If a Nobel committee had visited Colombia before awarding the 2009 Peace Prize, I have no doubt how members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia would have reacted. They would've greeted the committee members with open arms, tied them up and held them for ransom. That's how the FARC talks peace. Just ask former senator/peace-seeker/hostage Ingrid Betancourt. One of President Barack Obama's competitors for the Peace Prize, Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba, works tirelessly for the cause of peace in her country, but she does so willfully blind to the rebel leadership's long, well-documented history of deceit and betrayal in the name of peace. [continues 694 words]
On what planet does Edgar Mauricio Solano live? You described him as an expert ("Experts warn Mexico must keep coca out of the country," Oct. 17, El Paso Times). But he must have flunked economics 101. Where there is demand, there will always be supply. He calls for stopping the cultivation of coca in Mexico. Great. How? After 10 years of Plan Colombia, South American production is up and prices are down. Forty years into a failed prohibition model, he calls for stay the course. In the coming years, how many colleges and hospitals will have to close in Texas in order to hold all the drug-prohibition prisoners? Howard Wooldridge Dallas [end]
Of all the regions in a dangerous and intractable world, forgotten Latin America might paradoxically offer Barack Obama the best opportunity to influence events so that the "hope for the future" embodied in his Nobel Peace Prize becomes a reality. Building on his creative engagement with Latin America after the George W. Bush years of blindness and neglect, there is much the president can accomplish immediately. Lifting the senseless blockade against Cuba, followed by full diplomatic relations, would be a good beginning. Another sore spot is Honduras, where the United States has not done enough to isolate and punish the de facto government, which came to power through a coup against the country's elected president. And Obama should rethink his approach to hemispheric security (canceling, for instance, Plan Colombia) as a way of defusing tensions in a Latin America threatened by a new arms race. [continues 154 words]
EL PASO -- The Mexican government must do everything it can to prevent drug traffickers from growing the coca plant in Mexico, which could be the next major step the cartels may take, an expert from Colombia said Friday. If the cartels are successful in growing the plant, the situation in Mexico could get worse, said Edgar Mauricio Solano Calderon, a researcher who helps train the national police in his country. "The coca plant used in producing cocaine was not native to Colombia. It was brought over from Bolivia, and in 20 years, Colombia became the world's biggest producer," Solano said. [continues 607 words]
Juarez is fed up. The 1.8 million people living there are tired of the drug war that began 20 months ago. They are tired of elected officials who don't listen, and they are tired of living in a city where corruption is so common that the rule of law is absent. Now the people want change. "The violence in Juarez is a consequence of what we have failed to do as a society in this city," said Lucinda Vargas, general director of the new civic association called Juarez Strategic Plan. "The crime and violence are not the problem. They are a consequence of us not holding elected officials accountable, of us as a society allowing corruption to exist at all levels. The violence occurs because we live in a city where there is no rule of law. [continues 1174 words]
BOGOTA - Colombia's Supreme Court ruled that possession of illegal drugs for personal use is not a criminal offense, citing a 1994 decision by the country's Constitutional Court, Caracol Radio said Wednesday. Drug consumption "generates in a person problems of addiction and slavery that turn one into a sick, compulsive individual deserving of therapeutic medical treatment instead of a punishment," the judges said. Their ruling came in a case involving a man prosecuted for possession of 1.3 grams (.04 ounces) of cocaine. The court overturned his conviction and ordered him immediately released. [continues 191 words]
U.S. Says Drug Trade Is Booming as Morales's Plan to Encourage Legal Products From Leaves Backfires When Evo Morales, a former coca farmer, became president of Bolivia in 2006, he promised to restore the thumb-shaped green leaf to the place of respect it enjoyed in Inca times. Farmers could legally grow more of it, and his government would build factories to churn out coca shampoo and toothpaste. He would fight drugs under a policy of "zero cocaine, but not zero coca." [continues 833 words]
