Germ Warfare in the Andes

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 capsulizes the Bush administration's ongoing depredations in Colombia, all under the shady banner of the war on drugs.

The big difference is that Saddam's hideous use of poison gas against the Kurds and, possibly, against Iran occurred more than 15 years ago. The Bush administration's toxic war on Colombian peasants is happening now, day after day, in gross violation of international law.

Indeed, as Bush offers pious homilies on Iraq's possible hoarding of so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction, his administration and its backers from both parties in Congress are poised to unleash a new wave of toxins in the mountains of Colombia, including a dangerous new brew of biological weapons its proponents rather quaintly call mycoherbicides, but which is more accurately known as Agent Green.

The leading germ-war hawk in Congress these days is Rep. Bob Mica, a 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. "We have to restore our mycoherbicides," Mica fumed. "Things that have been studied for too long need to be put into action. We found that we can not only spray this stuff, but we found that we can also deactivate it for some period of time--it will do a lot of damage--it will eradicate some of these crops for a substantial period of time."

Of course, it also kills everything else it touches. There's not even a pretense to call these germ bomblets "smart fungi." This is the drug war as it might be waged by Dr. Mengele. Mica's bracing call for an unfettered germ war on Colombia should make interesting fodder for a future war crimes trial.

But Mica is far from a lone crazed voice. Colin Powell's State Department 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. Bizarrely, she later retracted this chilling observation, saying that it had been made under duress. Ms. Peterson didn't say who had applied the thumbscrews.

Then there's Rand Beers, one of the few holdovers at the State Department from Clintontime. It's easy to see why he appealed to the Bush crowd. Beers was all for using germ weapons on crops in drug-producing countries back in the late 1990s. 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 it against enemy states such as Iraq.

Agent Green is a genetically engineered pathogenic fungi, conjured up in the US Department of Agriculture's lab in Beltsville, Maryland. It is now being produced with US funds by a private lab in Montana and at a former Soviet bioweapons factory in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. There are two types of killer fungi in development, Fusarium oxysporum (slated for use against marijuana and coca plants) and Pleospora papveracea (engineered to destroy opium poppies). The problem is that both fungi pose severe 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 into non-target areas, including across the Colombian border into Ecuador and Peru.

Both nations 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 germ weapons and technology from one nation to another. Presumably, the Bush administration now considers Colombia a wholly owned colony, where even remote Andean valleys are in the toxic grip of the US empire.

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

"Reasoning in a similar manner as the US, others might prepare a biological attack on the US tobacco crop, which poisons millions worldwide, or those opposed to alcohol might target grapes or hops."

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 generals to the cartels and the banks who launder the money.

"In much of rural Colombia, there is simply no way to make a legal living," says Adam Isacson, of the Center 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 percent.

They can switch to legal crops on their own 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."

Of course, the drug war has little to do with this ghastly program. The truth of this can be divined in the numbers. Billions in US aid and thousands of gallons of chemical pesticides have been poured on Colombia with little 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-dollar 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, approving $1.3 billion dollars. (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 a million acres of land in Colombia has been blitzed and sterilized by pesticides and fumigants. But over the same period production of cocaine in Colombia has more than tripled. Opium production is also soaring, increasing by more than 60 percent since 2000. Colombia now accounts for more than 30 percent of the entire heroin consumed in the US.

The reasons for this will be obvious to anyone who has read Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, which I wrote along with Alexander Cockburn. War (especially covert ones) and drugs go hand in hand. Colombia is mired in a three-way civil war, with each side--guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the government troops--funding their operations from proceeds from the sale of drugs. The bloodier the conflict, the greater the flow of drugs.

But from the beginning Plan Colombia was only ostensibly about drugs. It 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, serving as vicious proxy-warriors for the Colombian government.

According to Rep. Bob Barr, since the implementation of Plan Colombia, at least 22 US helicopters have been shot down by Colombian rebel groups--a figure the Pentagon refuses to confirm or deny. However, the State Department confirmed that last month 3 US planes were struck by ground fire on the same day.

The US presence in the war is being waged under the jurisdictional banner of the State Department, so often in the past a sign of the darker presence of the CIA and other covert warriors. In December, Colin Powell revealed his intention to up 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 Congressman Mica the green light to work his dark magic on the reauthorization of Plan Colombia, where he would insert language once again requiring the use of Agent Green as a condition of the Colombian government getting its hands on billions of US dollars.

There's plenty of evidence that the Colombian government is 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 Colombian peasants.

In a bracing irony, last year Colombia presided over the UN Security Council, which was (and still is) poised to obliterate Iraq for hiding its history of bioweapons development. Indeed, it was the Colombian delegation which made the controversial call to hand over an early copy of Iraq's weapons declaration to the US.

This scandalous project drones on under the radar of the mainstream press, ever loathe to tackle seriously any topic wrapped in the holy robes of the drug war. Yet, what it really adds up to is a form of environmental terrorism. The toxic wasteland and human suffering left in the wake of these operations is not accidental and, not, to use the fetching term of the economists, a mere externality of a benign project. Instead, it is a calculated tactic, designed to evoke fear and terror: the carpet bombing of the drug war.

The toxic warriors in the Bush administration seem to have read Silent Spring not as a global warning but as a war plan, which they are now bent on putting into action.