Colombia news

TNI

Apr 20 2007

[url]detail_page.phtml?&&act_id=18989&menu=05b[link]Crops for illicit use and ecocide: Are illicit crops really the main cause of damage to the ecosystem in Colombia?[/url]
Moritz Tenthoff
Germán Andrés Quimbayo Ruiz
TNI Drug Policy briefing No 28, December 2008
Although coca production has contributed to the ecological damage, the main culprit of the 'ecocide' is the anti-drugs policy of the Colombian government itself.

Alternative Development, Economic Interests and Paramilitaries in Urabá
Moritz Tenthoff
TNI Drug Policy briefing No 27, September 2008
The following document analyses how the Forest Wander Families Programme and the Productive Projects of the Presidential Programme Against Illegal Crops in Colombia have been used to legalise paramilitary structures and implement mega agro-industrial projects in the Uraba Region.

Eradications and conflict in Colombia
Amira Armenta
19 Mayo 2008
While the coca farmer is treated as a criminal the road to peace in the Colombian countryside will remain closed.

Coca, Petroleum and Conflict in Cofán Territory
Spraying, displacement and economic interests
Moritz Tenthoff
Drug Policy Briefing No 23, September 2007
Under the guise of the war on drugs and terror, the way is being cleared for major economic interests in the Lower Putumayo (Colombia). This paper examines the impact of coca cultivation, petroleum activity and the armed conflict on the ancestral territory of the Cofán community.

Colombia coca cultivation survey results
A question of methods
Drug Policy Briefing No 22, June 2007
Despite 2006 witnessing the most intensive use of fumigation in the country’s history, some 157,200 hectares of cultivation areas were detected, 13,200 hectares more than in 2005. Is the fumigation strategy failing?

Plan Colombia - Putumayo
April 17, 2007
This is a series of eight videos made by the Colombian human rights group MINGA. "Take a moment to view some of these. They are quite typical of what we have heard in our own research in Colombia's coca-and-conflict zones: indiscriminate fumigation, dysfunctional alternative-development efforts, and civilians caught in the middle of the violence. This glimpse into Plan Colombia's first zone of operation makes pretty clear why the strategy has failed to achieve its goals." (Adam Isacson, Colombia researcher).

The politicisation of fumigations
Glyphosate on the Colombian-Ecuadorian border
Drug Policy Briefing No. 20, February 2007
Plan Colombia has brought environmental, health and economic damage – and may even have stimulated the spread of coca plantations. A new Briefing looks at alternatives for the Andean region and addresses the glyphosate dispute on the Colombia-Ecuador border.

The Sierra de la Macarena: Drugs and armed conflict in Colombia
By Ricardo Vargas
TNI Drug Policy Briefing 19, September 2006

The Colombian government has re-established the aerial fumigation of coca crops in the Sierra de la Macarena National Park. In so doing, it has drawn the wrong conclusion from the ‘failure’ of manual coca eradication in the region. These operations amount to a shortsighted military strategy in place of an anti-drug policy, harming and alienating the Park’s civilian population while doing little to affect the FARC’s ‘bankroll’. The likely result, writes Ricardo Vargas, is the creation of well-fertilised territory for a prolonged armed conflict.

Political Challenges Posed by the Failure of Prohibition
Drugs in Colombia and the Andean-Amazonian Region
TNI Drug Policy Briefing 16, May 2006
(by Ricardo Vargas)
After a slight dip in coca production during 2003 and 2004, the Andean region has returned to the historical average of 200,000 hectares of coca crops. Added to this is the sharp increase in the expansion of drug trafficking toward other countries in the region. The failure of Washington’s drug policy has enabled illegal globalisation to expand its foothold in the hemisphere, with a negative impact. Given the failure of policy and the complexity of the situation, different schools of political thought once again raise the easy option of legalisation, a proposal that actually conceals the lack of alternative critical thinking focused on the development of a national and regional policy.

[url]page_detail.phtml?page=http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2006/01/did_plan_colomb.html[link]Did Plan Colombia work? A look at the numbers[/url], by Adam Isacson, Center for International Policy, January 18, 2006.

Aerial Spraying Knows No Borders
Ecuador Brings International Case over Aerial Spraying
TNI Drug Policy Briefing 15, September 2005

The Politics of Glyphosate. The CICAD Study on the Impacts of Glyphosate and the Crop Figures
TNI Drug Policy Briefing 14
June 2005
The Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD), an agency affiliated with the OAS, recently joined the large number of existing scientific studies on the possible health and environmental effects of Round Up, the glyphosate formula being sprayed on illicit crops in Colombia. CICAD’s investigation, under the direction of an international scientific team, concluded that the chemicals used in the spraying — glyphosate and Cosmo-Flux — do not affect human health or the environment, and that at most they could cause temporary skin and eye irritation, but serious doubts exist. The National University of Colombia’s Environmental Studies Institute published a critical analysis of the CICAD study, which considered technical aspects of the investigation, finding methodological shortcomings, as well as omissions and inconsistencies throughout the report. Those findings could point to a lack of impartiality in the CICAD study.