Dyncorp Sued- When did Poisoning Foreign Farmers Become US National Security Policy?: Drugwar.com

"It is a hot zone, but that doesn’t mean you can poison people! If you can’t do it safely you shouldn’t do it." Terry Collingsworth, Attorney, International Labor Rights Fund

When Did Poisoning Foreign Farmers Become US National Security Policy?

by Preston Peet

March 7, 2002

While discussions about the long term effects of Monsanto's Agent Orange are underway in Vietnam now, another of the company's chemical brews is being sprayed on Colombia by the corporation Dyncorp under US government contract as part of the US-backed Plan Colombia. Dyncorp in turn is being sued in a class action suit in US federal court, filed September 11, 2001, by plantiffs representing up to 10,000 Ecuadorian indians living along the Ecuador/Colombia border in the Province of Sucumbios, who have received fallout from the extremely dangerous chemicals being used ostensibly to kill coca and poppy plants.

Citing horrific examples of fevers, diarrhea, skin rashes, eye irritations, body aches, outbreaks of sores, vomiting, bleeding from the intestines, even 4 dead children in the area, not to mention all the dead dogs, cats, horses, pigs, cows, corn, coffee, yucca and other crops, the subsistence farmers, teachers, and other plaintiffs want the spraying into Ecuador stopped, economic recompense from Dyncorp for injuries sustained by themselves and their environment, and medical attention. Dr. Adolfo Maldonado Campos, a Spanish medical professional who worked in the afflicted area of Ecuador for 6 years, becoming familiar with the tropical diseases prevalent there, estimates after visiting and researching the spraying’s effects that 100 percent of the Ecuadorians living within 5 kilometers of Dyncorp’s spraying just across the border in Colombia exhibited symptoms "associated with acute intoxication from the aerial spray released upon them by the DynCorp Defendants. The percentage of residents suffering from acute intoxication decreases to eighty nine per cent of the population within the zone located between five and ten kilometers from which the fumigations occurred," according to the lawsuit. Up to 94 schools in the area had to be closed due to the spraying.

No Descrimination

This poison does not discriminate between plants, destroying them all. "It kills plants," testified Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Rand Beers in a sworn deposition, Wednesday, February 27, 2002. He was under questioning by Terry Collingsworth, an attorney with the International Labor Rights Fund representing the plaintiffs in their suit. "Yeah, they kind of danced around that issue, but we got a pretty clear, non-ambiguous answer this time," says Collingsworth. "This poison does not know the difference between corn and cocaine."

Made up of glyphosate, the generic term for Monsanto’s herbicide Round-Up, and a surfactant to make the herbicide stick to the plants, the spray used in Colombia has never been tested on human beings to gauge its effects, according to Beers’ testimony. Beers refused to confirm the name of the company supplying the glyphosate, for National Security reasons. Originally the surfactant mixed with the glyphosate was something called COZMO FLUX, made by the British company ICI but now apparently made by a different company, again unidentified by Beers, as ICI stopped selling their product for use in Plan Colombia after allegations of children growing ill after inhaling the spray were made public.

No Testing

Under US Executive Order 12114, it is required that there be tests and documentation thereof as to the possible ill effects upon the environment and people in a foreign country resulting from any action on the part of a US agency or group undertaking US policy. When asked Beers claimed in his deposition that he had never heard of the Executive Order, but confirmed that the mixtures of chemicals as used in Plan Colombia have never been tested on human beings.

"Everyone is pretty amazed by that one," says Collingsworth. "That’s significant in that there are legal requirements in how they test things that are applied outside of the US. Again, we’ll follow up on that. It goes to the question of whether they can claim that their fumigant has been approved, and the answer is "no, it hasn’t." So, for us, that’s all we need at this stage."

How High Is Too High?

Although Beers’ attorneys continued to raise objections to many of Collingsworth’s questions, he was able to confirm that Beers was aware there were negotiations, and implementation of a no-spray zone along the Ecuador-Colombia border inside of which planes were not allowed to spray, though Beers would not divulge the size of the swath, claiming it might alert drug producers of areas not subject to spraying. "There’s negotiations going on between the governments of Ecuador, Colombia and the US about the width of that no-spray zone," says Collingsworth. "That’s a government to government exercise. We have the documents from the Ecuadorian side where they initially demanded a 10-km no-spray zone. Beers, in his deposition, says it is a National Security secret how wide it is. But there is a no-spray zone. So for our purposes, that is again fantastic because it does indicate that there is no ambiguity they’re not supposed to be spraying, either directly or by accident anybody in Ecuador."

Beers was evasive answering questions about what sort of guidelines existed governing from how high the planes could safely spray. "The commercial applications say that you should spray it from no higher than 10 feet," relates Collingsworth. "I was asking him what his requirements were, and he wasn’t very well aware of them. For our purposes, we’re going to be able to establish that you’re not supposed to spray it very high off the ground because it drifts. They are spraying it way higher than anyone would recommend in order to avoid being shot down." Beers did note in his deposition that both Peru and Bolivia carry out their eradication programs by hand, refusing to use the herbicides in their countries. Beers claimed that hostile traffickers and terrorists made that impossible in Colombia.

What in the Heck is a Dyncorp?

