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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">From Wounded Latin America, Demand To Put An End To The War On Drugs <br></h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">By Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">September 30, 2022<br></div>
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<p>Each year, in the last weeks of September, the world’s leaders gather
in New York City to speak at the podium of the United Nations General
Assembly. The speeches can usually be forecasted well in advance, either
tired articulations of values that do not get acted upon or belligerent
voices that threaten war in an institution built to prevent war.</p>
<p>However, every once in a while, a speech shines through, a voice
emanates from the chamber and echoes around the world for its clarity
and sincerity. This year, that voice belongs to Colombia’s recently
inaugurated president, Gustavo Petro, whose brief <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T46oAkrydg">remarks</a> distilled
with poetic precision the problems in our world and the cascading
crises of social distress, the addiction to money and power, the climate
catastrophe and environmental destruction. ‘It is time for peace’,
President Petro said. ‘We are also at war with the planet. Without peace
with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social
justice, there is no social peace’.</p>
<p>Colombia has been gripped by violence since it won its independence
from Spain in 1810. This violence emanated from Colombia’s elites, whose
insatiable desire for wealth has meant the absolute impoverishment of
the people and the failure of the country to develop anything that
resembles liberalism. Decades of political action to build the
confidence of the masses in Colombia culminated in a cycle of protests
beginning in 2019 that led to Petro’s electoral victory. The new
centre-left government has pledged to build social democratic
institutions in Colombia and to banish the country’s culture of
violence. Though the Colombian army, like armed forces around the world,
prepares for war, President Petro <a href="https://www.elpais.com.co/colombia/un-ejercito-que-empiece-a-prepararse-para-la-paz-presidente-petro.html">told</a> them in August 2022 that they must now ‘prepare for peace’ and must become ‘an army of peace’.</p>
<p>When thinking about violence in a country like Colombia, there is a
temptation to focus on drugs, cocaine in particular. The violence, it is
often suggested, is an outgrowth of the illicit cocaine trade. But this
is an ahistorical assessment. Colombia experienced terrible bloodshed
long before highly processed cocaine became increasingly popular from
the 1960s onwards. The country’s elite has used murderous force to
prevent any dilution of its power, including the 1948 assassination of
Jorge Gaitán, the former mayor of Colombia’s capital of Bogotá, that led
to a period known as <em>La Violencia</em> (‘The Violence’). Liberal
politicians and communist militants faced the steel of the Colombian
army and police on behalf of this granite block of power backed by the
United States, which has used Colombia to extend its power into South
America. Fig leaves of various types were used to cover over the
ambitions of the Colombian elite and their benefactors in Washington. In
the 1990s, one such cover was the War on Drugs.</p>
<p>By all accounts – whether of the <a href="https://www.unodc.org/">United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime</a> or the US government’s <a href="https://www.dea.gov/">Drug Enforcement Agency</a> (DEA)
– the largest consumers of illegal narcotics (cannabis, opioids, and
cocaine) are in North America and Western Europe. A recent UN <a href="https://www.unodc.org/res/wdr2021/field/WDR21_Booklet_2.pdf">study</a> shows
that ‘cocaine use in the United States has been fluctuating and
increasing after 2013 with a more stable trend observed in 2019’. The
War on Drugs strategy, initiated by the United States and Western
countries, has had a two-pronged approach to the drug crisis: first, to
criminalise retailers in Western countries and, second, to go to war
against the peasants who produce the raw material in these drugs in
countries such as Colombia.</p>
<p>In the United States, for instance, almost two million people – disproportionately Black and Latino – are caught in the <a href="https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html">prison industrial complex</a>,
with 400,000 of them imprisoned or on probation for nonviolent drug
offences (mostly as petty dealers in a vastly profitable drug empire).
The collapse of employment opportunities for young people in
working-class areas and the allure of wages from the drug economy
continue to attract low-level employees of the global drug commodity
chain, despite the dangers of this profession. The War on Drugs has made
a negligible impact on this pipeline, which is why many countries have
now begun to <a href="https://www.unodc.org/documents/ungass2016/Contributions/Civil/DrugPolicyAlliance/DPA_Fact_Sheet_Approaches_to_Decriminalization_Feb2015_1.pdf">decriminalise</a> drug possession and drug use (particularly cannabis).</p>
<p>The obduracy of the Colombian elite – backed by the US government –
to allow any democratic space to open in the country led the left to
take up armed struggle in 1964 and then return to the gun when the elite
shut down the promise of the democratic path in the 1990s. In the name
of the war against the armed left as well as the War on Drugs, the
Colombian military and police have crushed any dissent in the country.
