http://www.drcnet.org/wol/191.html#plancolombia
. . . Not only international criticism. Pastrana's own environment minister, Juan Mayr, has filed a resolution opening coca-spraying to legal challenge within Colombia. The resolution took the Colombian drug policy office to task for failing to address questions about spraying's environmental impact. "It can be concluded," read the resolution, "that the documents delivered until now by the drug policy office to define an adequate environmental management plan for the spraying of illicit crops…have not responded to the scope and objectives requested in repeated occasions by this Ministry."
In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Mayr said that any Colombian citizen could theoretically use the resolution to sue the drug policy office to stop spraying. It would be up to a judge, he said, to decide if the resolution formed a proper basis for such a lawsuit. No such lawsuits have been filed as of this week, although the Colombian public interest group Fundepublico and environmental activists are studying such a possibility.
"This is not the end of the fumigation process," former US Ambassador Myles Frechette told the Times, "but it's a real monkey wrench." But it is because of the deaf ear that Frechette and US officials have turned to complaints from peasants about poisoned crops, livestock, and children, that the Colombian government has acted. Frechette characterized peasants' accounts of damage from spraying as "folk tales."
As if this weren't enough for Pastrana and the embattled aerial eradication program, the largest outbreak of anti-spraying civil unrest in recent years broke out last week in Tibu, a town near the Venezuelan border with a strong paramilitary presence. Over the weekend of June 8-11, thousands of coca farmers rioted against aerial fumigation. According to press reports, the protesters, numbering as many as 4,000, burned down a refueling base for US spraying aircraft, along with pesticides stored at the local airstrip and the fire station adjacent, as well as looting businesses in the town itself.
They were protesting a limited spraying campaign that had gotten underway two weeks earlier. "We want fumigation, but not for coca," said protest leader Rafeal Arciniega. "We want it for malaria and for dengue," which plague the region, he added.
One spraying aircraft was hit by ground fire on June 11, local police officials said.
President Pastrana is increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place. Forced aerial eradication infuriates coca growers and other peasants, along with environmentalists domestic and worldwide, and potential European aid donor countries.
But any moves to halt spraying bring US denunciations.
(. . .)
"[M]oving against the drug-producing areas could have the effect of increasing support for the guerrillas among those who stand to lose their livelihood," write Chalk and Rabasa.
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http://www.drcnet.org/wol/191.html#bekaavalley
For hundreds of years, the Bekaa Valley on the Lebanese-Syrian border was known for its luxuriant cannabis crops, most destined to end up as hashish in the pipes of European aesthetes. When Lebanon collapsed into civil war in 1975, the Bekaa's cannabis crop exploded, joined by opium production, and both hash and heroin made their way into the global market. The dope business even trumped politics, with some of that hash and heroin flowing across the borders of invading enemy Israel to supply the denizens of Tel Aviv's nightlife scene.
By 1990, hash was a $500 million per year industry in the Bekaa, according to Dr. Mohammed Ferjani, the Tunisian head of a UN- sponsored rural development program in the valley. He told the San Francisco Guardian that 75,000 acres -- one-third of the valley's arable land -- worth of illicit crops in the valley put roughly $80 million in the hands of farmers each year, with another $400 million generated by associated processing and distribution.
Four years later, it was all gone. With the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, Lebanese and Syrian military forces moved into the lawless Bekaa with a vengeance, burning crops, arresting farmers, and driving the 250,000 person region into deep poverty. Some 25,000 families depended directly on the hash crop. After a hash-free decade, the Gross Domestic Product in the northern Bekaa is $500 per person; the Lebanese national average is $3,500. But by 1994, a UN mission could find no hash production in the valley and a couple of years later the country was rewarded by being removed from the US list of drug trafficking nations.
That was little solace to the farmers of the Bekaa or to the merchants who depend on them. "Butchers in Baalbek used to sell 20 lambs a day," said Ferjani, "though today they are lucky to sell two or three."
That may change this fall, if early reports from the valley are any indication. Fed up with ill-financed and perhaps ill-advised alternative development schemes -- UN experts have advocated substitute crops such as capers, walnuts, walnuts, saffron, and cattle -- farmers are returning to hash production with a vengeance, and they are prepared to fight. Last year, with only a few hundred acres under cultivation, armed clashes broke out when authorities arrived to eradicate the crop. This year, the hash crop has expanded to an estimated 37,000 acres, and farmers are vowing trouble if the government intervenes. "We are ready to fight the government and anyone who comes here," farmer Ali told the Guardian. "We will fight to feed our children." In his village, he added, there are 460 adults and 400 guns.
Another Bekaa farmer, Ali Hajj Hassan, is also planting cannabis this year. Hassan, who works for a UN development program, told the Philadelphia Inquirer he would go broke growing only wheat. He has a 9-by-22 foot cannabis plot. "This little plot of hashish that you see will bring me more money than a few hectares of wheat," he explained. "This year, everybody is planting cannabis again. If there is another eradication campaign this summer, there will be riots."
[end]
Alec
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