Oh, down in Mexico I never really been so I don't really know Oh, Mexico I guess I'll have to go . James Taylor With President Obama meeting with Mexico's president this week for the second time in four months to discuss guns, drugs and money laundering, the world ponders Mexico's future. To be sure, Mexico is not a "failed state," but as Latin American scholar Shannon O'Neil suggests, in a recent Foreign Affairs article, it may be "on the brink." [continues 749 words]
Farmers Would Be Paid Not to Grow Crop The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plant opium poppy, by far the country's most profitable cash crop and a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption. By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early October. Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan's harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest. [continues 1056 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia ---- Mexicans once bridled at suggestions of learning anything from Colombia, but as the violence and power of drug cartels have grown in their country, they now are beating a path here. President Felipe Calderon, civil society groups, policy experts, police and others have been traveling to this Andean nation to learn how it beat back the cartels, sharply reduced murders and kidnappings and reasserted a sense of civic participation. Some, such as journalists, just seek tips on how to survive. [continues 684 words]
************ DON'T BLAME POT -- THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A "GATEWAY DRUG" By Scott Morgan, DRCNet. Anti-drug zealots created the "gateway" theory from thin air. And it's easily refuted: most marijuana users just don't use other drugs. http://drugsense.org/url/MWx8LTIA ************ By Teo Ballve http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090615/ballve/single ************ DID THE DRUGS MAKE THEM DO IT? Drug czar Gil Kerlikowske says the latest data from the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program "reaffirm the strong link between drug use and crime," while the headline over his office's press release about the survey's 2008 results says, "New Study Reveals Scope of Drug and Crime Connection." But what is the nature of this connection? [continues 311 words]
President Obama says he is determined to cut the federal deficit in half, so I have an idea that will start saving millions of dollars right now: Shut down Plan Colombia. To date it has wasted about $6 billion. Over the last few weeks, senior Colombian officials have been flooding Washington, lobbying everyone they can find to renew federal funding for this ridiculous enterprise. I had a chat with one of them, Vice President Francisco Santos. "So far," he told me, "we have not heard of any changes to Plan Colombia." That's too bad. [continues 452 words]
President Obama says he is determined to cut the federal deficit in half, so I have an idea that will start saving millions of dollars right now: Shut down Plan Colombia. To date it has wasted about $6 billion. Over the past few weeks, senior Colombian officials have been flooding Washington, lobbying everyone they can find to renew federal funding for this ridiculous enterprise. One of those officials, Vice President Francisco Santos, spoke to The Chronicle's editorial board. "So far," he said, "we have not heard of any changes to Plan Colombia." That's too bad. [continues 658 words]
Imagine you had a really smart bomb - a genius bomb - that could blow up the leaders of every drug cartel in Mexico. By the time the smoke cleared, a new pusher would be sitting in every cartel's big chair and the distribution networks would continue satisfying the demand of every junkie and recreational-drug user in America. Mexico's drug cartels would continue to be, in the words of the Justice Department's National Drug Threat Assessment for 2009, "the greatest drug-trafficking threat to the United States." [continues 1305 words]
The Aerial Assault On Cocaine Funded By The US Is Wiping Out Everything - Apart From Coca Plants The counter-drugs strategy of the United States is clearly failing. UN figures cited in the Guardian this week show that the cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived, has surged in the Andes. The most dramatic rise has been in Colombia, the only country in the region that allows the use of pesticides to eradicate coca leaf - a policy promoted and funded by the US. [continues 718 words]
