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Green Left Weekly, January 22, 2003.

COLOMBIA: US considers new bioweapon attack

BY JEFFREY ST CLAIR

Hostile intentions toward the people of another country. Deployment of chemical weapons and biological agents. Pursuit of a scorched earth policy. Sound like Saddam's Iraq? Think again. This neatly summarises US President George Bush's administration's depredations in Colombia, all under the shady banner of the war on drugs .

As Bush offers pious homilies on Iraq's possible hoarding of so-called weapons of mass destruction, his administration and its backers are poised to unleash a new wave of toxins in the mountains of Colombia, including a dangerous brew of biological weapons its proponents rather quaintly call mycoherbicides ; opponents have dubbed them Agent Green.

The leading biological warfare hawk in US Congress is Bob Mica, a House Republican from Florida. In mid-December, Mica called on his pals in the Bush administration to uncork a currently banned batch of killer fungi and begin a campaign of saturation spraying of mycoherbicide in Colombia.

Of course, Agent Green also kills everything else it touches. There's not even a pretense to call these biological bomblets smart fungi . Mica's bracing call for an unfettered biological war on Colombia should be jotted down by junior legal eagles with dreams of becoming future prosecutors of war crimes.

But Mica is far from a lone crazed voice. Even the perpetually conflicted US Secretary of State Colin Powell is on record supporting the use of biological agents as a key part of Plan Colombia. Indeed, Anne Peterson, the US ambassador to Bogota, testified recently that she believed bioweapons had already been deployed in Colombia. Soon after, she retracted this chilling observation, saying that it had been made under duress . Peterson didn't say who had applied the thumbscrews.

Then there's Rand Beers, one of the few hold-overs at the state department from Bill Clinton's time. It's easy to see why this bio-war zealot appealed to the Bush crowd. Back in the late '90s, Beers was all for using bioweapons on crops in drug-producing countries. Now, as assistant secretary of state for narcotics, Beers trots across the globe to various international conferences where he invariably is forced to defend this toxic footnote to Plan Colombia against critics who charge that it violates, among other treaties, the Biological Weapons Convention.

Beers often says that the toxic weapons are needed to fight international crime syndicates. This heady bit of sophistry is hardly an exemption from the prohibitions, which, it must be pointed out, the Bush administration doesn't believe in anyway, even though they are trigger-happy to invoke its provisions against enemy states such as Iraq.

Indiscriminate killers

Agent Green is a genetically engineered pathogenic fungi, conjured up by the US Department of Agriculture's experiment station in Beltsville, Maryland. It is now being produced with US funds by Ag/Bio Company, a private lab in Montana and at a former Soviet bioweapons factory in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The labs are brewing up two types of killer fungi, Fusarium Oxysporum (slated for use against marijuana and coca plants) and Pleospora Papveracea (engineered to destroy opium poppies).

The problem is that both fungi are indiscriminate killers, posing threats to human health and to non-target species. Add to this the fact that when sprayed from airplanes and helicopters, Agent Green will be carried by winds and inevitably drift over coffee plantations, fields, farms, villages and water supplies.

Agent Green also threatens the ecology of the Colombian rainforest, one of the most biologically diverse on the planet. These forests harbour a greater variety of species per hectare than any other. But the Colombian forests are already under frightful siege from gold mining and oil companies, logging outfits and cattle ranching.

By one count, Colombia has already lost more than a third of its primary forest and continues to lose forest at a rate of almost 7800 square kilometres a year. It's possible that the Agent Green operation may saturate more than 600,000 hectares of Colombian rainforest, devastating wildlife and plants.

Amazonia could become collateral damage in the Bushites' biowar adventurism.

This grim prospect may place the US squarely in violation of yet another international treaty with which Bush, the former cocaine tooter, is charmingly unacquainted: the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD). ENMOD grew out of the worldwide outrage sparked by the use of Agent Orange and other environmentally malign potions plastered across Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Adopted by the UN in 1976 and signed by the US, ENMOD prohibits any signatory from using the environment as a weapon of war, which the spraying of Colombia constitutes by definition.

