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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Check out this website, giveusnames.com.
One of the people involved is a gentleman by the name of Zach Millett.
Welcome to the show, Zach.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing all right.
So anyway, giveusnames.com is about Columbia, and I guess you guys are making movies, short films about individuals down there in Columbia, but on what basis?
Yeah, we're basically working with a production company to film a series of short documentaries and basically looking at displacement as a whole and breaking it down into some of the different elements that are causing displacement.
Displacement, as in you mean people forced from their homes?
Yes, people who have been forced from their homes either by armed actors or different policies that we're examining that are causing people to lose their livelihoods and have to flee their homes and their land.
And we're kind of breaking it down to show it through the eyes of individuals and families as opposed to trying to tackle the whole issue at one time.
And so the video that's on the front page of giveusnames.com right now, that's basically the promo for kind of the beginning of what you all are going to try to put together, right?
Yeah, right now it's a three-minute piece that we put together from footage from our trip, I guess last winter in December, and just kind of goes into, just lightly touches on some of the issues that we're going to be further examining in each individual documentary.
Well, just that little three-minute promo is enough to certainly pique my interest.
It's a pretty sad story.
Some of the stuff that the people described there is pretty hardcore.
One guy said, you know, this is my land.
I had horses, I had pigs, I had cows, I had crops.
And they came and they said, well, we'll either buy your land for this pittance or we'll buy your widow even cheaper than that, pal.
And he said, okay, goodbye.
And that's pretty rough.
Who was it, though, that was telling him he's got to go?
You know, what you have, you have different armed actors who are at play.
You have the FARC, the leftist guerrillas, and then you also have the right-wing paramilitaries, which the FARC, you know, have their ideals of, you know, they've been fighting a revolution for 40 years.
They essentially want to overthrow the government.
But then, you know, on the right-wing side of the paramilitaries, you have hired hands who, you know, use force to control resources and to do some of the stuff like land grabbing and also, you know, involved in the narcotics trade.
So you have the left-wing rebels, the right-wing reactionary paramilitary death squad types, and then you just have the drug businessmen, and all these people are preying on the average peasant in Colombia.
Right, and, you know, through all this, it's just the average working family who's just trying to provide food for their family that takes the brunt of the violence and, you know, really gets the bad end of it.
Well, now, what does this have to do with any of us?
I mean, it's not like the United States government has ever intervened in Colombia in any way, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of one of the really big unknown policies that the U.S. is carrying out.
Outside the Middle East, Colombia receives the most military aid in the world.
And through Plan Colombia, which was enacted in 1998, we've been fighting the war on drugs to the tune of $7.5 billion, roughly.
We've been sending out the fortified military to stop cocaine production is what our goal was for that.
Well, and how's that working out?
Partnership for a drug-free America?
Are we drug-free yet?
Yeah, I mean, you can look around and see, like, the effect it's having here.
You can look down to Mexico and see how that's getting played out now as well.
It's hard to get the exact figures from the government because everything is really twisted and distorted.
Well, you know, we've eradicated this much coca land, but the coca production has increased still because the farmers are now consolidating a lot of their coca fields.
But really, you know, from our research, we've seen that it really hasn't stopped cocaine production at all.
And it's really had a lot of negative effects outside of even really the cocaine trade.
Well, so what's it really all about?
Is there a certain—it's oil or other resources, tin, copper, something like that in Colombia?
Or it's just the CIA needs to keep the price of cocaine artificially high so that they can spend that money killing and torturing people in secret in other theaters of operation?
Or what's going on here?
Well, as of today, there's a myriad of factors going on.
And, you know, like in our promo video, you see the farmers on the hill that we're talking with.
And that was over—you know, you look at like a big landowner who has their farm, and then, you know, peasant farmers all around there with their small parcels.
There's, you know, subsistence farmers.
And the way that big landowners can increase their yield is to basically suck up all the farms around them.
So that's when the paramilitaries come in and basically force people to give up their small parcels, thus increasing, you know, the majority landowner's stake.
So you've got that going on.
So you do have some resource and land stuff.
