Bad Weed | Translation

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[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante, I’m Daniel Alarcón.

Pergamino, Buenos Aires province, Argentina. A medium-sized city, with 100,000 inhabitants, in the heart of the Humid Pampa, the richest and most prosperous agricultural area in the country. A sea of soybeans, corn, and wheat, a place where all the inhabitants have a connection to the countryside: they live off it, for it… or despite it.

That’s where Sabrina Ortiz was born. And she was still there, 27 years later, that afternoon in 2011, when she heard the distant hum of an engine. She knew exactly what it was. She had heard that noise before. Still, she peeked out the window to see: in the distance, a tractor was slowly crossing the bright green field in front of her house, across a dirt road. It was the “mosquito,” as everyone called the machine that producers use to spray pesticides on the crops.

After the noise, the smell arrived, one she knew all too well, but this time, it was different.

[Sabrina]: There was wind that day… And that wind carried all the poison to my house. And, well, it started coming in, coming in, coming in…

[Daniel]: She checked that the windows were closed and lowered the blinds.

[Sabrina]: I don’t know what they sprayed that day, but it was incredibly strong. Much stronger than the other times. It was getting into every crack of the house, it was like it was coming in like a gas chamber, getting stronger and stronger… The air was poison.

[Daniel]: And now, she, who was five months pregnant, was breathing in that poison.

She started feeling ill. Her head hurt, and her eyes were irritated. Her daughter Fiama, 10 years old, who was with her in the house, began to have trouble breathing. They had had skin rashes after a fumigation before, so Sabrina thought it was better to leave. They could come back once it was over and the smell had dissipated.

But when they came back later…

[Sabrina]: It seemed like it was more concentrated and that it had accumulated in the air.

And well, I started having more headaches, my nasal passages started to get irritated, my throat, my mouth, my lips were chapped. My body started swelling up, swelling, and I began to feel nauseous, a lot of nausea, stomach pain, vomiting, vomiting…

[Daniel]: She lay down, thinking that maybe resting would help. But she couldn’t fall asleep. She was worried, and both of them still felt bad.

Sabrina’s pain became unbearable, so she went to the hospital with her husband. She didn’t say it out loud, barely could think it, but something terrified her: it had been hours since she had felt the baby move.

[Sabrina]: I didn’t want to think about anything… anything bad. In fact, I even had the denial of going to the doctor so that they wouldn’t tell me something bad had happened, right?

And yes… something had happened. Something had happened. The doctor told me the baby was lifeless, no heartbeat, no vital signs. And well, that’s how it was.

[Daniel]: Sabrina barely managed to tell the doctor what had happened that afternoon: the spraying tractor, the wind, the smell, the feeling that everything was burning her from the inside.

[Sabrina]: And he told me, “Well, look, this is clearly a… it’s poisoning, but imagine if I sign something, they’ll kill me.”

[Daniel]: She didn’t know how to respond. She was too shocked by the news she had just received to fully understand what he was trying to say.

But over the following days, she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

[Sabrina]: It clicked in my head, like saying, well, this is something much bigger. This is about something much darker than I thought, right?

[Daniel]: A pause, and we’ll be right back.

[Daniel]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante. Our producer Emilia Erbetta tells us more.

[Emilia Erbetta]: Sabrina grew up surrounded by fields. When she was 10, her parents bought a plot of land in Villa Alicia, a humble neighborhood with low houses and a few small farms on the east side of the city. Not far from there, just a few meters away, the larger fields stretched out towards the horizon, where corn had been planted historically, and in the mid-70s, soybeans arrived.

[Sabrina]: From the moment you… from the moment you’re born, you have this chip in your head, this idea that the countryside is the engine of the city of Pergamino, right?

[Emilia]: It drives the city. It organizes the year, the routines. In Pergamino, 80% of the land is devoted to crops, so a good or bad harvest defines the years that follow.

[Sabrina]: It was what everyone wanted, right? The countryside, nature, the movements of the machines, all that organization among the people, because the harvest was coming or because the planting was coming, and you grow up admiring all of that, right?

[Emilia]: Sabrina felt it was her own. Her parents worked as employees on one of the farms, and one of her grandfathers had also worked on a ranch. Even though they didn’t own half a hectare, their lives were completely intertwined with agricultural activities.

