If the US wants to lead on climate, it needs to re-think Colombia
Latin American country moves closer to re-starting controversial strategy apparently to counter drugs trafficking
Something extraordinary - although not unduly surprising - is happening in Colombia right now. I don’t mean what might appear to be obvious: the national strike, demonstrations, brutal government repression, deaths, disappearances and violence that have plunged the country into crisis and chaos over the past few weeks - tragic, unprecedented and historically significant as all that is. I mean the much-less-reported fact that, six years after taking the somewhat momentous decision to suspend spraying an apparently harmful herbicide from small planes over vast tracts of the countryside, the government is inching closer and closer towards re-starting.
The stated aim, mad and barbaric as it might seem, is to destroy coca plants, the key ingredient in cocaine, and thereby smash narco-trafficking’s influence over the country and its neighbours. This strategy had been employed in Colombia, the world’s top producer of both coca and cocaine, for over two decades until 2015 when the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate, the key ingredient in the herbicide, Roundup, to be “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Although Roundup continued to be used for manual eradication on-the-ground, so-called “aerial fumigations” were suspended.
“We must find strategies that are more effective and cause less harm to the environment and public health,” Colombia’s President, Juan Manuel Santos, said on TV at the time.
However, over the last few years, with coca cultivation reportedly now at almost record levels and a new Head of State in office, momentum to re-start fumigating has been growing. The Constitutional Court issued a ruling in 2017 establishing certain conditions for further fumigation to ever happen again, and the current president, Iván Duque, personally appeared before the court in 2019 arguing for those conditions to be relaxed. Since then, an Environmental Management Plan has been approved, and last month a decree regulating the proposed fumigation was signed by ministers. Any such aerial operations would be in addition to manual eradication, massively expanded under Duque.
Experts following the issue believe the government is now effectively ready-to-launch, pending rubber-stamp administrative procedures, which it might ignore anyway. In March the Defence Minister had said it was hoped fumigation could re-start in April, although that was before the strike and demonstrations. Meanwhile, numerous civil society organisations have been desperately trying to block it, arguing the Court’s conditions and other laws, jurisprudence and administrative requirements haven’t been fulfilled, and taking various kinds of legal action, among other strategies. In December, seven United Nations “special rapporteurs” issued an “urgent appeal” to the government recommending that they don’t proceed.
“It’s practically a done thing,” Ricardo Vargas, a Colombian researcher associated with The Transnational Institute non-governmental organisation (NGO) in The Netherlands, tells me. “Everything is ready. They’ve bought the Roundup.”
“They’ve got the planes, they’ve got the glyphosate, they’ve got the pilots and they’ve got the anti-drugs bases,” says Pedro Arenas, from the NGO Corporación Viso Mutop in Bogota. “But we are arguing that the government still hasn’t fulfilled all the requirements. It’s this that has allowed us to keep having the decision postponed.”
It won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Colombia that the US government is intimately involved with this. Having provided many millions of dollars and technical support for the pre-2015 fumigations, it is contributing this time too, albeit while trying to adopt a more hands-off approach and claiming ultimately that it is the Colombians’ “sovereign decision.” In 2019 the Assistant Secretary of the US State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that in light of the 2017 Court ruling and “at the request of the Duque administration, INL will work with the Colombian government to restart a targeted, Colombian-led aerial eradication program” - thereby playing only a “supporting role.”
When Donald Trump was President, the State Department “supported maintenance of the spray plane fleet, upgrades to bases, and training of eradication personnel, among other services,” according to the US-based Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). “They have been supporting them — not as much as before, but helping with plane maintenance, apparently some upgrades to the bases, some logistics,” WOLA’s Adam Isacson tells me. “It’s part of the approximately 70-80 million they spend on supporting eradication. So if they make a decision, it won’t be a decision to fund the program—it would be a decision to stop the operational support funding that began under Trump. They’ve said they’re not paying for pilots or glyphosate this time, though.”
An INL report from March this year described Colombia’s decision to commit to re-starting its “aerial coca eradication program” as a “most welcome development.” When I asked the State Department about their current role, they wouldn’t say specifically what they have been or are doing - only what they wouldn’t do. “Unlike the Plan Colombia years, the US government would only play a supporting and enabling role in any Colombian-led aerial eradication program,” says a spokesperson. “The INL would not hire pilots nor purchase glyphosate. The US will continue to support Colombia’s integrated, whole-of-government counternarcotics strategy.”
But it’s hard - or perhaps impossible - to imagine any of this happening without the US, despite appeals to Colombian sovereignty. Last year Trump reportedly told Duque “You’re going to have to spray”, while some observers argue the decision could be partly explained by larger financial, political and economic contexts. As the Belgium-based NGO International Crisis Group acknowledged in a February report, the US had been arguing “explicitly” for fumigation in 2018 and threatening to “decertify Colombia as a country cooperating with counter-narcotic efforts – a move that could have cut off significant foreign aid.”