But then also just with the cocaine trade, we're paying a lot of lift service to what we're doing there.
And when you add it all up, when you look at the money and where it's going in the program, it's just not doing what it's, quote, claiming to do.
Yeah.
Well, I apologize because I didn't really phrase my question clearly.
What I really was trying to get at was what's the American government's real interest there?
Because it can't just be that, you know, the Moms Against Cocaine Abuse pressure group told them to do this or something.
Is it just about selling helicopters?
Or is it about some corporation wants to steal their water or something, anything?
Or just selling weapons?
You know, I'm not – I mean, I'm not in a position to say for sure.
But, I mean, if you look at the aid we're sending to Columbia, it doesn't trickle down to a little man.
It's – that money is going into helicopters.
It's going to fund a very expensive aerial fumigation program.
It's going to – you know, it's going into a lot of people's hands.
You know, so it's taxpayers' dollars that are getting pulled up and sent down and going into, you know, companies' hands.
There's a lot of money in it.
Right.
Yeah, you know, I remember Ron Paul saying that when it comes to the debate about Plan Columbia in Congress, there are no lobbyists there except for, you know, in terms of Mothers Against Cocaine Abuse or whatever.
I'm making that up.
But there are no, you know, actual – the democracy really wants us to do something about drugs here.
It's just lobbyists from Bell Helicopter coming to say, yeah, we've got to stop all that cocaine running down in Columbia.
You know what?
You guys could use some Blackhawks and some Hueys and some machine guns.
Yeah, and if you look at just basic economics, you know, our drug policy in Columbia is all supply-based.
So we're trying to cut it off at the source, which, you know, you look at it, you talk about artificially inflating the price of cocaine.
If you just keep going after supply and don't touch demand at all, you're going to be constantly doing this, and you're just – you're raising the price of the commodity and you're allowing more money to be in it.
And that's assuming that you can't even curb production, which we haven't shown we've been able to do.
Right.
Well, but not for lack of trying.
I mean you explain – and by the way, everybody, again, it's Zach Millett.
The website is giveusnames.com, and I urge you also look at blog.giveusnames.com.
You have some interesting stuff up here, and a lot of it is about the fumigation, as I guess they call it, which means American money being spent not just on, you know, helicopters and paramilitaries, but being spent on, you know, Agent Orange-style poisoning of people's crops from the air.
Yeah, and, you know, you're talking about dropping herbicide on one of the most sensitive ecosystems in the world, the Amazon Basin.
All right, now hold it right there, Zach.
We've got to take this break.
We're going to come back, and we're going to be talking more with Zach Millett about America's war in Colombia.
Look at giveusnames.com, and hang tight.
That's forum.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I think this coffee's starting to kick in a little bit here.
We're talking with Zach Millett from giveusnames.com about America's drug war down in Colombia and really the displacement, the forced relocation of the average nobody in Colombia at the hands of the left-wing radicals, the right-wing radicals, and those who benefit from America's war on drugs down there.
Talk to us a little bit here, Zach, about what it means to have American paid-for planes spraying poison on people's crops in Colombia on a regular basis.
How regular of a basis does this even happen?
It's going on really regularly.
We had two guys on the ground the past couple months meeting with some farmers out in really remote areas.
We were actually able to even go in and meet with some farmers, and then they came back to the city.
Between them coming back to the city and going back out, a lot of the farmers they were talking with got fumigated.
We've been able to document that process pre, during, and we're now watching the post and seeing just what it's doing to a lot of people's legitimate crops.
Are they poisoning people with this stuff, too?
Yeah.
The thing is, when you're dropping someone off a plane like that, you can't be precise.
There's families that live around their little farms, and we've seen girls who've had facial lesions and skin conditions, almost like a scarring, almost like a chemical burn that they've gotten from this potent chemical that they're spraying.
There's detrimental health effects as well as environmental disaster.
Why don't you tell us about some of these people and what effect this has had on them on an anecdotal basis here?
It might as well be Afghanistan we're talking about here.
It's so far away.
Nobody here cares, really, unless you give them a reason to.
Yeah.
