Ecuador forgets, Colombia wins.
| Autor | Saavedra, Luis Angel |
With three controversial agreements, the Ecuadoran government decided to forget incidents that strained its diplomatic relations with neighboring Colombia. These include the aggression Ecuador suffered from Colombia's bombing of Angostura and downplaying the damages caused by the fumigations to eradicate coca fields in Colombia territory, but which affected the health and destroyed the crops of Ecuadoran campesinos living near the border.
The fumigations
Plan Colombia, implemented in 1999 (NotiSur, July 14, 2000, and Sept. 6, 2000), included eradicating coca fields that spread uncontrolled near the border with Ecuador, where the Colombian government had no presence and the guerrilla Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) fought each other for control.
Manual eradication had failed, and Colombia opted to carry out aerial fumigations, flying small planes at high altitudes to elude attacks from the armed groups that controlled the region. The spray used in the fumigations contained glyphosate, Cosmo-Flux, and POEA, resulting in a chemical mix that is highly harmful for humans (NotiSur, Aug. 3, 2001).
The altitude of the fumigations and the wind caused this toxic mixture to travel up to 10 km inside Ecuadoran territory, as verified in a technical report by the Comite Interinstitucional contra las Fumigaciones (CIF), led by medical doctor Adolfo Maldonado, an expert in tropical diseases.
An investigation by researchers at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador (PUCE) also found genetic damage in women living near the border in Putumayo who had been exposed to the Colombian fumigations.
All this evidence led the Ecuadoran government to file a lawsuit against Colombia at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, for both the ill effects on the health of Ecuadorans living near the border and for damage to their crops and lands (NotiSur, Feb. 16, 2007, and Aug. 17, 2007).
The affected campesinos formed the Federacion de Organizaciones Campesinas del Cordon Fronterizo Ecuatoriano de Sucumbfos (FORCCOFES) and, along with environmental and human rights organizations, pressured the various Ecuadoran governments for twelve years to demand that Colombia not fumigate within 10 km of the border to ensure that Ecuadoran soil would not be contaminated. In 2006, during the administration of former President Alfredo Palacio (2005-2007), Colombia tacitly accepted the request...
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