Illegal Drugs Are Causing Havoc Across the World. Over Four Articles, We Look at Attempts to Curb Supply and Cut Demand, Beginning in Mexico IN RECENT months Mexicans have become inured to carefully choreographed spectacles of horror. Just before Christmas the severed heads of eight soldiers were found dumped in plastic bags near a shopping centre in Chilpancingo, the capital of the southern state of Guerrero. Last month another three were found in an icebox near the border city of Ciudad Juarez. Farther along the border near Tijuana police detained Santiago Meza, nicknamed El Pozolero ("the soupmaker") who confessed to having dissolved the bodies of more than 300 people in acid over the past nine years on the orders of a local drug baron. [continues 2921 words]
Complacency and corruption are the real enemies. On a recent trip to Mexico, I asked a family friend -- a professor at the National University -- whether she thought the government was collapsing under the weight of the drug war, which has claimed close to 9,000 lives in the past two years, turned border cities into no-go zones and elicited comparisons between Mexico and Pakistan. "Collapsing?" she said. "It's finally picking itself up." Her point: Mexico's "drug problem" is of very long standing. The rest of the world is only noticing it now because President Felipe Calderon has decided to break with his predecessors' policy of malign neglect of, if not actual complicity in, the drug trade. [continues 762 words]
NEW YORK - When I read the news that the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy "blasted the U.S.-led drug war as a failure that is pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point" (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 12), I thought: Someone is finally talking sense. I have long regarded the U.S. approach to drugs as self-righteous, overbearing and destructive. This is not the first time the U.S. "war on drugs," which President Richard Nixon started back in 1971, has been pronounced a failure. Five years ago, for example, none other than President George W. Bush's "drug czar," John Walters, admitted that the "war" was failing. Of course, Walters, a hard-nosed conservative, made it clear that the U.S. had no intention of abandoning it. Today, he insists that intensified drug-related violence in Mexico - 4,000 people killed in 2008 alone - is a sign that the U.S. war is succeeding. [continues 851 words]
Officials Visiting This Week Press for Continued Funding of an Antidrug Strategy and Passage of a Free-Trade Agreement. Washington - Colombian officials are mounting a full-court diplomatic press in the United States this week as they seek to stave off a fall from the high-flying status their country achieved in Washington as a favored ally of the Bush administration. Colombia was promoted as a Latin success story by President Bush but denigrated by human rights advocates and some members of Congress as a failed state. Now, it's likely to find itself far from center stage in a Washington grappling with the economic crisis and still finding its foreign-policy footing. [continues 697 words]
A decade ago, before Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and other Mexican cities became bloody front lines, the biggest battles in the drug war were taking place 3,000 miles to the south. Colombia made headlines as a hotbed for violence, a large part of it tied to the cocaine trade. Drug money was fueling a long-running civil war, kidnappings for ransom were rampant and a general sense of lawlessness prevailed. In the late 1990s, the Colombian government announced a plan to restore order. This evolved into a military-based effort, with U.S. backing, to curtail cocaine production and weaken insurgents. [continues 1354 words]
EL PASO -- As drug violence claims lives every day across the border in Juarez, lingering questions about the Merida Initiative may come to dog lawmakers, who could find themselves under pressure if the cooperative agreement to fight drugs is not a success. Security experts have urged Congress to consider a range of indicators when evaluating the progress of the Merida Initiative. Whether the initiative will work and whether benchmarks have been set to measure success of failure remain key questions for lawmakers and local officials, some of whom are skeptical about the three-year, $1.4 billion plan. [continues 874 words]
If President Barack Obama is to succeed in convincing allies to pony up for the war in Afghanistan, he must do better than to reinvent former president George Bush's ill-conceived "War on Terror." He will have to revisit America's much older and disastrous War on Drugs. The U.S. officially has fought the latter war starting with Richard Nixon's presidency, when the fear of a country made of peaceniks and hippies convinced the Republican leader to copy former president Lyndon Johnston's short-lived but popular War on Poverty. Although the battle against poverty was an unabashed failure, at least it didn't cost the thousands of lives and countless years of lost freedoms claimed by the war on drugs. [continues 718 words]
