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http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/10/19/141412/86 Lines in the Sand: A Week of Drug War Summits in South America By Dan Feder, Posted on Wed Oct 19th, 2005 at 02:14:12 PM EST The northern Colombian city of Santa Marta — and Colombian president Álvaro Uribe — played host this week to the 15th Summit of the Heads of National Drug Law Enforcement Agencies (HONLEA) of Latin America and the Caribbean. President Uribe, addressing the delegations of about forty nations, took the opportunity to bash the drug legalization movement and demand that its neighbors do more to stop Colombian drugs from reaching consuming countries. Meanwhile, one of those neighbors — Venezuela — made some blunt criticisms of Plan Colombia and joined another one of Uribe’s neighbors — Ecuador — in complaining that the effects of the U.S.-sponsored crop fumigation program are spilling over the border and causing environmental and other damages… If Uribe’s remarks were not scripted at the U.S. embassy, he certainly had the recent United States drug control decertification of Venezuela (see previous report here) in mind with these comments, quoted by the Europa Press agency: “We must make a greater effort, not just in Colombia’s airspace, where we are already doing so, but in all our neighboring countries’ airspace; we must double our efforts,” reiterated Uribe… (One of the offences cited by the State Department was Venezuela’s supposed reluctance to participate in an international air traffic surveillance project.) Europa Press continues (translated here from the original Spanish as there are still no English reports on the event): Uribe indicated that Colombia has a responsibility toward the problem of drug trafficking and cannot try to excuse itself by blaming consumer countries. He showed concern for the Amazon rainforest and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains, which are seen as being at high rist due to the clearing of forests in order to plant illicit crops. Of course, if it were not for the joint U.S.-Colombia program of destructive crop fumigations, coca planters — most of them small family farmers just trying to make ends meet — would not be driven from traditional rural areas and into nature reserves and other ecologically delicate areas. Uribe also played his tired “decent family man” card to take a swipe at the movement against drug prohibition — that policy that has destroyed so many families in North and South America. Colombia’s Caracol Radio reports: Uribe admitted that the issue of legalization is captivating to many people who theorize on these issues. “I suspect that there are many friends of legalization who are keeping quiet, crouched down, waiting for our eradication policies not to triumph, so that they can say: ‘the war on drugs has been lost, we have to legalize it,’” said the head of state. He added that he sees at the issue of legalization with great pessimism, and that he looks at it more as a father than as a president. “I have lean more towards my feelings as a father than towards cold reason, but let me express two or three arguments to sustain my concern about legalization,” he explained. In the first place, he reflected that if the drug trade is no longer criminalized, although prices may fall, there is no assurance that supply will therefore fall. “We have seen that despite the trade being criminalized, there is still great supply, that international prices have fallen substantially but nonetheless the supply has not diminished,” he explained. … Finally, he spoke about ecological damage. “When I enter into discussions to present my thesis against legalization, in front of the kids at the universities, in front of professors, the big argument that forces them to think against legalization is the ecological one,” he said. He recalled that Colombia has lost 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) of tropical forests due to drug cultivation. “The future of Colombia in great part depends on the biodiversity stored in those tropical jungles, and drug crops can constitute the great enemy of that biodiversity.” Uribe’s first “cold reasoning” argument basically attacks a straw man — few if any legalization advocates claim that ending prohibition will also end the drug trade. Rather, most argue that despite massive spending and huge social damages incurred in the drug war over the course of more than three decades the drug trade has proven impossible to eradicate; that prohibition has only achieved the monopolization of the trade by violent international mafias and the resulting artificial inflation of prices. I am not familiar with Uribe’s “1.7 million hectare” figure; Uribe is famous for pulling overwhelming statistics out of nowhere without mentioning the source or context. But here is one figure I can source: according to the State Department’s own figures, 682,435 hectares (1,686,334 acres) of Colombian drug crops have been fumigated since 1996. Despite this, the coca harvest increased from 67,200 hectares in 1996 to 122,500 hectares in 1999. The harvest has remained more or less constant since then, hitting a high of 169,800 hectares in 2001 and leveling back out 113,850 in 2003. (Statistics for 2004 are not yet available.) Also, sources from and familiar with communities that have been fumigated have repeatedly told Narco News and others that when the fumigation planes come, most of the land they gas has no coca or opium growing on it. If this is true, either the State figures ignore the land fumigated that was not under cultivation and much more acreage has actually been poisoned, or include fumigated areas not under coca or opium cultivation that were fumigated anyway. In other words, all that fumigation, all that spraying of deadly poisons on not just coca and opium but food crops and forests as well, has accomplished nothing in terms of reducing the drug supply. It is the drugs’ illegality itself, therefore, that causes “ecological damage”; coca cultivation is no more inherently ecologically damaging than coffee or banana planting. Meanwhile, while the Colombian government keeps its head firmly buried in the sand on these issues, Venezuela’s antinarcotics chief was telling a separate gathering of antinarcotics officials Caracas that Plan Colombia “is not working.” The Venezuelan newspaper El Universal reports: Assuring that Plan Colombia is not “working,” as “there has been a significant increase in crops” in the neighboring country, the president of the National Commission Against Illicit Drug Use (CONACUID), Luis Correa, warned that the program “is bringing us many problems along the border.” After opening the… meeting of the Andean Committee for Alternative Development (CADA), which is being attended by delegates from Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela, the official explained that the fumigation of coca, marijuana, and opium poppy plantations “is decimating our flora and fauna.” “Plan Colombia is not on the agenda of this meeting, as it does not involve us Venezuelans. But Plan Colombia affects us anyway, because of the displacement we are experiencing of Colombians heading into Venezuela. And if you want my personal opinion, there is not much to evaluate in Plan Colombia, because it is not working,” announced Correa. Venezuela is therefore joining Ecuador in complaining that Plan Colombia has not been merely confined to its namesake country, but rather spilling over into their borders (a complaint Ecuador has been making for years.) The fault lines are being drawn in Latin America, as U.S. intervention is increasingly dividing governments into opposing political camps… Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM
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