At 16, she got pregnant by her first boyfriend. She managed to finish school with some difficulties, and soon after, in early 2001, her first daughter, Fiama, was born.

She lived with her family while studying to become a teacher and saved up enough money to build her own house, just a few meters from her parents’ house.

She was there when, around 2006, aerial spraying began in the fields surrounding the city.

[Sabrina]: The first time I heard the plane, I… I looked out to see what was happening and saw the plane with its nozzles open, releasing that cloud of… of poison, and at that moment, honestly, I didn’t realize how much damage it could cause, right?

[Emilia]: The planes would fly over the fields at low altitude. Following the line of the wings, there was a row of nozzles from which a combination of chemicals commonly called agrochemicals was sprayed in a pulverized form. Sabrina didn’t know which chemicals were being used, but it was likely glyphosate, atrazine, metolachlor… some of the most common ones in the area to kill insects and weeds.

The producers sprayed about five or six times a year. They used different methods depending on the time and development of the crops: when they were small, just starting to grow, they sprayed from the ground, and when they were tall, they used planes. Sabrina saw it all from the window of her house, and it seemed as normal as watching the sun rise and set.

But even though it seemed harmless to her, not everyone thought the same.

[Sabrina]: And my dad always told me to close everything when they were spraying because it could be harmful. But of course, we didn’t know how bad it could be, right?

Until at some point, I started to see that, well, my daughter was breaking out. Just like that. The doctor said she was allergic. They gave her medication with corticosteroids, they gave her injections… she kept breaking out anyway. So, I started paying more attention to when those symptoms appeared, right?

[Emilia]: She started keeping a record: every time Fiama broke out, she wrote down the date, the symptoms, and whether they coincided with the passing of the plane or the tractor. And at one point, it wasn’t just her daughter: Sabrina noticed that the whole family felt bad after the fumigations, even her parents.

She decided to start talking to her neighbors. She went door to door. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but after a couple of conversations, it didn’t take long for her to realize they weren’t the only ones.

[Sabrina]: The kids had exactly the same symptoms as Fiama. All the kids had the same diagnosis at that time: Atopic skin, respiratory allergies, skin rashes, swollen tongue, swollen throat, swollen bodies, irritation.

[Emilia]: At this point, the connection seemed obvious to her.

So she decided to ask for help. She started with the first place where she thought they might give it to her: the municipal building. She arrived alone because she couldn’t get anyone, not a neighbor, to accompany her.

[Sabrina]: I don’t know how to put it, but no one came with me. It didn’t move anyone… It was something so naturalized for many people that no one cared, but well, I knew I had to go because I knew something was happening.

[Emilia]: She went to speak with the Secretary of Health, a doctor named Matías Villeta, and she brought with her a note explaining the situation in her neighborhood and her daughter’s medical history.

[Sabrina]: Because I was just a worried mom who needed to know what was happening to us, who needed someone to open the door and say: don’t worry mom, we’ll go check what’s happening.

[Emilia]: The official received her in his office after half an hour. Sabrina told him about her house near the soybean fields, the spraying planes, and how her little girl would react every time they passed by.

[Sabrina]: And that, well, I needed help because I didn’t know what to do, because the doctors couldn’t find the right treatment for her, and I was sure it was related to that.

[Sabrina]: And I remember he told me, “No, but that can’t be. We all live surrounded by fields here,” he said. “Otherwise, the whole city would be sick, right?”

[Emilia]: The whole city, I don’t know, Sabrina thought, but yes, a neighborhood. Hers, Villa Alicia.

She begged the official to see it with his own eyes. To speak with the neighbors, to ask them what was happening, because she knew firsthand that many other kids were also getting sick. That couldn’t be normal.

[Sabrina]: Then he said to me, “And how do you know all this? Did you go around causing trouble?” he said… You went around causing trouble, he said…

[Emilia]: The official responded that, well, they would go see, but he didn’t give her any further specifics. Sabrina left the office disappointed.

[Sabrina]: We were completely adrift, there was nothing stopping it, or even a little bit of control, or inspectors who would go out. Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing. It was completely free and rampant. So, I expected it to be the Secretary of Health with his team, but unfortunately, he never went.

[Emilia]: So she went back to see him two more times. The second time, the official made her wait for several hours before seeing her, and again, he didn’t give her any concrete response.

