforts to persuade reluctant Colombian
officials.
"They acknowledged high up in the story that environmentalists
had grave concerns," said media critic Peter Hart, "but then they
spent most of the story pooh-poohing those concerns. They didn't
quote any critics." Hart, an analyst for Fairness and Accuracy
in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive media watchdog group, has
written about the mass media's coverage of Colombia for Extra!,
FAIR's magazine (http://www.fair.org/extra/0005/colombia.html).
The Times article also ignored a host of scientific research and
government studies showing that fusarium is potentially mutagenic
and potentially lethal to people and animals with compromised
immune systems, which can reasonably be expected to be
encountered in war zones. These studies are linked from a May
Mother Jones magazine article on fusarium available online at
<http://www.motherjones.com/news_wire/coca.html>.
In contrast to the Times' mushy coverage, the foreign press
showed a little more spunk. "US Sprays Poison in Drugs War:
Colombia Aid Includes Plan to Target Coca Fields With Herbicide
Which Kills Other Crops and Threatens Humans," was how the
Observer (London) headlined its article on the subject.
What now appears to be the Times' wishful thinking in its
premature report that the Colombians had approved research on
fusarium is not the only or even the latest example of the
paper's odd reporting on Colombia. Just last week, the newspaper
of record gave front-page play to a devastating investigation of
the massacre of at least 36 people, and possibly as many as 71,
by rightist paramilitaries in the small town of El Salado in
Uriba province.
The paramilitaries are widely and indisputably linked to the
Colombian military and are almost universally held responsible
for the vast majority of human rights violations in Colombia.
These "self-defense units" originated as landowners' death squads
who terrorized peasants involved in that nation's endemic
conflicts over land tenure. As Colombian traffickers invested
their profits in agricultural landholdings, the paramilitaries
morphed into increasingly important players in the cocaine trade.
Now some 5,000 strong, the paramilitaries are the de facto shock
troops in the Colombian government's war against peasant-based
guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers.
Over a three-day period, the Times' Larry Rohter reported, the
paramilitaries terrorized and butchered El Salado's inhabitants
in an alcohol-fueled orgy of rape, looting, and violence. Nearby
Colombian military units not only refused to go to the aid of the
town, they blocked humanitarian relief workers from the scene
while the paramilitaries did the army's dirty work.
Rohter also detailed some of the longstanding pattern of
cooperation and connections between the army and the
paramilitaries, noting that the paramilitaries are responsible
for the preponderance of human rights violations in Colombia.
Rohter also added the telling comment that in Colombia the
massacre attracted little attention since it was only one among
many.
All in all, a fine piece of reporting -- except that the massacre
occurred in February and the article, which would presumably have
had an impact on the long-running Congressional debates over aid
to Colombia, didn't see the light of day until safely after the
votes were cast.
"This is exactly the kind of reporting that would have informed
the voting in Congress. There is no reason for it not to have
been reported before now. Amnesty International had already
released a report on the massacre," Hart told DRCNet.
Indeed, several investigations of the massacre have been underway
for months in Colombia, and US Colombia watchers have been making
legislators aware of the massacre since the spring. Winifred
Tate of the Washington Office on Latin America implicitly
demonstrated the impact and political import of what the Times
chooses to cover and when.
"Some of the Senators who are most outraged by the Times report,
we talked to them about the massacre back in March," she told
DRCNet, "but you didn't see any of that reflected in the debate."
In general, the Times' record on Colombia "is erratic," FAIR's
Hart charitably commented. "When it is good reporting, like this
Rohter piece, it is often way after the fact and far away from
any real impact it might have had."
"The Times' coverage of the debate over military aid to Colombia
was worse, in the sense of the questions it failed to ask," Hart
added. "There were very few questions about exactly where the
money was going, although Tim Weiner did a good piece on the
helicopters and campaign contributions. Still, a lot of the
reporting was White House shorthand."
One example that Hart pointed to in his article was the Times'
March 10th characterization of the administration aid package.
The Times call it an attempt "to shore up Colombia's tottering
democracy and enable its military to step up its war on narcotics
traffickers," a virtual paraphrase of the administration line.
(The Times wasn't the only major paper playing the White House
handout game. A particularly blatant offender was the Washington
Post, which in the run-up to the Senate vote ran a shrill article
titled, "Anti-Drug Effort Stalls in Colombia." The article cited
variations on "administration officials" and "official sources"
15 times, a Senate staffer once, and quoted no critics of the
broader contours of the aid package.)
As for coverage of the paramilitaries, the Times' Rohter seemed
to be in the damage control mode in a March 12th story about
paramilitary leader Carlos Castano's nationally broadcast TV
interview on Colombia's Caracol network. In that interview,
Castano admitted that "drug trafficking and drug traffickers
probably finance 70%" of his organization's operations.
Other news outlets, notably Reuters, hit the story hard. The
lead in the Reuters piece was: "The leaders of Colombia's right-
wing paramilitary death squads has publicly admitted the drug
trade finances most of the bloodletting committed by his ruthless
militia force."
Rohter and the Times, however, avoided mentioning the drug
connection altogether and instead played the story as one of a
leader who bravely submitted to a TV "grilling" in order to
refurbish his image. The Times' seemed more interested in the
opinions of a waitress and a magazine columnist who thought
Castano had undergone a "surprising metamorphosis."
"Rohter missed that crucial aspect of the Castano story," said
FAIR's Hart. "There is an important distinction to be made
between the paramilitaries and the guerrillas," he said. "The
guerrillas tax coca growers just like they tax other landowners
in areas they control, but the paramilitaries are admittedly
deeply involved in trafficking."
Which leads to one last example of the Time's erratic reporting.
The term "narcoguerrilla" has been widely and unfairly bandied
about to describe the leftist rebels. The Times' deserves credit
for reporting in 1997 that the term originated with the Colombian
military, which used it to blur the distinction between
counternarcotics and counterinsurgency efforts. (It was also a
term of political art for Reaganite anti-communist drug
warriors.) But since then, the Times has used the phrase
repeatedly without explaining its derivations or its polemical
purposes.
"This is one of the things that leads me to describe their
coverage as erratic, " said Hart. That the term is a piece of
propaganda is something that "should be repeated and repeated."
"We should get our terms straight and facts correct, but the
Times didn't choose to recycle that fact," he added. "If they
would keep hitting those points, it's possible, given the
national import of the New York Times, that there would be a
ripple effect across the media." |
