Testimonies of Horror from the War on Drugs - Colombian Aerial Fumigations and Their Effects on Ecuador

Families frightened by warplanes and helicopters flying overhead. Men coming back from their fields with strange rashes and marks on their bodies. Women washing their faces in what was once a clean river, and their skin breaking out. Children suddenly coming down with mysterious stomach ailments, crying because their eyes are severely irritated. Farmers weeping as they watch their crops die, poisoned, their livelihoods destroyed.

These are some of the things we hear and images we see in the video we present here today. It is a compilation of some of the testimonies gathered by the International Verification Mission that traveled to the Ecuador-Colombia border this June, and comes to us thanks to our friend Adolfo Maldonado and his colleagues at the Ecuadorian organization Acción Ecologica, as well as the producers at Accion Creativa; both groups members of the Inter-Institutional Committee Against Fumigations.

The mission went to look into the continuing claims of Ecuadorian peasant farmers that the fumigation programs just across the border, in which the Colombian army, with vast financial and logistical support from the U.S. government, dumps untold thousands of gallons of powerful herbicides onto the countryside in an attempt to eradicate coca and opium plantations. They also investigated claims that Colombian troops had crossed into Ecuadorian territory while fighting against the guerrilla insurgency, violating Ecuador's avowed neutrality toward the Colombian civil war.

Crop fumigations have caused huge controversy within Colombia, generating countless denunciations that they devastate the rural areas where they are carried out. These denunciations have been controversial, with the Colombian and U.S. governments fiercely denying any danger from the spraying and producing a stream of questionable studies and evidence to support their denials.

The government of Ecuador, which shares a border with some of Colombia's top coca-producing and most violent areas, has repeatedly asked that the Colombians err on the side of caution, and, while the question of the fumigation chemicals’ safety remains in the air, stay at least ten kilometers away from Ecuadorian territory.

According to the eyewitnesses from the Ecuadorian side of the border interviewed in this video, Colombian military aircraft not only approach the border but often cross it. There is no question in the minds of these people that things have changed since the airplanes started spraying poison close to their homes. These are the people whose voices are never heard in drug war debates in Bogota and Washington. Though it may not be clear exactly what is causing some of the health and environmental problems they report, they know intimately these lands and the communities who live there, and understand that something is not right. Listen to what they have to say... and stay tuned, as this is by no means the last thing we will have to report about this in the coming days and weeks...

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http://salonchingon.com/movies/fumiga_hi.mp4