By Carley St. Clair
For 21 years, the drone of low-flying planes has been omnipresent throughout the state of Cauca, Colombia. Otherwise healthy people have had troubling breathing, babies have been born with birth defects, women have had miscarriage after miscarriage, crops have died mysteriously, and individual rights have been continually disrespected.
These planes have been dusting glyphosate, the main ingredient in RoundUp weed killer, over the lush rainforest, towering mountains, and rocky coast lines of Colombia’s westernmost state.
The Colombian government, in partnership with the United States, implemented the program as part of its own War on Drugs. The rationale: spray herbicides to kill coca—the plant used to make cocaine—and cut the illicit drug trade off at the knees.
Policymakers didn’t think about how these toxic chemicals would hurt people and Colombia’s environment.
From 1994 to 2015, millions of people in Colombia were exposed to deadly levels of herbicides, and farmers’ crops were destroyed. Many of these victims—robbed of their health, livelihoods, and homes—are members of indigenous or Afro-Colombian communities.
Activists like Yolanda Garcia Luango are enraged. As the Executive Director of the Aso Manos Negra community organization, Luango has been a leader in the successful movement to end the spraying.
In 2013, Global Greengrants Fund granted $5,000 to Luango and Aso Manos Negra. This seemingly small grant allowed the organization to research just how harmful glyphosate is to people’s health.
Meanwhile, farmers, indigenous communities, human rights activists, Afro-Colombian communities, and lawyers worked together to file and argue their case against the government in court. Aso Manos Negra used the Greengrant to publicize the court case and gain 15,000 supporters.
After many years and in collaboration with citizen groups all around Colombia, Aso Manos Negra finally got the upper hand:
In March 2015, the World Health Organization declared that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
And in April, the Colombian government announced it would stop fumigating for coca and subjecting Colombia’s marginalized communities to toxic glyphosate.
It was a monumental win, but the fight isn’t over. Monsanto, the U.S.-based manufacturer of RoundUp, claims that glyphosate doesn’t threaten people’s health when it is applied correctly. (This is the same company that has made its fortune developing genetically modified organisms and suing farmers.)
Luango and Aso Manos Negra are now demanding the government recognize victims of fumigation, take responsibility, and tell the truth about what the program did and why it continued for so long.
“This is just one opportunity for victims to be recognized in this country,” she says. “There are many victims in this country…we must work to heal together.”