A former member of Colombia’s anti-narcotics police, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was euthanized on Monday after years of exposure to glyphosate sprays on coca fields.
Sergeant Gilberto Avila, 59 years old and whose body was largely paralyzed, reached this end of life in a medical establishment in Armenia (center-west), said one of his relatives to AFP.
“I don’t want glyphosate to continue killing lives like mine,” Giberto Avila said in a video sent to media last week, in which he made his decision public.
In the 1990s, he participated in several sprayings of coca cultivation areas, the basic component of cocaine, using this herbicide. “We had to guard the ground so the criminals wouldn’t hit the planes and helicopters…the chemicals were falling on us,” he said.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s neurodegenerative disease in 2009.
There is “a strong probability that it was because of the glyphosate, since two other colleagues are also sick. We were subject to the same spreading conditions,” he also said.
Scientific studies warn that prolonged exposure to this herbicide is a “risk factor” for developing Parkinson’s.
Communities growing coca have also reported malformations following spraying.
Colombia, the world’s largest exporter of cocaine, in 2015 suspended glyphosate spraying of drug crops, on suspicion that the product may cause health and environmental damage.
Colombia decriminalized euthanasia in 1997 for terminally ill patients and last year extended the right to people suffering from “intense physical or psychological suffering” due to injury or incurable disease.