It was on the third visit when Sabrina felt something collapse inside her. She had been sitting alone for more than three hours, holding Fiama’s medical files on her lap, reviewing in her mind everything that had happened in her house over the last 5 years. She felt the exhaustion from the sleepless nights taking care of her daughter, trying to ease her pain, the burning of her skin… Because the spraying moment was just the beginning.

[Sabrina]: It’s not like they spray you, you get hurt, and that’s it, but the whole recovery process. Being careful where you put the clothes, that the cream burns, that the injectable hurts, all of that process as a mom, you have to go through it.

[Emilia]: And on top of that physical exhaustion, there was another kind of fatigue, more emotional. She had walked the halls of the municipality many times, knocked on the doors of the council offices, consulted lawyers, even tried to speak with the mayor. But she always encountered the same thing…

[Sabrina]: No one opened the door for me, you’d say fumigations and automatically the door would close, and they’d leave you waiting there for 2 hours, 3 hours, and no one would come out.

[Emilia]: So that day when they told her the secretary wouldn’t see her, she understood that what they were really saying was something else: they wouldn’t do anything for her, nor for her daughter, nor for her neighbors’ children. They were alone.

It was around this time, in 2011, that she became pregnant and lost the baby after a fumigation. The scene with which we began this story.

That was the day Sabrina’s life took an unimaginable turn. She didn’t know it at the time, when she returned home confused and sad, with the future she had imagined for herself and her family shattered.

After that, her life derailed. Fiama kept getting sick, and she herself could barely get out of bed. She couldn’t stop thinking about what the doctor had said, that the pregnancy loss was due to poisoning, and that if she went out to say anything, they would kill her. She thought about how different it was for her, as she had already lost so much. She felt like there was no escape.

[Sabrina]: It feels like they put poison in your body. They force you to have that poison in your body, in some way it becomes a part of you, and no one asks you anything. I mean, it’s. To me, it’s an outrage. Like a violation of the body.

[Emilia]: She spent several days like this, maybe weeks. No sleep, no food, no strength to get up.

[Sabrina]: I fell into a very deep depression that took me many days to get through. It was hard for me to understand human beings too because I couldn’t understand how they didn’t care about someone else’s life, you know?

[Emilia]: Until one morning, her daughter stood beside her bed, as if waiting for her to get up this time.

[Sabrina]: That morning, when my daughter came to look for me, I said: Well, either I sink or I do something. She’s going to keep getting sick and I’m the mom. And if we mean nothing to a lot of people, I have to do something for my daughter. To change that. And well, I decided to do something.

[Emilia]: Slowly, an improbable idea began to grow in her.

[Sabrina]: I said, “Well, the first thing I need are tools to go a little further.”

[Emilia]: And so, at the age of 28, with a 12-year-old daughter, she started studying to become a lawyer.

If no one wanted to defend her, fine: she would defend herself.

[Daniel]: A pause, and we’ll be right back.

[Daniel]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante. Emilia Erbetta continues telling us the story.

[Emilia]: Sabrina started studying law in 2013, a few months after losing her pregnancy.

Meanwhile, she became the spokesperson for the fumigated families in Pergamino. At first, a solitary voice. She knocked on doors and put herself in front of the few microphones the local media brought her. She spoke about the situation in the neighborhood in general, but said little about what had happened to her.

[Sabrina]: I still couldn’t talk about the pregnancy loss, it was very hard for me…

At first, well, they thought I was crazy, someone who wanted to take advantage of something, right? Some economic gain or something political.

[Emilia]: We couldn’t find any audio of these interviews, but Sabrina says she remembers well the helplessness she felt hearing some officials talk about her in the local media.

[Sabrina]: The politicians in charge came out to speak on the radio, in a lot of places, right? Dismissing what I was asking for or what I was claiming, right?

[Emilia]: Despite all these reactions, little by little, her demands seemed to find some open ears: by the end of 2014, about three years after she first visited the Secretary of Health’s office, a neighborhood assembly managed to get the council to approve an ordinance that, among other things, prohibited fumigations within 100 meters of urban areas.

It was a small victory. But it wouldn’t last long: soon, the mayor vetoed the measure, and although the council finally ratified it, Sabrina still saw the planes flying very close to her house.

It took about two more years for her to graduate, until she finally obtained her degree in 2017.

[Sabrina]: It was very strong because I said, “Well, I made it. I’m on the step I want to be, at the door to the goal I want to achieve.”

