Drug
War: Covert Money, Power & Policy:
Agent Green:
McCollum's "Silver Bullet" - In the Head
The early summer 1996 aerial spraying of Ultra Glyphosate (Monsanto's
"Round-Up") on 45,000 acres of Guaviare coca caused convulsive vomiting
and hair loss among the children. The enraged mothers organized the
August 1996 march of more than 150,000 campesinos in Guaviare, Putumayo
and Caqueta provinces. The Colombian federales diffused the protest
with false compromises, then stealthily assassinated the march leaders.
Many of the surviving campesinos turned, for the first time, to the
guerrillas. The U.S. then insisted that Colombia allow it to switch
to the far more poisonous tebuthiuron (Dow's "Spike"). Now, if the US
State Department has its way, the ongoing chemical spraying will be
followed by the massive, nearly indetectable high altitiude dropping
of Agent Green (the mycoherbicide fusarium oxysporum formae specialis
[f.sp.] erythroxyli). Agent Green is an extension of the US-engineered
1997 UN Drug Control Program's SCOPE program (Strategy for Coca and
Opium Poppy Elimination).1
The SCOPE program is, ultimately, a CIA/Defense contractor/World Bank/International
Monetary Fund plan to force the corporatization of millions of acres
of campesino-held land by physically destroying their only economic
mainstay, their agriculture. "Drugs" have no more to do with this war
than "communism" had to do with the 1954 war against Jacobo Arbenz in
Guatemala. That war was about ownership of Guatemala. Arbenz' government
was about as communist as Franklin Roosevelt's. This war is about ownership
of Colombia, and, for that matter, Burma, Thailand, Peru, Bolivia et
al.
But the UNDCP was forced to admit, January, 2000, that Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan have refused to carry out the field testing of the opium
poppy mycoherbicide that they had previously approved. Then, on March
24, Peru passed a law banning the use of biological agents in coca eradication.
And in Lima, Sept. 7, 2000, the Andean Committee of Environmental Authorities
(CAAAM), representing the governments of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador,
Peru, and Venezuela, stated its "rejection of the use of the 'Fusarium
oxysporum' fungus as a means of eradicating illegal crops in the Member
Countries of the Andean Community."2 The CAAAM was following the lead
of the Colombian Ministry of the Environment, which declared on July
18 that the Colombian Government, "did not accept the proposal put forward
by the United Nations International Drug Control Programme to conduct
tests using the Fusarium oxysporum because it considered that any agent
foreign to the native ecosystems of our country could pose a serious
threat to the environment and to human health."
Even Bush/McCollum-led Florida has rejected the mycoherbicide idea,
thanks to a Bush-appointee with some real backbone, and its rejection
reveals the real purpose of the policy. In 1999, Ag/Bio Con, Inc., a
Montana-based USDA-connected company with an inside track to Defense
Department financing, proposed using a cannabis-killing strain of Fusarium
oxysporum in Florida. The proposal was engineered by James McDonough,
Florida's Director of the Office of Drug Control. Jeb Bush brought McDonough
to Florida from his position as McCaffrey's Director of Strategy for
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Florida's Rep.
Bill McCollum engineered the first $23 million for mycoherbicide financing
in his defense contractor's dream bill, the $2.3 billion "Western Hemisphere
Drug Elimination Act." Virtually all of McCollum's $2.3 billion went
for weapons purchases for the vast US Southern Command and for the dope
dealing armies of Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, etc. Beamed Bill, "All of
the indications are that this [mycoherbicide] has the potential for
making a big difference in the drug war.... This could be the silver
bullet."3
The head of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, David
B. Struhs, quashed the maniacal idea, pointing out that it was more
like a silver bullet in the head: "Fusarium species are capable of evolving
rapidly. Mutagenicity is by far the most disturbing factor in attempting
to use a Fusarium species as a bioherbicide. It is difficult, if not
impossible to control the spread of Fusarium species. The mutated fungi
can cause disease in large numbers of crops, including tomatoes, peppers,
flowers, corn and vines and are normally considered a threat to farmers
as a pest, rather than as a pesticide…. Fusarium species are more active
in warm soils and can stay resident in the soil for years. Their longevity
and enhanced activity under Florida conditions are of concern, as this
could lead to an increased risk of mutagenicity."4
This information was not news to the Department of Defense, and its
contractor, Ag/Bio Con. Quite the contrary. Fusarium's spectacularly
deadly mutagenicity has been firmly established in biological science
for years. Like various other plant pathogens, Fusarium oxysporum has
several specialized forms - known as formae specialis (f.sp.) - that
infect a variety of hosts causing various diseases. In Hawaii, these
include: Fusarium oxysporum f.sp.asparagi (fusarium yellows on asparagus);
f.sp.callistephi (wilt on China aster); f.sp.cubense (Panama disease/wilt
on banana); f.sp.dianthi (wilt on carnation); f.sp.koae (on koa); f.sp.lycopersici
(wilt on tomato); f.sp.melonis (fusarium wilt on muskmelon); f.sp.niveum
(fusarium wilt on watermelon); f.sp.pisi (on edible-podded pea); f.sp.tracheiphilum
(wilt on Glycine max); and f.sp.zingiberi (fusarium yellows on ginger).