“Despite a slight softening in rhetoric advocating eradication since the Biden administration took office in January 2021, at least some U.S. officials continue to argue that fumigation is vital to reducing coca supply,” the ICG stated. “As one official put it: “We want to try to get back to success – to where we were in 2012”, before spraying was paused.”
“Is fumigation harmful?” asks rhetorically Ross Eventon, a researcher at the Colombian Observatory on Organised Crime and the Universidad del Rosario in Bogota. “This is a closed conversation. Everyone knows fumigation is harmful. The big question is why they’re really doing it. From a results standpoint it is surprising, but from a PR standpoint I don’t think it is. They’re looking to Washington. I’m sure their overriding concern is what does Washington want us to do and Washington is saying, “Fumigate.” What comes with it? They might be conditioning aid on this. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.”
So what might it take for the Biden administration to u-turn and, not only cease all support for fumigation, but use every ounce of its influence to stop Colombia’s government from going ahead? If, as has been pointed out by so many people for so many years, the risks to the health of 100s of 1000s of people, their livelihoods, their other crops and their homes, or the possibility of forcing some of them to flee to towns, cities and neighbouring Ecuador, or the potential impacts on the soil, water, pollinators, fish, forests, the Amazon and other highly biodiverse regions, or the likelihood it will intensify ongoing conflict, violence and drive more Colombians into illegal armed groups, or the simple fact there is no evidence that fumigation even reduces coca cultivation in the long-term, or that it is so eye-wateringly expensive, or that it means targeting the most vulnerable people in the entire cocaine supply-chain, thereby waging more of a “War on the Poor” as much as a “War on Drugs”. . . if none of this enough to convince Biden et al, then here are a further four things to consider:
One, the IARC’s position on glyphosate being “probably carcinogenic to humans” hasn’t changed since 2015. That evaluation “still stands,” an IARC spokesperson tells me.
Two, proposed fumigation partly explains why many Colombians have come out onto the streets recently to protest, although it is true it is just one of many reasons. For example, a statement from the country’s largest indigenous federations has listed “spraying with glyphosate” as one of the first Duque policies that they are opposing, while national newspaper El Espectador has described the “possible return of fumigations with glyphosate” as one of the main motives for why people in the Putumayo and Cauca regions have been demonstrating.
Three, re-starting fumigation would explicitly violate the 2016 landmark peace agreement between the government and the country’s then largest guerrilla organisation, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP), considered by some to be a “legacy” of Barack Obama’s US presidency when Biden was his deputy, as well as a Constitutional Court ruling effectively reinforcing it. That agreement specifies fumigation as a last resort that should only be used if the government isn’t able to strike deals with communities to grow other crops, and prioritises manual eradication. A national crop substitution plan was established in 2017 and tens of 1,000s of families have signed up, but according to observers it has been poorly-designed, poorly-funded and poorly-implemented. “If the government wants to fumigate it must prove it has tried to implement voluntary crop substitution in all the territories where there is coca, but this just isn’t the case,” says Isabel Pereira from the Bogota-based NGO Dejusticia.
Four, the fact that US support for fumigation, whatever the extent and real reasons, makes a mockery of the US apparently trying to position itself as a global leader on climate change, as suggested by the “Virtual Leaders Summit” convened by Biden last month and touted by various commentators. No government serious on the environment should be pressuring or supporting another to spray something like glyphosate out of planes across huge areas of land - almost literally the last thing that is required. Apart from the potential, direct environmental impacts acknowledged above, there is the very real chance of driving coca growers into even more remote parts of the country, thereby expanding the agricultural frontier and encouraging further deforestation, including in national parks, as has already been happening. Spray one location and you’re only encouraging someone to return several months later and try again, or move and plant elsewhere. The demand is just too great, the incentives irresistible, the current alternatives just not practical or attractive enough.
In March more than 150 academics wrote to Biden and his deputy Kamala Harris urging them to abandon their administration’s support for fumigation, highlighting the potential impacts and describing it as “singularly ineffective at eliminating coca crops.” Current support “sends an unfortunate message to the Colombian people that your administration is not committed to abandoning the ineffective and damaging war on drugs internationally,” the letter ran, “even as your administration takes bold steps to mitigate its multiple impacts on Black, Indigenous, and people of color in the United States.”
For María Alejandra Velez, director of the Centre of Security and Drugs Studies at the Universidad de los Andes and the lead signatory on the letter to Biden and Harris, past fumigation has been a “total failure.” “There is an entire literature on the risks to health and the environment from spraying glyphosate,” Velez tells me. “It doesn’t make any sense. We hope that Biden’s government won’t support or finance any fumigation.”