[Emilia]: By then, Sabrina and her husband had another son, Ciro, who soon also started to get sick. At three years old, his mouth and throat would swell after fumigations, and he lost 5 kilos in a month, until they finally diagnosed him with lymphatic gland inflammation in his intestines.

And Fiama hadn’t improved, quite the opposite: at 16, she had undergone several surgeries, even spent some time in a wheelchair, and was finally diagnosed with chronic osteomyelitis, a rare disease that causes cysts in the bones. It’s usually caused by a bacteria or after a fracture, but this wasn’t the case.

[Sabrina]: They did all the studies for every disease that could have been causing that. All were ruled out. From the simplest to the most complex. There was no diagnosis for it. There was no trigger for it, it had no name.

[Emilia]: She had also had more serious health problems: while studying, she suffered two strokes. It was years of going from doctor to doctor, alternating study hours with medical consultations. And it was in one of those many consultations that a doctor recommended Sabrina have her entire family undergo a toxicology study.

[Sabrina]: To our great pain, right? they determined what she could tolerate. The little girl had 100 times more, and I had 58 times more.

[Emilia]: The laboratory report showed what Sabrina had already suspected: all three of them had high levels of glyphosate in their urine, a herbicide developed by the giant agrochemical company, Monsanto, which you’ve probably heard of. She also had traces of an insecticide.

With those results, Sabrina made one of the hardest decisions of her life. One night, after a fumigation, she left her house and never returned. The doctors had recommended she move to another part of the city, and although she resisted the idea, she felt like she had no other choice. But she knew that, although that would be a relief for them, it wasn’t a real solution.

[Sabrina]: My parents lived there, the kids who were around. We couldn’t move an entire neighborhood, it wasn’t possible, and besides, it wasn’t fair, right?

[Emilia]: It was after all that, already as a lawyer, that Sabrina arrived in 2018 at Federal Court Number 2 to file her lawsuit against four agricultural producers. The complaint spoke of poisoning and the violation of a national law that regulates the treatment and handling of hazardous waste. Seven years had already passed since the day she lost her pregnancy.

Out of fear, she made the complaint anonymously. She wasn’t very optimistic, but…

[Sabrina]: To our surprise, right? A week later, the federal judge had already ordered seven procedures to investigate what was going on, right?

[Emilia]: Seeing that the judge was responding well, she presented herself with her name to expand the complaint. She also provided new documentation, such as the results of the toxicological tests her family had undergone. She was both skeptical and excited: it was the first time someone in the justice system had paid attention to her.

But she wasn’t the only one watching her.

[Sabrina]: When they started identifying specific names, right? Which sector they were from and who the producers were, well, that’s when the threats against my family and me started…

[Emilia]: The first one arrived at her house one day when she was with her daughter and her dog. Sabrina saw from inside how a man approached the small front yard. He was holding something in his hands, but at first, she couldn’t identify what it was.

Suddenly, a gunshot.

[Sabrina]: I remember my daughter was in her room, and I ran to grab her, and I was there, paralyzed, holding her. And well, when I went outside, I saw the dog that was dead…

[Emilia]: From a distance, she heard a man’s voice shouting, insulting her, and telling her he would kill her if she didn’t stop with the complaints. She thought it was the voice of one of her neighbors. The same one who had sprayed the day she lost her pregnancy.

[Sabrina]: I said, “Wow, this, this is going to go much further, because it was just beginning.”

[Emilia]: Still, she pressed on. As a plaintiff lawyer, Sabrina had many more ways to intervene in the legal case. She was no longer just a worried mom. A neighbor. Now, she could, for example, be part of the investigation, provide evidence. But at first, she didn’t know exactly how to do it. It was trial and error.

With the investigation already underway, she began a nearly detective-like, hands-on job.

[Sabrina]: A very, very cumbersome job, you know, figuring out when they were spraying, where they bought the products, what the marketing chain was to buy them, what they considered when spraying.

[Emilia]: As she had done a few years earlier, she went door-to-door to talk to her neighbors to gather more evidence. This time, she didn’t limit herself to Villa Alicia but looked for cases in other neighborhoods that, like hers, were on the border between the countryside and the city. What she found was overwhelming.

[Sabrina]: We added more than 70 medical records, and many testimonies that talked about the same thing.

