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Country
Focus: Colombia This month’s country focus is on Colombia. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re reading a progressive newspaper and I realize that you therefore belong to that small group of citizens who actually care about stuff and I understand that as a result you’ve probably already heard about Plan Colombia and how your government is spraying industrial quantities of herbicide - whose chemical constituents the State Department won’t even disclose - on peasants in rural Colombia, but… … but that’s peanuts compared to the new plan. Speaking of peanuts, don’t try to grow them in Colombia any time soon. Apparently unsatisfied with the ravages caused by Ultra Glyphosate™ (brought to us by the same company that gave us - or actually, gave Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and our Vets – the infamous Agent Orange. Stick with what you know, right?), the State Department has brilliantly conceived of an even more efficient way of pursuing an anti-drug campaign which it’s own analysts are even saying isn’t working. Mycoherbicide fusarium oxysporum formae specialis [f.sp.] erythroxyli. Quite a mouthful. Or rather not. Inevitably dubbed ‘Agent Green’ by opposition groups, Fusarium oxysporum is actually a virulent fungus engineered by the Montana-based Ag/Bio Con, Inc. So the plan is for high altitude drops of this stuff over Colombia to target coca, the raw material for cocaine. There are a few pesky legal obstacles to overcome, however. Like the fact that the UN Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention technically classifies F.o. as a biological weapon. And the fact that spraying the stuff all over Colombia contradicts several clauses of the Geneva Convention. (These, by the way, are agreements that the US has actually decided to sign. Unlike the 1966 Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women; certain protocols of the 1989 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child; the 1997 Kyoto Global Warming Protocol, the 1997 Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty; and the 2002 Rome Statute for the establishment of an International Criminal Court - to name just a few). There’s more to Colombia than cocaine, of course. Like oil, for example. Los Angeles-based Occidental Oil has most of that covered. They got their pipelines covered, too. By US-trained right-wing paramilitaries, no less. Then there’s coal. Brought home to a light-switch near you courtesy of the Alabama-based Drummond mining company. They recently got into trouble for allegedly using Death Squads to polish off Colombian trade union leaders, according to an Asian edition of Time Magazine I picked up in Nepal. You see, one of the perks of being the Ruckus International Correspondent is that I actually get to read about this stuff - the story never appeared in the US edition of Time. Final Fun Fact: Colombia is the third-highest recipient of US ‘aid’. (What are the first two? Entries open now. Bonus points for telling us why. Send your answers in to Ruckus by e-mail, post, or hand today. Winners to be announced next month.) |
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