These specialized forms are an indication of the spectacular mutagenicity
referred to by Florida's chief environmental officer. Once released,
the thing would become a deadly threat to Florida's major industry,
as race 2 of Fusarium oxysporum now is to the watermelon industry in
Texas and Oklahoma.5
US Forest Service: Forest Health Protection, Southern Region: "Mimosa
Wilt, caused by Fusarium oxysporium var. perniciosum: Importance. -
Mimosa wilt is the most devastating disease of mimosa. In many areas
it has almost eliminated ornamental mimosas."6 Worldwide, Fusarium oxysporum
is deadly to chrysanthemum, grape, potato, cotton, vanilla, date, sunflower,
coffee, mimosa, avocado, cabbage, celery, squash, soy, tobacco, clover,
various melons, eucalyptus, pine trees, sesame, beet, African palm,
eggplant, numerous other important cultivars and innumerable wild plants
on which wildlife depend.
When the Kenyans tried to do something about the Fusarium oxysporum
f.sp.cubense that was devastating their small-scale banana farms, they
found 4 different Fusarium oxysporum races and more than more than 20
different "bridging groups."7 Scientists in Hawaii have reported over
24 fusarium species there. The list of affected Hawaiian plants is about
three times longer than the list I cited above and the economic and
ecological damage in Hawaii has been severe.8 Yet our own Department
of Defense, under McCaffrey's direction, is proposing intentionally
dropping this stuff on small-scale campesinos worldwide. All in the
name of a war on "drugs," meaning the traditional sacramental herbs
of native peoples. The transparent purpose is corporate, that is, defense-contractor,
land theft.
Remember the American Chestnut tree? I bet you don't. At the end of
the nineteenth century, the American chestnut was a major component
of eastern deciduous forests from Maine to Georgia and west to Illinois,
in some places constituting more than 40% of overstory trees. Early
in the twentieth century, chestnut blight, a nonindigenous fungal disease
from Asia, broke out near New York City and quickly infected almost
all American Chestnuts on the continent, driving the species to ecological
extinction. American Chestnuts now exist only as scattered small trees
that become infected and die as they mature. There is no known cure
for the Chestnut fungus Cryphonectria parasitica. That's how dangerous
fungal diseases are. And Fusarium oxysporum is far more evolutionarily
agile than the unstoppable Chestnut blight. That's what these maniacs
are playing with.
In 1994, the USDA-contracted researchers attempted to rig an experimental
test of the "species specificity" of fusarium osysporum f.sp.erythroxyli
by insisting that it be tested only on North American plants completely
unrelated to the South American erythroxylum coca. Lo and behold, much
to their own chagrin, they proved that fusarium oxysporum f.sp.erythroxyli
was anything but specific to erythroxylum coca. North American meadowfoam
(Limnanthes douglasii) and redstem filaree (Erodium cicutarium) succumbed
to the fungal attack - confirming, of course, that this stuff is spectacularly
dangerous to all agriculture anywhere it is sprayed.9
And that, of course, is the real point of its proposed use in the third
world. During the early 1990's, two decades after Ag/Bio Con first discovered
fusarium oxysporum f.sp.erythroxyli on Coca Cola's Hawaiian coca plants,
another fusarium epidemic, known locally as "seca-seca" ["dry-dry"]
swept through the coca patches of the upper Huallaga Valley in eastern
Peru. Jeremy Bigwood & Sharon Stevenson: "Coincidentally, one of the
apparent epicenters of the disease was near the US antinarcotics fire
base at Santa Lucia. Peasants in the area complained of their coca patches
being sprayed from helicopters. In a debriefing of the US-funded Peruvian
National Coordinator for Human Rights ('La Coordinadora') about their
1993 Annual Trip to Peru's Huallaga Valley Jungle Region, 'the delegation
was struck, however, by the devastation caused by the fungus plague
that is withering coca crops. They were assailed at almost every stop
with accounts of US DEA airplanes spreading "fungus pods" over the coca
fields...'"