In Villa Alicia, there were many kids with autism, also babies born with malformations who ended up dying. Spontaneous abortions, hypothyroidism, many diseases like leukemias or types of cancers, in many young people.

[Emilia]: Around the same time, Sabrina met Alejandra Bianco, a teacher who lived in Santa Julia, another neighborhood on the edge of the countryside, south of Pergamino, not far from her house.

Alejandra’s husband was sick, he had pancreatic and liver cancer. Her children too: one had thyroid cancer, and the other a rarer blood disease called idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. And she herself had had a tumor in her uterus.

But until a doctor suggested it, Alejandra had never thought that having her whole family sick could be more than a coincidence.

That day, on her way home after the appointment, she stopped at a store in her neighborhood. She wanted to clear up a doubt. This is Alejandra.

[Alejandra Bianco]: And I asked the storekeeper, right? I asked him, “Do you know what’s going on here in the neighborhood, if anyone has cancer?” He looked at me and said, “Ale, here in Pergamino… in the neighborhood, he says: Well, do you remember the neighbor? Yes. Well, he died of cancer, and now this one and that one. Yes.” And the truth is it caught my attention. That’s when it caught my attention…

[Emilia]: She got home with an idea.

[Alejandra Bianco]: I sit at home and make a kind of census on a sheet. Name, surname of the neighbors, address, ID, if they had any disease that they could say yes or no, and they would explain what disease they had and their signature.

[Emilia]: She left several of these forms at the neighborhood shops. Two weeks later, she picked them up and sat down to look at the results…

[Alejandra]: And the truth is, it alarmed me. It was a lot of people, a lot of people already dead, and a lot of people sick with different types of cancer, right? Stomach cancer. Breast cancer. Pancreatic cancer, tumors in the head….

[Emilia]: There were more than 50 cases in a three-block radius.

But at that moment, Alejandra didn’t associate it with the spraying. She didn’t know much about it, she had only heard something about a neighbor from Villa Alicia named Sabrina, but with work, her kids’ health problems, her husband’s and hers, she hadn’t paid much attention. In fact, at first, she associated it with an electrical transformer that was near her house.

It was Sabrina who contacted her after hearing her talk about what was happening in Santa Julia in some local media. She told her about the agrochemicals, the tests she had done with her family, and even recommended that Alejandra do the same. That’s when Alejandra found out she also had glyphosate in her blood.

When she joined as a plaintiff in the legal case, adding her medical history, her family’s, and some of her neighbors’ to the file, Sabrina gave her a warning.

[Alejandra]: She said, “Well, get ready because they’re probably going to threaten you, and you’re going to have certain things happen, they’re going to try to scare you.” I mean, Sabrina warned me based on her experience, right? Well, thank God nothing ever happened. No one ever threatened me, and I never felt afraid of any kind. Nothing. But I did see people who… tried to make me look like the crazy person, the liar of the neighborhood.

[Emilia]: The liar. The same thing they said about Sabrina. But Alejandra’s attitude, that desire to get involved, wasn’t the most common among the neighbors. On the contrary, from the beginning, Sabrina had faced a lot of resistance…

[Alejandra]: A lot of fear, a lot of vulnerability too…

[Sabrina]: Actually, they would close the door or would just say no, they didn’t want to get involved in that, that they already knew what it was, but didn’t want to get involved because, well, they knew what could happen, or they worked in relation to it and were afraid of losing their jobs… they just didn’t want to talk.

[Emilia]: She could understand that fear. It wasn’t foreign to her. In a way, she felt it too. After the threats, she knew exactly what she was up against. She had lost the naïveté of years past when she used to visit government offices asking for help. And she had long stopped talking about agrochemicals: she preferred to call them agrotoxins. She had spent hours and hours reading about their potential effects on health, reviewing legislation in other countries, consulting medical reports. She knew that in other parts of the world, there were people asking big laboratories to be held accountable for the effects of their products.

In fact, Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, faces multi-million dollar lawsuits in Asia, Europe, and Latin America for the health effects of glyphosate.

[Soundbite]

[DW]: New protests against Bayer’s glyphosate herbicide are causing headaches for the chemical giant.

[TODAY NEWS]: Friday, a jury in SF found biochemical Monsanto liable for former school groundskeeper Johnson’s cancer….