Some of the stuff we're really focusing on is some of these farmers who have the option.
Can I grow legitimate crops and feed my family, or should I grow coca and be a slave to some of the drug producers?
It's so tough.
You see the average guy just growing his bananas and different legitimate crops, and then they get fumigated while we're trying to knock out coca.
It usually takes just a matter of months before you can start growing coca because it's a very resilient crop.
As opposed to food crops, it will take several years before the land will be able to produce edible food.
These people are really left with no choice.
It's grow coca or let your family starve.
We're not talking about giant agribusiness or something here.
Most of these people are living off the land.
They don't have anything to sell at the end.
This is subsistence farming basically going on here.
This is the people that we're driving off of their own property.
They have very limited infrastructure, and it's really hard to get legitimate crops to a market that you can sell.
Our whole war on drugs and all this stuff comes down to us punishing the little guy who doesn't profit immensely off this stuff.
He makes very little money, just enough to feed his family.
Even if he is growing coca and producing what turns into cocaine, they're not the ones who make any money off this.
They're the ones who take the brunt of all these policies.
As you're saying, the demand in the United States stays the same regardless of whether people are put in prison for it or not.
I guess the market's going to find a way no matter what, but if they are complaining about particular farmers growing coca, they're the ones who make coca that much more expensive to sell than bananas or whatever else they could be growing.
It's our policy that gives all the incentive to that lowest-level farmer who, as you say, is barely profiting off of a thing anyway.
He's certainly not the moneybags guy, but we're the ones giving him the incentive to grow coca instead of food in the first place when we're not poisoning his food in the name of the coca.
Right.
We're virtually leaving him with no choice.
It's starve or grow coca.
The program doesn't incentivize farmers to do anything but grow coca.
It just perpetuates the problem.
How widespread is the collateral damage when it comes to spraying the coca?
Are they even trying or they don't even care?
Do they just spray any old thing in any part of the jungle they want and kill everybody's food all the time or rarely or half the time?
The fumigation program is just really shrouded in secrecy.
There's not any real oversight over the true effects of the fumigation.
That's what we're trying to research and provide is an honest look at what's going on and the effects of the spraying.
A lot of it is very careless, very thoughtless, just guys flying around in planes wiping out sides of mountains with this really, really potent chemical.
How bad is the fallout for the society?
Obviously people are being driven out of their homes, driven off of their farms.
Are they starving?
Are they hungry?
Are they dying?
They're in refugee camps or people are taking them in?
What's happening to these people?
What we see a lot of in Colombia, not just from the fumigations, but it is a big aspect as well as the other causes of displacement that we're looking at, is you'll see these people who've farmed their whole lives, two, three, four, five generations of farmers.
Once they have their livelihood taken away, either from an armed actor who forced them off the land or the fumigations that forced them off the land as well, they end up going to the cities and looking for ways to make ends meet in the cities.
You see a lot of the shanty towns, shanty camps around the city where they just go to try to find work and stuff.
These people aren't trained to do anything in the city.
They're not educated typically.
They don't have a skill set that can help them make a living in the city.
They're farmers or campesinos, but they've always done it.
All right, so now tell us again about this project.
Give us names.
Yeah, well, we're basically wanting to use the power of story and media to show the big problem of displacement in Colombia and break it down on a very personal level.
We believe that faces and names hold a lot more power than numbers and statistics.
By personifying the problem and giving you a name that you can relate to and putting a face with the problem, it'll have a lot more impact and we'll be able to touch people a lot more and make it real.
It is thousands of miles away.
We want it to be real and feel up close and personal.
Right, absolutely.
The big thing of mine is, well, as everybody knows, they never show us pictures of Iran because they're always talking about it.
We might have to bomb them off the face of the earth.
So it's better if it's kind of a misshapen shape in our mind, what it looks like on a map rather than what it looks like from eyeball view on the ground.
So I think you're absolutely right about the very same effect.
I think it's great work that y'all are doing.
Everyone, please go check out Zach Millett and his friends and their work at giveusnames.com.
And especially check out their blog.
It's good, blog.giveusnames.com.
Thanks again.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