First founded back in 1946 in Reston, Virginia, Dyncorp bills itself as a "technology and services company". Dyncorp received a $600 million contract in 1997 from the US Department of State to spray poisons, provide logistical support, and otherwise manage operations for the US-backed anti-drug Plan Colombia, launched in 1998. Since 1991, Dyncorp has worked with the State Department's International Narcotics and Law Enforcement aviation program, renewing that contract in 1996. According to the Los Angeles Times, (link Detroit Times), as of August, 2001, Dyncorp had approximately 335 civilian employees working on anti-drug efforts inside Colombia. In 2000, while raising the number from 100, Congress capped the number of civilian contractors allowed to work in Colombia on Plan Colombia at any one time at 300, a limit Dyncorp circumvents by utilizing non-US citizens who aren't counted by the State Department.

Dyncorp has personnel posted around the world, hiring out private military forces to do the jobs that can‘t be done by US troops without some sort of Congressional oversight, often training, equipping, and even transporting foreign countries‘ forces on operations, as in Colombia. Dyncorp is currently the target of a RICO lawsuit filed by Ben Johnson, a former employee who alleges Dyncorp fired him for reporting that other Dyncorp employees and supervisors stationed in Bosnia with him were buying and trading women sex slaves. Dyncorp’s British subsidiary, DynCorp Aerospace in Aldershot, England, has been sued in a second suit by Kathryn Bolkovac, an American who was working as one of the 2,100 police officers Dyncorp is under contract to supply the United Nations in the Balkans. She also alleges she witnessed widespread sex trade involvement on the part of her co-workers. Dyncorp fired her for allegedly falsifying her time sheets, which Bolkovac denies, after she gathered extensive evidence of the trade and reported it to her superiors. Dyncorp was also in the news after a Federal Express package on its way to the Dyncorp facilities at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida was opened May 12, 2001, inside of which was found 250 grams of a liquid resembling motor oil that allegedly contained heroin. Dyncorp spokespeople told the Nation, (July 3, 2001), that the test was done using "apparently faulty equipment," but the US Embassy in Bogota confirmed to the Nation that a package on its way to someone at Dyncorp’s Patrick AFB facilities had been "confiscated" by Colombian police who had detected heroin in the liquid. No subsequent test results were forthcoming, and nothing more has been heard of this mysterious package.

Still the Early Stages

"We’re at the very early stages of this," says Collingsworth, "so we have not yet had the right to get information from Dyncorp. Once I win this first round I will be able to get documents from them. That’s sort of what the purpose of this round one is, to be a reality check on the complaint, and we will win it." The International Labor Rights Fund, an AFL-CIO affiliated organization, is filing a response Monday, March 8, to Dyncorp’s lawyers' motion filed in front of federal judge Richard Roberts in January 2002, seeking to dismiss the suit over mainly National Security reasons. Their motion went to great lengths to prove the indispensability of the spraying campaign, immediately contradicting itself by first noting the long time US involvement in Colombia since the late 1970s, then illustrating how the drug trade has only exploded in size and dimension over those years. Dyncorp’s CEO, Paul. V Lombarti, wrote a letter on October 25, 2001, to the Rights Fund’s President, Bishop Jesse de Witt, and to all the Fund’s board members, asserting that the plaintiffs’ actions if successful would only benefit the drug cartels, and that in these post- September 11 days it would be best not to be distracted by such a "frivolous," lawsuit, meant merely to "fulfill a political agenda."

An Excuse to Increase Spraying

All this comes at a time when the US government is questioning whether alternative development programs in Colombia are helping decrease the amounts of coca and poppies grown. The General Accounting Office released a report on February 8, 2002, noting that as they are administered now, alternative crop substitution programs are not economically feasible, nor efficacious enough in cutting drug production to continue at this time. GAO noted that only $5.6 million of $52.5 million allocated for alternative development was spent by September 30, the end of the last fiscal year. Senators Charles Grassley, (R- Iowa), Jesse Helms, (R- NC) and Mike DeWine, (R- OH) requested the inquiry to find out why this money was not being spent.

"I suspect this report is part of a Republican effort to discredit alternative development in Colombia (which isn't hard to do) IN ORDER to say it isn't working and that the US should be able to fumigate without worrying about providing farmers with an alternative," says Sanho Tree of the Washington, DC based Institute for Policy Studies‘ Drug Policy Project. "There are indeed huge problems with the design, implementation, and effectiveness of alternative development, but this pittance is usually all that campesino families are left with as the fumigation proceeds. Of course the US shouldn't be intervening in Colombia in the first place, but I suspect Jesse Helms & Co. simply want to forget about any compensation to peasant farmers so that they can spray the region harder and faster. Or worse, US-backed troops need to occupy the region before alternative development money can be spent "effectively". The current alternative development sham leaves campesinos between a rock and a hard place, but if these Republicans have their way, these farmers would be left with less than nothing. So much for compassionate conservatism. GAO reports are a bit like Arthur Anderson: depending on which party requests the study, they'll tell them what they want to hear. In this case, it was requested by three of the harshest drug warriors in the Senate."

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Here is a collection of links leading to information about Dyncorp, its actions, history, missions, troubles and even Dyncorp's own views on things.

International Labor Rights Fund Lawsuits Against Dyncorp.

Rumble from the Jungle

Fumigation- An Attack on the Ecology and People of Colombia

OCP Protestors Attacked by Military

Ecuador Hope for Settlement in ChevronTexaco Case

Oil Inflames Colombia's Civil War

US Contractors to Colombia

Ecuadorans File US Suit Over Plan Colombia

Statement of Paul Lombardi- President and Chief Executive

Dyncorp