[Emilia]: It has also been at the center of controversies for several questionable practices, such as trying to impose genetically modified seeds on farming communities. Or for the effects of monoculture in places like Mexico, Sri Lanka, or Burkina Faso.

But it wasn’t necessary to go that far. While Sabrina was trying to get her neighbors in Pergamino to react, just a few hours away, an entire town was rising up against Monsanto. It was Malvinas Argentinas, a town in Córdoba with 12,000 inhabitants, very poor, where the company had arrived with the promise of creating 400 jobs. They wanted to set up a genetically modified corn seed conditioning plant there, but the resistance was fierce: the whole town organized against the project because they feared the plant would contaminate the water and air during the chemical processes the seeds underwent. They held assemblies, camped out, and even blocked access to the land where Monsanto wanted to build the plant.

A group of doctors, including Medardo Ávila Vázquez, joined the cause of the people of Malvinas Argentinas. Medardo had been researching the effects of spraying on the health of babies born in the outskirts of Córdoba for several years. It all started in 2007 when he was the Undersecretary of Health in Córdoba, and a group of mothers contacted him because something was making their children sick, and they didn’t know what.

As in Pergamino, there were many cases of cancer, asthma, hypothyroidism in Córdoba. But for Medardo, who is a neonatologist, what alarmed him the most was the number of children with congenital malformations.

[Medardo Ávila]:  Only 2% of births in Argentina, worldwide, are born with malformations. Suddenly, in the intensive care units in neonatology, we started filling up with malformed children. There were so many malformed children.

[Emilia]: Children born with cardiovascular abnormalities or problems in brain development, for example.

[Medardo]: And when we started seeing these malformed children. Who are they? Where do they come from? Where did their mothers live? We found that their mothers lived in sprayed territories and that they were pregnant while being sprayed.

[Emilia]: Along with other doctors, he started investigating, reading, and asking questions. They discovered that in most cases, the mothers had been exposed to spraying during the first month of pregnancy.

[Medardo]: It’s the embryogenic stage. If she is exposed to agrochemicals, the risk of having malformed children is six times higher than in a normal person. So, well, this led us to get involved and start debating and denouncing what was happening.

[Emilia]: Right away, he and other doctors joined the complaints of the neighbors, and in 2008, they managed to get a Córdoba judge to ban spraying near urban areas. They even took some producers to criminal court and joined the lawsuits against Monsanto for the cancer-causing effects of glyphosate.

But in Pergamino, things were different. Not only was there no resistance or popular organization, but the presence of Monsanto and other biotechnology companies was becoming increasingly strong. Sabrina had spent several years witnessing how they delivered school supplies and made donations to health centers. The relationship was so close that it was possible for Monsanto to publish a video like this…

[Archive soundbite]

[MONSANTO AD]: We are committed to seeds, which is why we dedicate so much effort to their study, to technology, to innovation. In the end, the reward is great: to feel part of a family table, to feel part of a great city.

[Emilia]: It’s two minutes in which they speak about Pergamino as if the company and the city were one and the same, while images of the town, the main square, kids on bicycles, the entrance road, laboratories, and machines working on the harvest at sunset are shown.

In a way, it was Sabrina against everything that gave meaning to the people of Pergamino, to that identity we talked about at the beginning.

But over time, she stopped being so alone. She not only met Alejandra. With other women, she formed the Madres de Barrios Fumigados de Pergamino collective, and she got in touch with groups from other towns who also denounced the effects of spraying. She also met Medardo, who later joined as an expert in her legal case.

Thus, Sabrina began learning about all the places where the same thing was happening as in Pergamino and found out that not only in Córdoba but also in Entre Ríos and Santa Fe—where the largest cultivated area is concentrated—citizen demands for more control were growing. And behind them, first-hand stories, like hers and her neighbors’. Other names, other towns, the same pain.

[Daniel]: A pause and we’ll be back.

[Daniel]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante.

Emilia Erbetta continues telling us…

[Emilia]: It was also in Córdoba, in a town called Río Cuarto, where in 2006, a biologist named Delia Aiassa began investigating the relationship between agrochemicals and genetic damage. This is her.

[Delia]: When we talk about genetic damage, we’re talking about breaks at the DNA level in the cells, in the cell nucleus. And it means that this organism has interacted with or been exposed to an agent that has the ability to interact with and break its DNA.