The US bio-bomblets will inevitably stray across the border into Ecuador and Peru. Both countries vehemently oppose the US biowar plan and charge that it violates international law. Specifically, they cite a non-proliferation section of the Biological Warfare Convention that prohibits the transfer of bioweapons and technology from one country to another.

If Agent Green is used anywhere, it will legitimise agricultural biowarfare in other contexts , says Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, the anti-biowar group that has done excellent work in exposing the environmental consequences of toxic spraying in Colombia.

Eradication programs are a foolhardy way of addressing problems associated with drug consumption. It doesn't work, it oppresses the weak and merely plays into the pockets of the drug profiteers, from the cocaine generals to the drug cartels and the banks who launder the money.

In much of rural Colombia, there is simply no way to make a legal living , notes Adam Isacson of the Centre for International Policy. Security, roads, credit and access to markets are all missing. The most that many rural Colombians see from their government is the occasional military patrol or spray plane. When the spray planes come, they take away farmers' illegal way of making a living, but they do not replace it with anything. That leaves the farmers with some bad choices. They can move to the cities and try to find a job, though official unemployment is already 20%. They can switch to legal crops and risk paying more for inputs than they can get from the sale price. They can move deeper into the countryside and plant drug crops again. Or they can join the guerrillas or the paramilitaries, who will at least keep them fed.

Billions in US aid dollars and tens of thousands of litres of chemical pesticides have been poured on Colombia without making a dent in coca production. In fact, the flow of drugs from Colombia is increasing at a rapid clip.

Back when the Clinton administration was pushing a somewhat reluctant Congress to approve its multi-billion project dubbed Plan Colombia, none other than Rand Beers swore that the spray and burn tactics would eliminate the majority of Colombia's opium poppy crop within three years . Congress bought Beers' song and dance. As a pre-condition for receiving the money, Congress required Colombia to begin operational testing of bioweapons. Bowing to world pressure, President Clinton waived the requirement.

In the past five years, nearly 600,000 hectares of land in Colombia has been blitzed by pesticides and fumigants, rendering them as sterile as the fields of Carthage after Scipio Africanus' last cruel visit. But over the same period production of cocaine in Colombia has more than tripled. Opium production is also soaring, increasing by more than 60% since 2000. Colombia now accounts for more than 30% of the heroin consumed in the US.

As the book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press has explained, war, especially covert ones, and drugs go hand in hand. >From the beginning, Plan Colombia was really a way to use the drug war to underwrite the Colombian military's savage war against the FARC and other rebel groups and secure US control over Colombian oil, gas and mineral reserves. The so-called eradication programs have targeted areas controlled by the FARC, rather than even larger swaths of land held by paramilitaries who serve as vicious proxy-warriors for the Colombian government.

Since the implementation of Plan Colombia, at least 22 US helicopters have been shot down by Colombian rebels, a figure the Pentagon coyly refuses to confirm or deny.

In December, Powell revealed his intention to increase the permanent fleet of US attack helicopters in Colombia to 24. The State Department informed Congress that new pilots were being trained at a classified location in New Mexico.

Now, it appears that the Bush administration has given Mica the green light to work his dark magic on the reauthorisation of Plan Colombia, inserting language once again requiring the use of Agent Green as a condition of the Colombian government getting its hands on US aid money.

There's plenty of evidence that Colombian government is now totally under the sway of Washington and will be only too happy to oblige, even if that means allowing the US to launch biological warfare attacks on its own peasants.

In a bracing irony, in December Colombia presided over the UN Security Council, which is poised to clobber Iraq over it past bioweapon development. Indeed, it was the Colombian delegation that made the controversial call to hand over an early copy of Iraq's weapons declaration, which the US generously returned a week later, minus 8000 pages.

[From <http://www.counterpunch.org>.]