Fumigated Rural Communities Take Over Downtown Cantagallo
By César Jerez
Agencia Prensa Rural
September 26, 2005
Around 300 people, including several woman and children, from the 22 outlying
rural zones of the town of Catagallo, have been occupying the municipality’s
downtown area since Saturday, September 24...
The protest action is being realized, according to participants, because
of the grave situation of health and nutrition that the local peasant farmers
are currently enduring as a product of the indiscriminate fumigations of
Plan Colombia. The farmers are demanding an end to the fumigations.
The fumigations, managed and imposed on the Colombian government
by the United States administration, have put approximately 50,000 people
in the Cimitarra River Valley (in southern Bolívar department, in
the region known as the Magdalena Medio) into a situation of hunger and
illness.
The fumigations have been going on in the area for three months
now. The peasant farmers say that they are indiscriminate, as “in
addition to the coca, the food crops, cattle pastures, jungles and water
supply are also fumigated.”
Peasant farmers from surrounding communities such as Chaparral, Yanacué,
Palagua, Alto Paragua, San Lorenzo, Patio Bonito, Mira Lindo, Las Brisas,
Sepultura and Isla no hay como Dios have now been in the town’s elementary
school for three days, waiting to reach agreements with the local and national
government on an end to the fumigations, emergency food aid and healthcare,
as well as structural investment that would permit them to begin to substitute
other crops for coca.