"Over the last decade, the disease spread to the Yurimaguas area, the
northern limit of Peruvian coca cultivation as well as beyond Pucallpa
in the east. During this period, disturbing revelations about its nature
were documented by the US State Department through the US embassy in
Lima, who were following its progression in their reports to Washington,
D.C.. The embassy recorded reports that the Fusarium coca wilt disease
was not specific to coca, but killed other crops, too: 'Meanwhile, reportedly
3000 farmers in the Tingo Maria and Leonicio Prado area…have had to
scratch for other means of earning a living, including panning for gold,
when a plant disease, 'seca-seca' which had previously attacked coca
plants broke out again in alternate crops planted in former coca beds.'"10
In fact, the defense contractors themselves aknowledged fusarium's
lack of species specificity by inanely insisting that the "species-specific"
strain was "specific" to two completely different varieties of coca,
Erythroxylum coca var. coca and Erythroxylum novogranatense var. novogranatense.
Their own tests showed that var. novogranatense fared far better under
"specific" attack than did var. coca.11
The only way to positively identify fusarium disease is through laboratory
culturing and diagnosis, and the only known defense is massive antifungal
spraying combined with specially engineered resistant strains of commercial
food crops - agribiz. By destroying traditional agriculture in southern
Colombia (there is evidence this is also happening on the Burma-Thai
border with the Akha's staple ginger crop), you destroy the campesinos
hold on their land and force them into the cash economy - as sharecroppers
on land they no longer own. Given the Prohibition-inflated value of
drug crops, many of the landless campesinos will become drug-crop sharecroppers
on Army-owned or connected land.
The "anti-drug" fungal spraying is proposed only for rebel-held areas.
During the investigation of former Colombian President Samper's financing
it was revealed that, while coordinating drug shipments, Cali traffickers,
Samper's financiers, racked up a $200,000 phone bill on a number assigned
to Brig. Gen. Ismael Trujillo, then head of the Federal Judicial Police,
the guy in charge of the U.S. Drug War in Colombia. The Cali money was
funneled through Fernando Botero, Samper's 1994 campaign manager and
Defense Minister. That is, the Cali cartel was an organic part of the
establishment in charge of the Colombian military. Their vast monocrop
drug fincas were never sprayed by glyphosate and tebuthiuron, because
they weren't in rebel-held areas.
The situation today remains unchanged, as the investigation of Col.
Hiett has revealed, and as the dope-dealing army-connected paramilitary
leader Carlos Castaño Gil has admitted. Reuters, September 6, 2000:
"The head of Colombia's outlawed right-wing paramilitary forces, who
has conceded most of his financing comes from the drug trade, said Wednesday
that he also gets support from the local and international business
community. Carlos Castano, leader of the ruthless United Self-Defense
Forces of Colombia (AUC), spoke of his ties to legitimate businessmen
in an open letter to Congress, a day after Defense Minister Luis Fernando
Ramirez urged lawmakers to launch a probe into private sources of funding
for the paramilitary militias that target leftists and suspected rebel
sympathizers across Colombia…. Local and international human rights
groups say the AUC, which is responsible for most of the peasant massacres
and other rights abuses committed in Colombia, operates with the support
of state security forces in an increasingly dirty war with Marxist rebels
that has taken more than 35,000 lives since 1990. In a rare television
interview in March, Castano said drug trafficking and drug traffickers
probably financed 70 percent of his organization's operations."
In direct contravention of innumerable chemical warfare and ecological
treaties, intentional ecocide is being proposed here. US State Department
documents, signed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, urge the
UNDCP to set up testing for "large-scale implementation" of fusarium
on coca in Colombia and to get other countries involved "in order to
avoid a perception that this is solely a US government initiative."12
This, while the USDA officially estimates the Fusarium oxysporum spore
survival structures stay active in soil for 40 years.13 And no test,
either by Ag/Bio Con or anyone else, has ever been able to contain the
pathogenicity of fusarium - once released, the thing is an uncontrollable
mutating monster.
