Or maybe it is, I don't know what you think about how cocaine is produced, or why some people in Colombia grow coca and turn the leaves into coca paste for further refinement and export. If you're like most of us U.S. Americans, you probably don't really think about it.

But as a drug war characterized by brutal military and police interventions continues to intensify in Mexico, Colombia and our own communities in the U.S., maybe we ought to think about and listen to the people directly affected by it. There's a new film that our friends at Witness for Peace just produced called Shoveling Water: War on Drugs, War on People that helps us do just that. It looks at the story of coca growing and the effects of U.S. policy -- fumigations specifically -- on communities in Colombia, and features folks from many walks of life in Colombia speaking for themselves about their experiences with U.S. policy. I highly, highly recommend watching it, and it's easy -- all 25 minutes are posted on Vimeo here.

Some of the farmers, as they're adding gasoline, baking soda, cement and other ingredients to the coca leaves to turn it into coca paste, asked whether President Obama would be seeing the film. When told it's possible, they were glad -- they wanted to show that "it's not how people think. It's not easy; you don't make a lot of money doing this."

Maybe I can't fully understand a reality so different from my own. Can't know what it feels like to be pushed off my land by mega-development projects or corporate plantations. To have my livelihood taken away, and not be able to feed my children enough food. To try to grow yuca and corn and plantains but to have these food crops fumigated -- killed -- by the government's planes dropping poison from the sky while the hardy coca bush bounces back within a matter of weeks.

But even if I won't ever totally get it, I can and should listen to people who are caught in a conflict that is being fueled by U.S. funding to further U.S. economic interests.

Listen when the mayor of one of Colombia's major cities tells us "half the population of our city is displaced" -- a region that our government has been fumigating for fifteen years. Where folks increasingly get awful rashes and respiratory ailments and women experience more reproductive complications than can be explained away.

Listen to a farmworker organizer telling us that "fumigations have been a plan of extermination of human and natural life, and have destabilized our lives."

Or a farmer asking plainly, "and now what do we do? Without our land, what do we do?"

Ten thousand farmers have reported their food crops fumigated. The UN agrees there is "credible evidence" that fumigations are harmful to human health.

Since fumigations began in full force across the country -- the year 2000 -- coca production has increased 23 percent. At the very least, it's time to change who we're listening to when our government decides where to put our resources.

Labels: Colombia, fumigations