Desertions Rise As Status and Perks Are Replaced With Constant Harassment by the Colombian Army. but the Guerrilla Group Is Known for Its Resilience. Life was good for "Ernesto" when he joined Colombia's largest rebel group at age 14. He loved the leftist fighters' swagger, the perfumed rebel groupies and the stolen SUVs he and his buddies drove unchallenged over the roads of this cattle- and coffee-growing zone. But eight years later, Ernesto's life as a foot soldier in the 25th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, had lost its charm. Gone were the status and the free-spending ways, a lifestyle financed by kidnappings and extortions here in the west-central state of Tolima. [continues 1237 words]
Santos Will Meet With Barack Obama Soon After Inauguration to Try To Persuade Him to Continue Plan Colombia, the $556-Million-A-Year U.S. Aid Plan. He Discusses the Case He Will Make. Soon after President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos will fly to Washington to lobby for continuance of Plan Colombia, the largest U.S. foreign aid program outside the Middle East and Afghanistan. Colombian leaders face a steep challenge: persuading the new administration to maintain $556 million a year in military and economic aid as it braces for an era of trillion-dollar deficits. Santos will have to fend off critics who say Plan Colombia has fallen short of its coca eradication goals and that the military's battlefield gains against leftist rebels have been stained by human rights abuses, including "false positives" -- the killing of innocent civilians passed off as battle casualties. [continues 747 words]
Experts and Public Figures in the U.S. and Latin America Offer a Range of Views, From Stepped-Up Policing to Legalization. At times, the fight against drug trafficking in Mexico seems hopeless. The body count grows steadily, each massacre seemingly more gruesome than the one before. The flow of drugs to America and Europe continues virtually unabated. The Times asked experts and public figures in the U.S., Mexico and other parts of Latin America for their views on the problem and what should be done about it. The comments, compiled by Mexico City Bureau Chief Tracy Wilkinson, have been edited for space or clarity. [continues 1505 words]
Last Sunday, at least 18 people were killed in the struggle to control the Mexican drug trade. They included 10 suspected traffickers and a soldier who died in a wild gunfight, and two men whose severed heads were left near the residence of a state governor. The record-high rate of drug-related murders in 2007 has doubled in 2008. As of Dec. 2, it stood at 5,376. Canadians will be dimly aware that drug-related violence is soaring in Mexico. But to us, this is just more bloodshed far away. It has nothing to do with us. [continues 681 words]
On Dec. 6, at least 18 people were killed in the struggle to control the Mexican drug trade. They included 10 suspected traffickers and a soldier who died in a wild gunfight and two men whose severed heads were put in buckets and left near the residence of a state governor. As horrible as it was, it was a day like any other. Last Monday, Mexico's attorney general told reporters the record-high rate of drug-related murders in 2007 had doubled in 2008. As of Dec. 2, it stood at 5,376. [continues 832 words]
On Sunday, at least 18 people were killed in the struggle to control the Mexican drug trade. They included 10 suspected traffickers and a soldier who died in a wild gunfight, and two men whose severed heads were put in buckets and left near the residence of a state governor. As horrible as it was, it was a day like any other. On Monday, Mexico's attorney general told reporters the record-high rate of drug-related murders in 2007 had doubled in 2008. As of Dec. 2, it stood at 5,376. [continues 846 words]
Funds For Mexico Comes As It and Colombia Wonder About Future Help MEXICO CITY - The U.S. government finally released the first part of a $400 million aid package Wednesday to support Mexico's police and soldiers in their fight against drug cartels. The money comes at a critical time: Mexico's death toll from drug violence has soared above 4,000 so far this year, and drug-related murders and kidnappings are spilling over the U.S. border as well [continues 197 words]
Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, who helped supervise the Brookings Institution study, says Washington needs to focus on consumption in addition to targeting traffickers. The United States' war on drugs has failed and will continue to do so as long as it emphasizes law enforcement and neglects the problem of consumption, a Washington think tank says in a report co-chaired by a former president of Mexico. The former president, Ernesto Zedillo, in an interview, called for a major rethinking of U.S. policy, which he said has been "asymmetrical" in demanding countries like Mexico stanch the flow of drugs northward, without successful efforts to stop the flow of guns south. In addition to disrupting drug-smuggling routes, eradicating crops and prosecuting dealers, the U.S. must confront the public health issue that large-scale consumption poses, he said. [continues 583 words]
The Key Is Cutting Demand, Not Supply A recent report by the Government Accountability Office, commissioned by Sen. Joe Biden, has come to an unsurprising conclusion: After more than $6 billion spent, the controversial drug control operation known as Plan Colombia has failed by large margins to meet its targets. The goal had been to cut cocaine production in Colombia by 50 percent from 2000 to 2006 through eradication of coca crops and training of anti-narcotics police and military personnel. In fact, cocaine production in Colombia rose 4 percent during that period, the GAO found. With increases in Peru and Bolivia, production of cocaine in South America increased by 12 percent during that period. In 1999 it cost $142 to buy a gram of cocaine on the street in the United States, according to inflation-adjusted figures from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. By 2006 the price had fallen to $94 per gram. ad_icon [continues 501 words]
Bush Administration Policies to Fight Drug Trafficking and Rebels Have Proved Less Than Effective. Human rights activists in Colombia have long accused their government of a horrific war strategy: In order to prove it is making progress against leftist rebels and criminal gangs, the military inflates its body count by killing innocent civilians, mostly impoverished young men, and attributing their deaths to combat. Now we know it's true. President Alvaro Uribe has fired 27 soldiers and officers, including three generals, and the commander of Colombia's army, Gen. Mario Montoya, recently stepped down. [continues 296 words]
Drugs are an established part of our landscape. But how do we reconcile the apparently happy experience of the casual user with that of the addict? And how do we win the unwinnable 'war on drugs', asks Andrew Anthony Andrew Anthony Like televised sport, taking recreational drugs seems to require running commentary. In fact, two commentaries. First there are the banal observations that accompany drug consumption - 'This is good stuff', 'I'm completely out of it', 'I'm not feeling anything', etc - and then there is the meta-commentary, the ceaseless debate about the role, meaning and desirability of the massive socio-economic phenomenon that falls under the expansive title of 'drugs'. [continues 2201 words]
Three suggestions for how Obama can take immediate, practical steps to reform America's antiquated and punitive pot laws. http://drugsense.org/url/nxv2DdaM Century of Lies - 11/11/08 - Cele Castillo Cele Castillo, former DEA agent, Iran-Contra whisteleblower & author of "Powderburns, Cocaine, Contras & the Drug War" + Terry Nelson Reports for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/?q=node/2131 [continues 378 words]
Legalizing Narcotics Could Provide More Oversight, Regulation On Substances With today's faltering economy, many people are wondering what can possibly cure these economic hard times. Besides the obvious need to cut out some of our billion dollar military budget, the United States currently spends about $40 billion on the War on Drugs, which many mayors, police commissioners and others feel has failed. At the United States Conference of Mayors held in Los Angeles, mayors of the largest cities in the U.S. said a new plan for the War on Drugs needs to be drawn up since the current plan is only prolonging the problem. [continues 370 words]
A Thundering Rejection of America's Longest War By Rob Kampia Voters dealt what may be a fatal blow to America's longest-running and least-discussed war -- the war on marijuana. http://drugsense.org/url/STptes92 The National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction (NCETA) was commissioned by the Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD) in March 2007 to undertake an independent, comprehensive and critical examination of all relevant issues involved in drug detection and screening in the school setting. The results of the review are presented in this report. [continues 339 words]
'WAR ON DRUGS' REALLY A FUTILE ATTEMPT IN U.S. By Terry Nelson A state-funded task force, the Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force, operates out of Bemidji and includes officers from many local city and county jurisdictions. I find this story fascinating in that the task force is named after a mythical person who hung out with a mythical ox because all the information in the article, while possibly true, is based on the myth that we will ever "win" this crazy war. [continues 336 words]