Some strains of Fusarium oxysporum produce the toxic substances fusaric
acid, moniliformin , trichothecenes and fusarin C . Trichothecenes is
dangerous enough to be listed as a biological weapons agent in the draft
Protocol to the UN Convention on Biological and Toxic Weapons.
Fumonisins have been shown to cause a neurological disease, equine
leucoencephalomalacia in horses, pulmonary edema in swine, hepatotoxic
and nephrotoxic effects in other domestic animals, and carcinogenesis
in laboratory animals. In humans, mycotoxins can cause reduced growth
rate, decreased resistance to infection, fatty liver syndrome and death.14
The influential Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project15, a pioneer
in opposition to this nazi science, quotes an 8/7/2000 editorial by
the Managing Editor of Chemical and Engineering News, the magazine of
the American Chemical Society, entitled "Agent Orange and F. oxysporum":
"There is an unavoidable moral component to scientific research, and
development of F. oxysporum as a weapon in the war on drugs or any other
war violates it. Scientists should just say no to participating in this
research."16
In closing, let me quote a couple of horrified plant biologists with
long experience, John M. McPartland, D.O., M.S. and David P. West, Ph.D.:
"In the case of pathogens of Cannabis, the non-target host at greatest
risk, because of its close phylogenetic relationship to Cannabis, is
hops (Humulus lupulus). At least 10 fungal pathogens are known to mutually
infect Cannabis and Humulus. The next closest relatives are the Urticaceae
(members of the nettle family) and the Moraceae (mulberry family), with
which Cannabis shares at least 20 fungal pathogens."
"Genetic engineers have recently been investigating a coca pathogen,
Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. erythroxli (Sands et al. 1997, Nelson et al.
1997). F. oxysporum f. sp. erythroxli was selected for coca eradication
because it caused natural epidemics in Peru and on the former Coca-cola
plantation on Kauai, where "containment of the fungus proved challenging."
(Sands et al. 1997) [That's Dr. David C. Sands of Ag/Bio Con scientifically
admitting that he has failed to control the spread of Fusarium to the
surrounding ecosystem.] Fusarium oxysporum is well known to bioengineers,
and previous researchers successfully inserted toxin genes into the
species. Nevertheless, Gabriel considered it "unwise" to clone a toxin
gene into a necrotrophic pathogen (such as F. oxysporum). He argued
that such a pathogen might gain unexpected fitness and radically expand
its host range, "a potentially dangerous experiment." Fusarium species
can produce a variety of toxic metabolites known as trichothecenes,
which gained some notoriety for their reputed use in biological warfare
("yellow rain"). F. oxysporum is known to cause systemic infections
in humans."17
Notes: Bibliographic references are listed at the cited sites:
1:http://www.sunshine-project.org/fungusreport.html
2:http://www.comunidadandina.org/english/press/np8-9-00.htm
3:Scientific American June, 1999; Title VIII of the Omnibus Consolidated
Appropriations Act, P.L. 105-277, contains the Western Hemisphere Drug
Elimination Act. This legislation authorizes billions of dollars in
funding during fiscal years 1999, 2000, and 2001 for the U.S. Customs
Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Defense, the Department
of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department
of Agriculture, and the Drug Enforcement Administration to enhance their
current drug interdiction programs as well as establish new interdiction
and source country programs.
4:http://www.sunshine-project.org/fungusreport.html
5:http://www.nal.usda.gov/ttic/tektran/data/000010/23/0000102399.html
6:http://fhpr8.srs.fs.fed.us/idotis/diseases/mimoswlt.htm
7:http://www.kari.org/Narp/dfid%20theme%202/051e.html
8:http://www.extento.hawaii.edu/kbase/crop/Type/fus_prim.htm
9:http://www.sunshine-project.org/fungusreport.html
10:http://www.mycoherbicide.net/OUR_ARTICLES/unpublished_manuscript.htm
11:http://www.sunshine-project.org/fungusreport.html
12:http://www.narconews.com/pressbriefing19-20september.html
13:http://www.extento.hawaii.edu/kbase/crop/Type/f_oxys.htm
14:http://www.sunshine-project.org/fungusreport.html
15:hammond@sunshine-project.org
16:http://www.earthsystems.org/list/elan/0928.html
17:http://www.gametec.com/hemp/mcpartland/mycoherbicides.html