[Emilia]: In the lab, Delia had exposed rats and amphibians to different concentrations of agrochemicals. She also did it with isolated cells, like lymphocytes. She worked especially with glyphosate, the herbicide most used in her province. The same one Sabrina and her children had in their bodies.

Delia explained to me that there are many substances that break DNA, not just agrochemicals. Some medicines, for example. Or ultraviolet radiation. Factors like lifestyle, cigarettes, or certain viruses can also cause it. Over the course of our lives, we will all experience it to some degree: there is no such thing as zero damage.

[Delia]: Our bodies have mechanisms to repair that damage, but the problem is, as the years go by, that damage increases in some way because all the repair processes slow down, or they may start to fail…

[Emilia]: I’ll try to explain it simply: there are different reasons why an organism might fail to repair damage. It could be due to age or genetic predisposition, for example. For whatever reason, when the error is fixed in the cell, it can start to divide uncontrollably. And when a cell divides uncontrollably, a neoplasia can form. That is, a tumor.

Delia was very insistent on one thing: we are always in the realm of possibility. We can’t say that someone exposed to an agrochemical will definitely develop some kind of cancer. Just as not everyone who smokes ends up with a tumor in their lung. But when there is genetic damage, it is scientifically proven that the risk is greater.

[Delia]: Why am I clarifying this? Because some people will say, “Ah! I lived 60 years in the countryside, surrounded by these things, and I never had anything, I don’t have cancer or the other thing.”

[Emilia]: A very similar argument to the one the Secretary of Health of Pergamino gave Sabrina when she went to see him for the first time. “If what you’re saying is true,” he told her, “we’d all be sick.”

[Delia]: There are many variables at play: lifestyle, diet. But we find ourselves obliged to say, “This is a substance that is causing you damage.” Just like the components of cigarettes, which have the ability to interact with DNA and break genetic material. Well, pesticides have that ability too.

[Emilia]: The difference is that, in the end, we can choose whether to smoke or not. Whether to sunbathe with or without sunscreen, but Sabrina and her neighbors didn’t have that option.

Sabrina and Delia met at a talk about agrochemicals in Pergamino and met again some time later when Delia was in charge of conducting a biomolecular analysis to see if Sabrina and her family had genetic damage.

In the study report, which was added to the legal case, Delia pointed out that Sabrina and her children had a higher number of cells with damage than the baseline. That is, in populations with similar lifestyles and conditions, the damage is statistically lower.

[Sabrina]: It was very hard to know it because everyone knows what genetic damage means and the risks it represents. So it didn’t just end with knowing that we were full of poison, but in addition to that, we have damage in the cells of our bodies…

[Emilia]: But the report said something more. That the damage could be reversible if the cause was removed, and that it would reduce the risk of developing diseases. That is, something could still be done. But for that, the spraying had to stop.

At the end of 2018, the judge ordered soil and water samples to be taken from the fields of the accused producers, from the neighbors’ gardens, and from the water they consumed. The house where Sabrina had lived was one of the places chosen.

The study was carried out by scientists from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), who found residues of 19 pesticides in the soil and 18 in the water. Some of these chemicals, the report said, are considered carcinogenic and others are endocrine disruptors, meaning they alter hormonal balance. The water, it concluded, was not suitable for human consumption.

Medardo Avila, the Córdoba doctor we heard from earlier, participated in this part of the investigation as an expert. In his statement to the judge, he warned of an additional risk: the one arising from the combination of agrochemicals, which are never used alone. It’s a basic principle of toxicology: when you mix two poisons, you increase their toxicity. That’s why, in combination, agrochemicals can be even more dangerous.

Medardo was very surprised to find so many agrochemicals in the water of Pergamino. In that, it was different from all the other places he had studied.

[Medardo]: What Pergamino taught us is that people don’t just breathe the contaminated air from the agrotoxins being sprayed, but they also ingest them with the water they bathe in, drink, or use to prepare food.

[Emilia]: It was no longer enough to protect oneself when the plane passed or to close the windows when the spraying tractor passed. The poison could come directly from the tap.

[Sabrina]: If it’s in the soil, it’s in the air, it’s in the food, it’s everywhere. How are we going to escape from that?

[Emilia]: Maybe escaping wasn’t possible. Because as Sabrina thought many times, you can’t move an entire neighborhood. And for the spraying to end completely also didn’t seem realistic, because it would require a total paradigm shift in intensive agriculture, which uses more than 500 million liters of agrochemicals per year and is the driving force behind the Argentine economy.