A state-funded task force, the Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force, operates out of Bemidji and includes officers from many local city and county jurisdictions. I find this story fascinating in that the task force is named after a mythical person who hung out with a mythical ox because all the information in the article, while possibly true, is based on the myth that we will ever "win" this crazy war. I am a retired federal agent with more than three decades of service to my country in this failed effort. It was initially hard for me to admit that we had failed and that we could never win. Perhaps if we had not called it a "war" then we could have changed our policy once we saw that it would not work. I am now a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Our 10,000-member organization consists of police, judges, lawyers, prison wardens and the general public. [continues 233 words]
On June 30, President Bush signed into law an initiative called Plan Merida, a $465 million program designed to help Mexico deal with the unchecked drug trafficking and violence that have recently turned much of the U.S.-Mexican border into a war zone. The initiative is the most recent chapter in the long history of attempts to regulate activity along America's southern frontier. It is bold and ambitious - and it probably won't work. Plan Merida dwarfs previous U.S. counter-narcotics assistance to Mexico, and the Bush administration has touted the aid package as a major step forward in the fight against the drug trade. As currently designed, however, Plan Merida stands little chance of producing meaningful long-term results. Why? Because at its core, Plan Merida represents the same flawed ideas that have long bedeviled U.S. drug policy. If not modified substantially, this program will go down as simply another failed offensive in the war on drugs. [continues 613 words]
Eradication Efforts Elsewhere Have Pushed Coca Cultivation into Rural El Rosario, Where Workers Processed Coca Leaves Recently. PASTO, Colombia -- Along with Colombia's successes in fighting leftist rebels this year, cities like Medellin have staged remarkable recoveries. And in the upscale districts of Bogota, the capital, it is almost possible to forget that the country remains mired in a devilishly complex four-decade-old war. But it is a different story in the mountains of the Narino department. Here, and elsewhere in large parts of the countryside, the violence and fear remain unrelenting, underscoring the difficulty of ending a war fueled by a drug trade that is proving immune to American-financed efforts to stop it. [continues 1554 words]
When Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico's top police official, arrived in Tijuana in January, the city was in the middle of a storm of violence that he found, as he put it to me with clipped understatement soon after his visit, "surprising." First, three local police officers were murdered in a single night, apparently in retaliation for a bust that a drug-cartel boss warned them not to carry out. A few days later, federal police officers tried to storm a trafficker safe house in a quiet Tijuana neighborhood and ended up in a shootout. [continues 5101 words]
Merida Plan Is Best Answer to Mexico Drug Chaos Buried inside the $162 billion war spending bill recently signed by President Bush was a $465 million counter-narcotics aid package for Mexico and Central America. That's a far cry from the full $1.6 billion that the House and Senate need to approve immediately for the president's Merida Initiative. Members of Congress who aren't from border-area districts might need reminding about why this funding is so important. Drug gangs are marauding through Mexican border cities, killing police, kidnapping hundreds of people, shooting up streets and using terror tactics - including beheadings and torture - to instill a sense of fear and submission. [continues 267 words]
The GOP Presidential Candidate Lauds the Nation's Efforts to Curb the Illicit Activity. He Also Touts Free Trade and Calls for Improvements in Human Rights. BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- Fresh from a ride on a fast boat used to chase narcotics traffickers, John McCain on Wednesday praised this nation's efforts to crack down on its illicit drug trade. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, on the second day of a Latin American tour, also continued touting a proposed free-trade pact between the United States and Colombia that faces stiff Democratic opposition in Congress. [continues 387 words]
