Biowar
in the Andes
http://www.purefood.org/corp/biowar.cfm
Biowar in
the Andes: The CIA's Next Secret Weapon
Genetic Engineering and Chemical Biological Warfare
The Steps of Agent Blue
At the Institute for
Genetics in Kazakhstan, former Soviet biowarriors are being financed
by the US and Britain to test mycoherbicides
Fusarium oxysporum
strains that infect coca plants are closely related to those that attack yams,
a staple in the Andean diet.
McCaffery's Plague
Along with the other
enormities presently perpetrated in the name of the War on Drugs, the United States is now
actively preparing to deploy biological weapons. The weapons consist of plant
pathogens designed to attack coca, cannabis and opium poppy crops.
Research into the project has involved the resurrection of biological agents
developed long ago at Fort Detrick,
Maryland,
center for the US biowar program closed down by President Nixon
in 1969. Deep-frozen at the time of the program's termination, they are now
being thawed out and readied for assault on producer countries in the third
world. Also involved are veterans of the Soviet biological warfare effort, now
being funded by the US through the connivance of an obscure UN agency, employed for this
purpose in order to shield the US from
well-deserved charges of violating the internationally negotiated biological
weapons convention.
The work is proceeding
despite well attested evidence that the weapons, if deployed, will have profound
and disastrous impact on the ecologies of the countries in which they are used.
Furthermore, the USDA is now researching the use of genetic modification to
enhance the potency of these bio-weapons. The principal agents under
development are microbial pathogens.
At the Institute for
Genetics in Kazakhstan, former Soviet biowarriors are being financed
by the US and Britain to test mycoherbicides-fungi, specifically Pleospora - to kill opium poppies and marijuana plants. In
the Andes and
western Amazon, the US is planning the testing and widespread application of fusarium oxysporum, an anti-coca
fungus. The FY 2000 budget contains at least $23 million for these programs,
although further appropriations are almost certainly buried in covert military
and intelligence budgets.
The prospect of being on the receiving end of a biological attack is not
alluring to countries such as Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. The
Peruvian government has already banned the testing and or deployment of the
fungi. The Colombian government is similarly queasy, but has been sharply
admonished by the project's supporters in the US Congress that if Colombia wants
its $1.8 billion aid package, it had better take the fungi too.
Last March, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman,
R-N.Y., added an amendment to the Colombian aid bill requiring President
Clinton to certify that the Colombian government "has agreed to and is
implementing a strategy to eliminate Colombia's
total coca and opium poppy production" using, among other means,
"tested, environmentally safe mycoherbicides."
The amendment is still in the bill (which is still stalled in the senate)
despite a submission by Colombian scientists to the Colombian Ombudsman for the
Environment that the use of mycoherbicide agents in Colombia
represents "a great danger both for Colombian humans as well as for the
Colombian environment and biodiversity".
It is easy to see why the Colombians are worried. The absolute
requirement of this sort of weapon is that it should be "host specific",
ie that it should attack only the intended victim and
nothing else. According to Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project, which has researched and publicized this enormity, tests conducted
by USDA-contracted researchers in 1994 and 1995 using the favored strain of the
fungus fusarium oxysporum-EN4-resulted in two
non-coca species becoming infected.
Furthermore, fusarium oxysporum
strains that infect coca plants are closely related to those that attack yams,
a staple in the Andean diet. This is hardly surprising, Hammond points
out, in view of the fact that EN4 is designed to attack different strains of
coca and therefore cannot be entirely host specific. Thus the rare and
beautiful Agrias butterfly may soon fall as one more
casualty of the War on Drugs, since its larvae feed and mature on wild
relatives of the coca plant. One of the few remaining areas where Agrias can be found is the upper Putamayo
river region, a center both of guerrilla activity and coca cultivation in Colombia and
therefore a prime target for the US fungus
spraying campaign.
Meanwhile, back at the lab, USDA researchers have been working to create
genetically modified strains of the fungi, including the cloning of fusarium strains that attack potatoes, in order to produce
something still more vicious.
However, in their search for instruments of what is officially known as
"bio-control", the government's researchers have also, it seems,
reached back into the past. Sometime before 1969, according to documents
supplied to Hammond under the FOIA, a team from APHIS, the USDA's plant and animal
inspection service, found a virus on a Datura tree
imported from Cauca, Colombia. Someone, it is not clear who, determined that the virus could be
useful as an anti-opium poppy agent, and it was dispatched to the US biological
warfare center at Fort Detrick, Maryland under the
label D-437.
Following Nixon's order to close the place down, D-437 was not destroyed
but put in deep frozen storage, forgotten by all but the researchers who had
worked so happily at Detrick. On April 12 this year,
Hammond caught
a brief mention of D-437 on a US Army website, along with the fact that it was
being studied by a Dr Vernon Damsteegt, himself a Detrick veteran. Following enquiries by Hammond, all
mention of the virus and its custodian was hurriedly removed from the site,
which now carried a fraudulent notification that it had last been updated on
April 6. 1969 was the year Richard Nixon launched his war on drugs, using it to
set up what was intended to be his very own secret police force - the Drug
Enforcement Agency, a story chronicled in Edward J. Epstein's great book Agency
of Fear.
Biological warfare was integral to the US war
against Vietnam. CounterPunchers will recall Agent Orange,
the hellish brew deployed to defoliate the jungle. Agent Blue, targeted on rice
production, is less well known. The aim was to wipe out the NLF's
food supply. Rice plantations deemed to be servicing the enemy were duly
sprayed and obliterated. Professor Matthew Meselsen
recalls how, early in 1970, he was taken by a US Army Chemical Corps colonel to
survey a valley in an upland area that had been sprayed with Agent Blue some
weeks before. As they flew over the devastated valley, the colonel proudly
explained to Meselsen that this had obviously been an
NLF food supply area since there were no houses to be seen.
Later, they landed at a nearby village that turned out to be thronged
with refugees from the valley. The refugees explained that they had fled
because the Americans had just destroyed their rice crop. Scrutinizing
photographs he had taken from the air, Meselsen later
detected numerous houses that had been invisible while flying overhead at
speed. A simple calculation revealed that the amount of rice under cultivation
in the valley had been just sufficient to feed the locals, with none left over
to feed hungry Vietnamese guerrillas. Meselsen wrote
a report that prompted some political qualms in the US
command in Vietnam, which recommended to Washington that Agent Blue be terminated. The recommendation was leaked to the
Washington Post, whereupon Nixon cancelled the program forthwith.
It is a measure of the obtuse barbarity of our present generation of
drug warriors that they make Richard Nixon look sane. Despite abundant evidence
of the dangers of deploying bioweapons such as the
fungi in the wild, the US appears determined to press ahead. CP
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