Sao Paulo--
With president Obama's State of the Union speech giving notice that free trade with Colombia is not a priority in Washington, Colombia's ability to attract foreign capital now depends on the security provided by US forces and trade incentives linked to the war on drugs. With the promise of free trade, more than $7 billion in foreign investment poured into Colombia last year, powering the growth of a modern services sector in cities like Medellin, where commuters ride to work on a french designed metro system. But renewal of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), due to expire in a few weeks, is now critical if the Obama administration is to maintain its strategic alliance with the nation that remains the world's largest grower of coca leaves.
ATPDEA is a decade old policy tool that provides Colombia with trade preferences to host US drug war personnel who help contain the FARC, right wing paramilitary units and others seeking to control coca producing land and prices. Thanks to ATPDEA over 90 percent of Colombian exports, including cut flowers, already enter the United States duty free without the need for the free trade agreement that's stalled on Capitol Hill.
Colombian vice president Angelino Garzon will visit Washington on Friday to lobby counterpart Joe Biden and secretary of state Hillary Clinton to renew ATPDEA. Garzon will also listen to NGOs and union officials share their concerns about human rights and labor issues in Colombia.
A former leader of Colombia's Workers Confederation (CUT) from a humble background, Garzon is a sharp contrast to president Juan Manuel Santos whose family owns El Tiempo, the Bogota newspaper that has been a beacon for Reaganomics for three decades. He has negotiated agreements with the FARC and is no stranger to the ATPDEA process. As governor of Cauca, a major coca growing state, he helped then-president Alvaro Uribe persuade the George W. Bush administration to renew the agreement in 2007.
But ATPDEA can't reduce the global demand that's made the crack house the new opium den. And it can't stop Colombia's narcotics industry from being too big to fail. While Americans still go to jail for possessing a gram of cocaine for personal use, Colombia passed a law decriminalizing possession of that amount in 1994. Colombia's Constitutional Court has refused on six occasions to rule that law unconstitutional.
With Colombian veterans of the drug war now assisting counterparts in Mexico and Peru, the conflict has escalated into an inter-American operation that has less to do with stopping the flow of drugs than with attempting to direct product and profits through politically reliable channels. In this context, renewal of ATPDEA reflects the contradiction-- fighting to control the supply but failing to quell the demand -- that is inherent in Washington's drug war policy and renews questions about the moral and ethical credibility of US policy in Latin America.
US and Colombian claims that the drug war is winning hearts and minds has been called into question in a recent study by Colombia's National Repatriation and Reconciliation Commission. The study indicates that 8,250 right wing paramilitary forces and leftist guerrillas (including FARC associates) who joined the government's demobilization and re-education program have dropped out, returning to their militarized lifestyles in rural coca producing regions.
In Washington, President Obama has warned the media to avoid associating drug violence in Mexican border towns like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez with the Colombian experience. But the war on drugs has pushed Colombian traffickers, including the FARC, to augment their relatively low margin, labor intensive paramilitary operations that control the gathering and manufacturing of product with the more lucrative front end of the business in Mexico that exploits the huge US market.
The war on drugs has also pushed Colombian cartels south into Brazil, which, according to Interpol, is the second largest consumer of cocaine products after the United States. President Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla who spent three years in prison courtesy of a US-backed military regime, is now using the army to help clean up the nation's drug infested favelas. While cutting back on some social programs, Brazil is spending $5 billion on aircraft and $7 billion on radar and other tracking systems that is turning the Amazon bordering Colombia into the new Rio Grande.
While it's probable AFTDEA will be renewed over the objections of human rights and union groups, Colombia is looking beyond Washington for economic partners. China is now Bogota's second largest trade partner. And President Santos met Wednesday in Paris with President Sarkozy to discuss investment and cultural programs and french support for agricultural projects that can provide an alternative to coca as a lucrative cash crop.
The strategy being employed in Colombia to promote development while mediating the FARC and the global drug trade is dynamic, cuts both ways and is not pretty. It's as if President Santos borrowed a page from the late Richard Holbrooke's playbook on statecraft. A legendary US diplomat and former investment banker, Holbrooke never had moral qualms about negotiating with people who do immoral things.
Now, there are no doubt elites in Miami, or Bogota, which may benefit from it, but the general welfare of a nation is bound to decline when its government abdicates its sovereignty for a little temporary benefits.
NAFTA has been a disaster for Mexico, for the US manufacturing sector.
We have found the WED's (the weapons of economic destruction) and they are:
Free trade
Globalization
Privatization
Union busting
The submission of a sovereign government to privately issued debt.
Want to end the growing of coca in Colombia? Take the money out of the market for coca leaves. Want to end the growing of poppies in the Taliban dominated regions of Afghanistan? Take the money out of the heroin market. (Or, alternatively, pay those rural farmers to grow other crops, and put a cop on every farm to prevent cheating.)
Want to put the vast majority of every flavor and style of gang banger on the planet on a radically different path over night? Lay them off of their "jobs".
These things are not rocket science. We only pay many billions of dollars every year to so called "experts" to work full time trying to convince us that things will get better if we just continue to send them billions and billions of dollars decade after decade.
But everything I can find says that "drugs" only went to the Dark Side with illegalization. Before that society could find no way to truly hurt itself over usage of mind altering substances, and individuals so prone were (and are) numerous enough to be a harm to they and theirs, but also rare enough that societies easily have been able to go on without them.
But in the modern world criminal convictions can affect voting rights and outcomes, and Air America can be used to maintain the viability of Chaing Kai Shek and the Kuomintang.
From there the virus of the drug war can become an epidemic and affect civilization in permutations, and to degrees that even the best minds never could have imagined.
The alternative, of course, is to simply instill freedom, and trust humanity. Kind of a scary proposition in a lot of ways, but it seems pretty easy to say in which direction the safer alternative lies.
The solution to this issue is a simple one. Legalize drugs, and control their distribution via clinics and/or prescription. Offer rehabilitation to those who seek it, provide job skills training, transitional support etc.
Conservative principles, quite clearly, ARE:
1) Limited, locally controlled government.
2) Individual liberty coupled with personal responsibility.
3) Free enterprise.
4) A strong national defense.
5) Fiscal responsibility.
Prohibition is actually an authoritarian War on the economy, the Constitution and all civic institutions of our great nation.
It's all about the market and cost/benefit analysis. Whether any particular drug is good, bad, or otherwise is irrelevant! As long as there is demand for any mind altering substance, there will be supply; the end! The only affect prohibiting it has is to drive the price up, increase the costs and profits, and where there is illegal profit to be made criminals and terrorists thrive.
The cost of criminalizing citizens who are using substances no more harmful than similar things that are perfectly legal like alcohol and tobacco, is not only hypocritical and futile, but also simply not worth the incredible damage it does.
Afghani farmers produce approx. 93% of the world's opium which is then, mostly, refined into street heroin then smuggled throughout Eastern and Western Europe.
Both the Taliban and the terrorists of al Qaeda derive their main income from the prohibition-inflated value of this very easily grown crop. Only those opposed, or willing to ignore this fact, want things the way they are.
A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF NARCOTICS-FUNDED TERRORIST GROUPS
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/pdf-files/NarcsFundedTerrs_Extrems.pdf