But the spraying could be pushed away.

That’s what Judge Carlos Villafuerte Ruzo ruled in June 2019, when he established that airplanes couldn’t spray less than 3,000 meters from urban areas, and that ground spraying could not come closer than 1,095 meters. The distance came from a study conducted in Córdoba by Delia and her team, who discovered that this distance significantly reduced the damage caused by agrochemicals.

The judge also ordered the government of Pergamino to provide drinking water in the affected neighborhoods and criminally charged three of the four producers denounced by Sabrina. With this decision, she felt hope.

[Sabrina]: But I must also confess that there is a great pain because I wish that none of this had ever happened. Yes, we achieved this measure. We worked hard. I remember nights without sleep reading, because as I told you, I really felt this way, stripped of tools, many times. But at that moment, it was like going to war with a slingshot, right?

[Emilia]: A slingshot: a rubber band, a slingshot. That’s how she felt: like David against Goliath. She couldn’t think of it as a victory because she had lost too much along the way, but at least it seemed that things in Pergamino were starting to change.

Sabrina’s life was never the same after the legal battle. In the years that the process lasted, she continued to suffer threats: one day, she found her car covered with soybean stalks. Another time, they left canisters of agrochemicals at her doorstep. In 2020, a year after the ruling, a truck ran her father off the road on a nearby highway to Pergamino.

Everyone in the city knows who Sabrina is. Her name and face have appeared in news articles, reports on local and national television.

[Soundbite]

[Journalist 1]: We are with Sabrina Ortiz, who is the one who initiated a complaint about water contamination, irresponsible fumigations, now she is going to explain to us….

[Journalist 2]: We are talking to Sabrina Ortiz, she is one of the neighbors who started the complaint and who has made…

[Emilia]: As a lawyer, it has been hard for her to find work. Even today, she feels that many look at her with distrust, as the woman who bit the hand that feeds them. Some even said it to her face.

The authorities of the city didn’t support her either. On the contrary, the municipal government appealed the judge’s ruling twice and also denied that the water in Pergamino was contaminated. That is why, in 2023, the case reached the Supreme Court, which finally upheld the precautionary measures. At the time of publishing this story, the agricultural producers denounced by Sabrina were about to face a criminal trial. And scientists determined that thanks to the limits on fumigation, the levels of agrochemicals in the water had been reduced by half.

Justice and science, then, are on Sabrina’s side. But Pergamino…

[Sabrina]: Pergamino is still complex. Here we run… marathons to raise funds, to fight cancer, and people run with Monsanto-Bayer t-shirts.

[Emilia]: Alejandra, who lost her husband to that disease, also struggles to understand it.

[Alejandra]: It’s very strange, because there isn’t a single neighbor in the city who hasn’t had or doesn’t have a cancer patient, right? Or someone who passed away from cancer, and yet, it’s as if they normalize it… you say, “What’s going on?” It’s very unfortunate, it’s sad that the people of the city don’t realize that it’s not a coincidence that we’re getting sick.

[Emilia]: For Sabrina, that normalization is a defeat. Her own personal story forms the basis of an international lawsuit against Monsanto, but in her small town, she doesn’t find the same recognition.

[Sabrina]: I can assure you that what hurts the most is the people of Pergamino’s zero empathy, right? Because there are different classes…

[Emilia]: Different classes of people she’s encountered in these more than 15 years…

[Sabrina]: People who don’t have information, who are always in their own world, who never found out about anything. Then you have the people who try to learn, who already have the information, and decide what to do, right? Whether to join in or stay where they are because the same agrochemicals come into their house through the faucet. And then there are those who know, who are educated, who… and well, nothing…

[Emilia]: Nothing. They do nothing. They choose not to do anything. Sabrina doesn’t understand them. Maybe because for her, that was never an option.

[Daniel]: Emilia Erbetta is a producer for Radio Ambulante and lives in Buenos Aires. This story was edited by Camila Segura. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. The sound design is by Andrés Azpiri with music by Ana Tuirán.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean,, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, David Trujillo, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, Luis Fernando Vargas, and Desireé Yépez.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO.

Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed in Hindenburg PRO. If you liked this episode and want us to continue independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us keep telling the region’s stories. Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thank you for listening.