Toxic Remnants of War Project
colombia fumigation
To address record-breaking cocaine production in Colombia, the Trump Administration is quietly working with the Colombian government to restart a controversial aerial fumigation program that a previous Colombian administration had halted due to its risk to public health.
Last month, several U.S. officials told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Trump Administration is ready to help the Colombian government restart the aerial spraying of glyphosate, an herbicide that some research studies have linked to cancer. Glyphosate, the main ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup, has been found by several U.S. juries to be carcinogenic.
Kirsten Madison, the head of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), said that the INL is prepared to “work with the Colombian government to restart a targeted, Colombian-led aerial eradication program.” Aerial spraying is “an effective and safe tool,” Madison insisted, ignoring evidence suggesting otherwise.
Before the Colombian government halted its aerial fumigation program in 2015, the spraying of glyphosate had been a central component of U.S.-Colombian counternarcotics operations. From 2009 to 2013, U.S. and Colombian forces collaborated to spray roughly 100,000 hectares of land every year.
“INL helped fund, plan, and operate the aerial eradication program,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in 2018. “It provided the pilots, planning, aircraft, logistics, maintenance, and fuel to operate the program’s two spray bases.”
Many Colombian farmers opposed the program, arguing that it made it more difficult for them to make a living and survive. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a leftist revolutionary group that fought on behalf of the rural poor for decades, demanded an end to fumigation and called on the Colombian government to shift its focus to rural development.
The Colombian government stopped the program in 2015 after an agency of the World Health Organization reported that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The Colombian government’s decision was an important factor in its peace agreement with the FARC, which agreed in August 2016 to lay down its arms and end its decades-long rebellion.
Since then, U.S. officials have been urging the Colombian government to resume fumigation. As The Progressive reported in 2017, the Trump Administration made a major effort during its first year in office to pressure the Colombian government into restarting aerial spraying.
As The Progressive reported in 2017, the Trump Administration made a major effort during its first year in office to pressure the Colombian government into restarting aerial spraying.
At the time, U.S. official William Brownfield told Congress that aerial spraying would help the Colombian government circumvent ongoing efforts by poor farmers to prevent on-the-ground eradicators from destroying their coca crops. “You cannot protest from the ground an airplane that is flying over a coca field and killing the coca from the air,” Brownfield said.
The Trump Administration’s pressure campaign is working. In 2018, Colombian officials began experimenting with drones, using them to get around the country’s restrictions on aerial spraying by spraying glyphosate from lower heights.
“The United States should help with new technology such as unmanned aircraft or drones that can spray coca crops,” U.S. Senator Marco Rubio argued last February in an op-ed in the Miami Herald.
At the same time, Colombian President Iván Duque began making a major push to persuade the Colombian people to return to fumigation, arguing before Colombia’s Constitutional Court this past March that spraying glyphosate is necessary to slow the country’s cocaine boom. Although the court ruled in July that previous restrictions must remain in place, it created an opening for the Colombian government to resume aerial spraying.
According to Madison, the head of the INL, “Colombia’s Constitutional Court gave the Colombian government the authority to restart aerial spray of glyphosate on coca once it meets certain administrative and oversight conditions.”
With U.S. and Colombian officials moving to resume aerial spraying, human rights organizations are warning against it. Earlier this year, Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America said that it would be a mistake to restart fumigation.
“The best outcome,” Isacson argued, “would be for Colombia to establish a functioning civilian state presence in the abandoned areas where coca flourishes: with basic services, low impunity for abuse and corruption, and enforcement of rules that a legal economy requires.”
Other critics say the Colombian government should focus on crop substitution and rural development. The Colombian government and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) previously agreed to help coca farmers transition to crops such as cacao and coffee, but neither of them committed the time and resources that are necessary for coca growers to make the transition.
An independent evaluation commissioned by USAID shows that “USAID and the Colombian government frequently did not provide sufficient income to cover food costs or other expenses, making farmers highly vulnerable to resume coca cultivation,” according to a 2018 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Former INL official Rand Beers, who raised the issue before Congress in June, indicated that the U.S. and Colombian governments have failed to uphold their commitments to Colombia’s rural poor. As Beers noted, alternative development programs “never ever were implemented in a serious enough way in an area of the country that has been distant from the capital, and distant from the elites in the country from time immemorial.”
Under the Trump Administration, a bigger problem is that officials are refusing to support crop substitution and other forms of alternative development. Still pressuring the elites in Colombia’s capital, they keep pushing for a return to aerial fumigation, despite the risks it poses to Colombia’s rural poor.
According to Isacson, the better option would be to focus on crop substitution and rural development, just as the 2016 peace accord between the Colombian government and the FARC required. If the peace accord is not properly implemented, “it is going to be a tragedy,” Isacson says. “Start fumigating, and the tragedy will be compounded, and we’ll be right back where we were before all of this began, maybe worse.”