Drug War Testimonies from Ecuador
November 14, 2005
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Families frightened by warplanes and helicopters flying overhead. Men coming back from their fields with strange rashes
and marks on their bodies. Women washing their faces in what was once a clean river, and their skin breaking out.
Children suddenly coming down with mysterious stomach ailments, crying because their eyes are severely irritated.
Farmers weeping as they watch their crops die, poisoned, their livelihoods destroyed.
These are some of the things we hear and images we see in the video posted this weekend, and now available with a full
English transcript. It is a compilation of some of the testimonies gathered by the International Verification Mission
that traveled to the Ecuador-Colombia border this June, and comes to us thanks to our friend Adolfo Maldonado and his
colleagues at the Ecuadorian organization Acción Ecológica, as well as the producers at Acción Creativa; both groups
members of the Inter-Institutional Committee Against Fumigations.
The mission went to look into the continuing claims of Ecuadorian peasant farmers that the fumigation programs just
across the border, in which the Colombian army, with vast financial and logistical support from the U.S. government,
dumps untold thousands of gallons of powerful herbicides onto the countryside in an attempt to eradicate coca and opium
plantations. They also investigated claims that Colombian troops had crossed into Ecuadorian territory while fighting
against the guerrilla insurgency, violating Ecuador’s avowed neutrality toward the Colombian civil war.
Download and watch the video, here:
From somewhere in a country called América,
Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin