The Green Planet Monitor - Edition # 6

Long after wars end, landmines continue to inflict a hideous toll. Twenty thousand people are killed each year by landmines and other forms of exploded ordnance. That’s fifteen hundred a month – forty each day. It’s a developmental disaster. Farmers can’t work their fields; kids can’t play … or they do and get killed; treating the blinded, burned and maimed costs poor countries a fortune. Landmine clearance is key. So is public awareness. GPM producer Norma Jean MacPhee reports from the tiny West African nation of Gambia.

And thirty years have come and gone since the end of the American War – as the Vietnamese call it – and its toxic aftermath lingers on. Between 1961 and the early 1970s, the U.S. drenched Vietnam with almost a hundred million liters of Agent Orange and other herbicides. It wasn’t just rainforests and mangroves that suffered … and the poison continues its dirty work.

Finally, on the other side of the planet from Vietnam sits little Guatemala. Back in 1954, Guatemalans elected Jacobo Arbenz as their president. Arbenz was a socialist. So, with U.S. government support, Guatemala’s military toppled Arbenz and thirty years of conflict ensued, pitting soldiers and paramilitary against rebel insurgents. An estimated quarter of a million died, mostly poor Mayan villagers. Guatemalans continues to grapple with violence and impoverishment.