22 June 2006

Colombian Pusherman Alvaro Uribe "Loses" the Drug War

Joshua Goodman begins his recent AP piece with these lines:
A key component of the U.S.-backed war on drugs appears to be failing.

Despite record drug seizures and spraying of herbicides, production of the plant used to make cocaine increased by 8 percent in Colombia, to 330 square miles, the United Nations said Tuesday - even as authorities sprayed coca fields totaling 25 times the size of Manhattan.

The two reports are the strongest evidence yet that a cornerstone of the U.S.-led war on drugs - the aerial fumigation of coca fields - is failing to meet its goal of halving coca production in the Andes.
In the piece, the author simply refuses to entertain the idea that Uncle Sam's "War on Drugs" is as phony and fraudulent as the "War on Terror".

If it had anything to do with drugs, the "aerial fumigaion" campaign undertaken by Uncle Sam's privatized DynCorp mercinaries would aim these chemical weapons at the government controlled teritories producing what he calls, "the source of 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States," instead of enormous swaths of peasant-controlled lands whose inhabitants have barely survived the country's 50-year civil war.

As with each of Uncle Sam's other military conquests, the war in Colombia has everything to do with power, domination, and control of geopolitical resources. Uncle Sam's campaign of chemical warfare against the peasants of Colombia serves these interests, creating hostility and friction between the peasants and FARC, the organized peasant resistance movement.

Goodman's laughable suggestion that Uncle Sam's "War on Drugs" aims to eradicate drug possession bears nothing in common with reality. For years in Colombia, Uncle Sam has actively supported the drug trade, arming and training a paramilitary army of Narco Trafficers.

This collaboration between Uncle Sam and the Colombian Narcos has risen to epic heights, including NarcoPresident Alvaro Uribe and former paramilitary commanders now integrated into the Colombian military.

Uncle Sam's "Drug War" - like the "War on Terror" - offers a phony pretext in which it can manufacture a geopolitical crisis. And right now the terrain of that crisis has shifted from the Colombian countryside to places like Bolivia and Venezuela - places that have committed themselves to resisting Uncle Sam directly.

And sure enough, Goodman carries water for the Empire like a good stenographer. He continues:
In Colombia, the world's largest cocaine producer, the biggest increases were in the lawless, largely uninhabited jungles near its borders with Venezuela and Ecuador.

The spread of the coca frontier eastward toward Venezuela is in line with comments by U.S. anti-drug officials who have alleged that corruption within the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may be converting Colombia's neighbor into a major drug route.

Although production is on the rise in Colombia, the U.N. said it declined in Peru and Bolivia.

Coca production in Bolivia fell by 8 percent last year, according to the U.N. The United States, however, is concerned Bolivia's leftist, coca-growing President Evo Morales - who took office in January - could relax his country's drug-fighting efforts....

The apparent declines differ widely from findings by the United States... which estimated coca plantings grew by... 10 percent in Bolivia last year.
Totally taken in by State Department propaganda, Goodman never bothers to consider the geopolitical dimensions of this "failed" campaign. He never bothered to look in whose economic and geostrategic interest the "failure" serves.

The "War on Drugs" offers Uncle Sam an issue to drum up support for military action against not only Colombia and Venezuela, but also Peru, Mexico, and Ecuador. And, as its fortunes slip in the Middle East, and as the Bolivarian Revolution increasinly forces Sam's hand in America, we must assume it's propaganda will seize upon this fake "War" to justify its imperial machinations as it does elsewhere throughout the world.