In yesterday’s Crikey Bernard Keane’s comment — that Colombian president Alvaro Uribe will be lining up with our own unlamented ex-PM for a presidential gong “in recognition of his country’s extraordinary commitment” to providing American consumers with high quality marching powder — is a long way from the truth.
Commenting on the fight against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other such groups Uribe said, “if not for illicit drugs we would have defeated these groups long ago.”
And in a recent article on Colombia in Vanity Fair Maureen Orth wrote: “I will never forget President Betancur telling me in an interview in Bogota in 1981, before cocaine really took hold, ‘We would not have these problems if you [Americans] were not such excellent clients.'”
In fact the drug war in Colombia is, like similar drug wars in other locations, a wonderful example of one group funding both sides of the battle. American taxpayers fund the “war on drugs,” American consumers fund the drug lords.
A paragraph on the home page of the Platypus Hostel (the owner likes Australians) in Bogota sums up the attitude of many Colombians to their drug problem:
If you’re thinking about using cocaine during your stay in Colombia, we hope you will consider your decision carefully. You can learn about the drug and its health effects at Wikipedia and see a video showing how it’s produced here.
The production of cocaine also significantly damages the environment of Colombia. And money spent on cocaine goes directly to support groups fighting in Colombia’s internal conflict, leading to assassinations, massacres and one of the world’s largest refugee problems. This conflict is excellently summarized in this Reuters report.
If not for your own well-being, we would encourage you to refrain from supporting violence against the Colombian people by purchasing cocaine.
Regrettably Mr Wheeler has a very proscribed view of Columbian cocaine production and trafficking. Drug trafficking and right wing terrorist activity have been linked in Columbia for at least the past forty years. The CIA has been heavily involved in organising this trafficking, using the profits to fund its “off the books” activities, most notably in Central America in the Iran Contra affair. Under National Security Directive 221 of April 1986 the US defined drug trafficking as a national security matter, allowing the use of US troops in Columbia in alliance with the CIA.
The DEA is well aware of the CIA’s involvement and regularly frustrated by its inability to prosecute persons clearly protected by the CIA. The details of this activity have been set out by Daniel Hopsicker and Peter Dale Scott among others.
Scott suggests that the real purpose of the so-called ‘war on drugs’ is to alter market share. Those cartels protected by the CIA benefit at the expense of non-protected cartels whose members frequently wind up dead in large numbers.
None of this should be news. It has been confirmed by official reports in the US, including the CIA’s own Inspector-General and Senate reports.
Nor is this pattern of activity confined to Latin America. One cannot understand the true nature of America’s involvment in what was then called Indo-China and more recently Afghanistan without appreciating the vital role played by CIA drug trafficking in financing its illicit wars, support for dictators, terrorism and much else.
Accepting what Mr Uribe has to say on the subject is at best naive and simply does not accord with reality.