Despite <a href="https://www.semana.com/esta-realmente-crisis-proceso-auc-tras-traslado-macaco-don-berna-combita/87824-3/">evidence</a> of
the financial and political ties between the Colombian elite,
narco-paramilitaries, and drug cartels, the United States government
initiated Plan Colombia in 1999 to funnel $12 billion to the Colombian
military to deepen this war (in 2006, when he was a senator, Petro <a href="https://www.semana.com/el-senador-alvaro-araujo-confiesa-estuvo-fiesta-jorge-40-antes-su-desmovilizacion/82000-3/">revealed</a> the nexus between these diabolical forces, for which his family was threatened with violence).</p>
<p>As part of this war, the Colombian armed forces dropped the terrible
chemical weapon glyphosate on the peasantry (in 2015, the World Health
Organisation <a href="https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-glyphosate/">said</a> that this chemical is ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’ and, in 2017, the Colombian Constitutional Court <a href="https://www.eltiempo.com/justicia/conflicto-y-narcotrafico/las-condiciones-de-la-corte-constitucional-para-volver-a-usar-glifosato-266574">ruled</a> that its use must be restricted). In 2020, the following <a href="https://hir.harvard.edu/americas-failed-war-on-drugs-in-colombia/">assessment</a> was
offered in the Harvard International Review: ‘Instead of reducing
cocaine production, Plan Colombia has actually caused cocaine production
and transport to shift into other areas. Additionally, militarisation
in the war on drugs has caused violence in the country to increase’.
This is precisely what President Petro told the world at the United
Nations.</p>
<p>The most recent DEA <a href="https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2021-02/DIR-008-21%202020%20National%20Drug%20Threat%20Assessment_WEB.pdf">report</a> notes
that cocaine use in the United States remains steady and that ‘deaths
from drug poisoning involving cocaine have increased every year since
2013’. US drug policy is focused on law enforcement, aiming merely to
reduce the domestic availability of cocaine. Washington will <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FY-2023-Budget-Highlights.pdf">spend</a> 45%
of its drug budget on law enforcement, 49% on treatment for drug
addicts, and a mere 6% on prevention. The lack of emphasis on prevention
is revealing. Rather than tackle the drug crisis as a demand-side
problem, the US and other Western governments pretend that it is a
supply-side problem that can be dealt with by using military force
against petty drug dealers and peasants who grow the coca plant.
Petro’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T46oAkrydg">cry</a> from the heart at the United Nations attempted to call attention to the root causes of the drug crisis:</p>
<p>According to the irrational power of the world, the market that razes
existence is not to blame; it is the jungle and those who live in it
that are to blame. Bank accounts have become unlimited; the money saved
by the most powerful people on Earth could not even be spent over the
course of centuries. The empty existence produced by the artificiality
of competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money
and to possessions has another face: the drug addiction of people who
lose the competition in the artificial race that humanity has become.
The sickness of loneliness is not cured by [dousing] the forests with
glyphosate; the forest is not to blame. To blame is your society
educated by endless consumption, by the stupid confusion between
consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of the powerful to
fill with money.</p>
<p>The War on Drugs, Petro said, is a war on the Colombian peasantry and
a war on the precarious poor in Western countries. We do not need this
war, he said; instead, we need to struggle to build a peaceful society
that does not sap meaning from the hearts of people who are treated as a
surplus to society’s logic.</p>
<p>As a young man, Petro was part of the M-19 guerrilla movement, one of
the organisations that attempted to break the chokehold that Colombia’s
elites held over the country’s democracy. One of his comrades was the
poet María Mercedes Carranza (1945–2003), who wrote searingly about the
violence thrust upon her country in her book <em>Hola, Soledad</em> (‘Hello, Solitude’) (1987), capturing the desolation in her poem ‘La Patria’ (‘The Homeland’):</p>
<p>In this house, everything is in ruins,in ruins are hugs and
music,each morning, destiny, laughter are in ruins,tears, silence,
dreams.The windows show destroyed landscapes,flesh and ash on people’s
faces,words combine with fear in their <a href="http://mouths.in/">mouths.In</a> this house, we are all buried alive.</p>
<p>Carranza took her life when the fires of hell swept through Colombia.</p>
<p>A peace agreement in 2016, a cycle of protests from 2019, and now the
election of Petro and Francia Márquez in 2022 have wiped the ash off
the faces of the Colombian people and provided them with an opportunity
to try and rebuild their house. The end of the War on Drugs, that is,
the war on the Colombian peasantry, will only advance Colombia’s fragile
struggle towards peace and democracy.</p>
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