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Feb 27, 2008

Posted by : Jon Clausen

I'm posting this because I think it's fundamentally wrong and certainly not something I want my tax dollars being spent to do: spraying villages with RoundUp at concentrations that are illegal in the US:

The tiny indigenous Kofan community of Santa Rosa de Guamuez in Colombia had it hard enough with pressures from settlers on their reservation, without Roundup Ultra containing Cosmoflux 411F, a weedkiller that is being sprayed on their villages in a concentration 100 times more powerful than is permitted in the United States.

Aurelio, a Kofan village elder, shows us around his village. The Kofan have been here 500 years. Now it looks as though their time is up. Pineapples are stunted and shriveled. The once green banana plants are no more than blackened sticks. The remains of a few maize plants can be seen here and there, but the food crops have been devastated. There is hunger at Santa Rosa. He is close to despair.

Colombian babies and children are falling ill. Peasants, already miserably poor, are getting hungrier. Indigenous tribes are being torn apart and whole communities pushed into exile.

The argument is there to be made that somehow these people are in cahoots with the Drug Lords and there may be some of that in places.

Thing is though, when the chemicals we're paying to drop are making kids chronically sick and what's below becomes their class art project, we might want to re-think how we are allocating funds to this project (It started back in the Clinton years and carried through to the Bush Administration so it's not a partisan thing - despite the title of the linked article):