Ex-Guerrillas Find Way into Society; Drug Trafficking Still a Problem BOGOTA, Colombia -- The wounds of war are still fresh here in the Quinta Ramos Peace House, a shelter for former guerrillas in the Colombian capital. Men who spent their entire lives fighting now worry about finding work. Hardened rebels struggle to become mothers to children taken away at birth. After more than four decades, Colombia's leftist insurgency appears to be on the run, in part because of $6.2 billion in U.S. aid during the past eight years to its closest ally in South America. [continues 928 words]
US presidents rarely attack the really dangerous drugs of alcohol and tobacco and meanwhile efforts to reduce Colombia's drugs harvest are making little difference Failure continues to dog President Bush as he finishes his disappointing European tour and returns home to watch his second term in office agonisingly dragging to its tragic conclusion. Failure to improve the lot of the ordinary man in his own increasingly divided country; failure in his relations with his allies; failure in Iraq and Afghanistan; failure to master his adversities from Cuba to North Korea; failure to control Israeli aggression against their neighbours; and what surely must be the impending failure of his party to win the US presidential election. Now it's a big US failure in Colombia, the predictable - and long predicted - failure of the unwinnable "war on drugs" that Bush has pursued so sedulously. The details, says the Reuters news agency, will come out from the United Nations tomorrow, June 18. [continues 585 words]
Mexico Says Aid Deal Shouldn't Meddle in Rights MEXICO CITY -- Even though Mexico has just endured an especially deadly month, top Mexican officials said this week that they are ready to walk away from a historic U.S. aid package to help combat drug-related violence. Mexican officials said they will not accept the Bush administration's proposed Merida Initiative if it includes requirements to overhaul their country's human-rights institutions, as a growing number of U.S. lawmakers insist. [continues 732 words]
Drug Use Is Up, And Colombian Farmers Are Unfairly Targeted. Let's Overhaul Counternarcotics. Washington - Every year, White House officials describe the US counterdrug policies in the same glowing terms used to describe the Emperor's new clothes: We're snuffing out coca crops and cracking down on those who grow them. But they leave out two important facts: More cocaine is coming out of South America than ever before and more young Americans are using than when the Bush administration took office. [continues 697 words]
WASHINGTON -- There have been all-expense paid trips to Colombia for more than 50 members of Congress, featuring coffee tastings and dinner at a posh restaurant inside an old Spanish fort. The Colombian president has visited Washington to make personal appeals. Major corporations like WalMart and Citigroup are taking up the cause. And former Clinton administration officials have landed lucrative lobbying contracts. This barrage of activity is over the trade pact that cost Mark Penn, a top adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his job over the weekend. Mr. Penn had been working for a presidential primary candidate opposed to the trade deal with Colombia, while also running a public relations firm hired by the Colombian government to promote it. [continues 1110 words]
ELORZA, Venezuela -- Facing criticism that cocaine trafficking is out of control, Venezuela's government this year has embarked on an aggressive program to track drug-smuggling planes and destroy clandestine airstrips used by Colombian drug clans, Venezuelan drug enforcement and military officials said in a series of interviews. In what appears to be a sharp shift from last year, Venezuelan aircraft and munitions experts have destroyed 157 dirt strips here in the grassy plains state of Apure, most of them in the last two weeks. The government has installed three new Chinese-made radar stations and plans to put up seven others that will completely cover Venezuelan airspace and permit authorities to track unidentified flights originating in neighboring Colombia. [continues 1094 words]
Soldiers, Under Pressure to Show Progress in a U.S.-Funded War, Allegedly Are Killing Civilians and Passing Them Off As Rebels. GRANADA, COLOMBIA -- Street vendor Israel Rodriguez went fishing last month and never came back. Two days later, his family found his body buried in a plastic bag, classified by the Colombian army as a guerrilla fighter killed in battle. Human rights activists say the Feb. 17 death is part of a deadly phenomenon called "false positives" in which the armed forces allegedly kill civilians, usually peasants or unemployed youths, and brand them as leftist guerrillas. [continues 984 words]
