« Holiday cheer from Fernando Londoño | Main | 2005: The year of non-military aid? »
December 21, 2004
Fumigation compensation? Forget it
A colleague in Colombia gave me a copy of this document [PDF format], obtained in June from the narcotics unit of the Colombian police (the DIRAN). It provides statistics about the number of people who have sought compensation for damages to their legal crops after being fumigated with herbicides by U.S.-funded spray planes. Of those, the document notes how many have been compensated, rejected, or are still being considered.
Colombians who seek compensation for damage to their legal crops must undergo an arduous and bureaucratic process, the Latin America Working Group explained in an excellent report published last February [PDF format].
The State Department reports that claims of damage are sent to municipal representatives who refer them to a local agricultural agency to be verified in a field visit. If the complaints are verified, the municipal representatives submit the complaint and a record of preliminary verification to the Antinarcotics Police (DIRAN) and the National Directorate of Dangerous Drugs (DNE). The DIRAN is then required to certify within five days whether spraying took place in the vicinity of the complaint. If the claim is certified, DIRAN makes a field visit within ten days to evaluate the veracity of the claim and the potential amount of compensation to be paid. It is important to note that the agency responsible for the spraying operation is the agency in charge of verifying claims, and it has no incentive to admit to spraying errors.
Despite having to undergo such a difficult process, the DIRAN document notes that, as of June, 4,535 people – most of them residents of remote and insecure parts of rural Colombia – had taken the step of registering a complaint.
Of those 4,535:
2,768 (61%) were rejected, or were thrown out because they filed too late (the most common reasons claimed for rejection: no spraying allegedly occurred on the day the campesino claimed it did, or the campesino had some coca near his legal crops);
1,757 (38.8%) were still under consideration, at some stage (field visits, due to cost and security concerns, are not easily arranged); and
10 (0.2%) had been compensated (I’ve heard anecdotally – and this may not be accurate, though I’ve heard it several times – that most of the ten are agribusiness enterprises, particularly oil-palm plantations.)
That’s right: 0.2 percent of those who had bothered to file a claim had received any compensation at all. Leaving aside the 1,757 still under consideration, that’s an incredibly low success rate: for every individual compensated, 276 are turned away.
Does this low rate owe to the incredible accuracy of the spray planes, combined with the malice of Colombian peasants looking to make a quick peso? Of course not. As the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, which closely monitors drug-crop eradication results, acknowledges in a remarkable recent “Mini-Atlas” of Colombian coca-growing [big Powerpoint document], “It is not technically possible to limit the aerial spraying only over coca fields and to avoid overlaps.”
In our judgment, this poor record should make it impossible for the Secretary of State to certify that “fair compensation is being paid for meritorious claims,” which since 2002 has been a requirement that the U.S. government must fulfill in order to free up money for new herbicides. (In 2005, for instance, 80 percent of funding for herbicides is frozen until the State Department can certify that this and several other requirements have been met.)
The compensation program must be dramatically sped up if the next fumigation certification is to be at all honest – and if we are to make any progress at all in the battle for hearts and minds in the “ungoverned spaces” of rural Colombia.
Posted by isacson at December 21, 2004 10:46 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://ciponline.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/31
Comments
This might sound a bit like a broken record (still, by now, few opinions expressed in discussions regarding Colombia can escape such a fate), but, unless I'm wrong or missing something, I honestly don't see neither the U.S. nor Colombian governments taking much interest in this issue if current trends continue, despite the fact that it's evidently an important and deserving one.
Posted by: jcg at December 22, 2004 02:34 PM
Recently the Dutch government made a donation of 500.000 Euros to Colombia for manual eradication of coca in two specific places, Amazona and Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
Isn't it a better way to solve the drugproblems instead of those terrible fumigations, very expensive and provoking terrible damages on human health and biodiversity. They even fumigate where there is no coca at all. We know it is not the right solution.
Everybody talks only about Colombia but the US are highly responsable for this situation:
- They by nearly all the Colombian cocaine production.
- How is that enormous amount of cocaine entering so easily into the US.
- With wich complicities? Who takes the advantages?
- Who is arming the AUC and the FARC?
- How come that both are so rich?
- If the US wouldn't by the Colombian cocaine it would be a part of the solution.
- Maybe would it be more interesting to solve the American drugproblems, put more money in desintoxication programs inside the US and survey the borders.
It is, of course easier to make a diversion and talk only about the problems inside Colombia. I don't blame you of course, your site is really interesting, but generally, in France it is the same.
I would be interested in some answers to my questions.
Posted by: francoise callier at December 28, 2004 07:36 AM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)