With only 1,200 remaining members, the Tule tribe of northwestern Colombia is facing a threat to its survival. In recent months, the tribe has been driven out of its native lands as a result of the Colombian government’s aggressive attack on coca growing. The Tule are not alone. Last month, the New York Times reported that “more than 40 percent of the country’s 84 distinct indigenous groups are now at risk of extinction… because of the pressures of the country’s long running internal armed conflict, which is fueled partly by the cocaine trade.”
The eradication of coca, a plant used both as a traditional stimulant by indigenous groups in the Andes and to manufacture cocaine, has become highly controversial because of its environmental and socioeconomic impact. Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru have seen the large-scale burning, cutting, and chemically fumigating of much of their coca growing regions. The land is devastated, but the demand for coca remains. Planters simply abandon their old plots to move deeper into the forest, where they clear new lands for cultivation. The resulting deforestation, combined with the soil erosion and chemical contamination caused by eradication, make for serious environmental degradation in coca producing zones.
Colombia has seen the most aggressive attacks on coca cultivation, which usually entails fumigation—the aerial spraying of herbicides over coca fields. Colombia is the only country that allows such aerial sprayings, which have been lambasted by environmentalists and human rights activists because its impact on soil, water systems, and human health.
The dangers to health posed by fumigation have been most clearly seen on the Aponte Indian Reservation. According to one report,, eighty percent of the children here fell ill with diarrhea, fever, and infections of the skin and eyes as a result of the spraying in 2000. As Sanho Tree, the director of the Institute for Policy Studies Drug Policy Project, argues:
"The U.S. has supplied tens of thousands of gallons of Roundup to the Colombian government for use in aerial fumigation of coca crops. We have been using a fleet of crop dusters to dump unprecedented amounts of high-potency glyphosate over hundreds of thousands of acres in one of the most delicate and bio-diverse ecosystems in the world. This futile effort has done little to reduce the availability of cocaine on our streets, but now we are learning that a possible side effect of this campaign could be the unleashing of a Fusarium epidemic in the Amazon basin. The drug war has tried in vain to keep cocaine out of people's noses, but could result instead in scorching the lungs of the earth."
Aerial fumigation of coca has been highly contentious in Colombia. The Superior Administrative Court of the Colombian department of Cundinamarca ordered the end of of the practice in 2003, as part a series of mandates to protect the environment and public health. The court’s decision to stop fumigation, however, was quickly overruled by the Colombian State Council, the country’s highest administrative authority, perhaps with a strong monetary incentive in mind: the United States to eradicate coca cultivation. US has provided Colombia with almost US $6 billion in aid over the last decade, mostly through Plan Colombia (aimed both at curbing drug smuggling and quashing left wing insurgencies).
In 2003, 60 percent of the world’s cocaine came from Colombia. Many believed that coca the eradication program in Colombia would lead to higher production in Peru and Bolivia. But in 2005, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy reported that the total area dedicated to coca production had remained unchanged. The Washington Office on Latin America, which studies the effects of US foreign policy in Latin America, attributed the seeming puzzle to the so-called balloon effect: aggressive spraying simply led to increased cultivation in other parts of the country.
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