Colombia in the news

Today's humor headline in Eskpe: "Important scientific magazine reveals document that proves JuD.A.S. was Colombian."

This requires some explanation, but is absolutely hilarious, in a very dark way. The D.A.S. (Department of Security) has been rocked by scandal recently (and also not so recently, as you might imagine in Colombia). The former director, Jorge Noguera (pictured above), now ambassador to Italy, stands accused of allowing electoral fraud in the 2002 elections as well as the assasination of union leaders during his tenure as head of the intelligence agency.

This is all tied up with the upcoming presidential elections - Uribe has harshly criticized media outlets for covering the story. I don't have to hit you over the head with these parallels, do I?

President Alvaro Uribe assured today that the denunciations made by Colombian magazines Semana and Cambio about supposed cases of electoral fraud and administrative corruption in the administration of the DAS, the Colombian Institute of Rural Development (Incoder) and the Fund for Agricultural Sector Financing (Finagro) 'harm the stability and democracy of the country.' (from Terra)

Interesting how politicians tend to think it's the news of corruption and misdeeds that harm a country's image, not the acts themselves.

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Opponents accused Colombian President Alvaro Uribe of bullying the media on Wednesday after he made a fierce attack on a magazine that reported allegations of vote fraud and links between officials and illegal militias.

[Semana] had published an interview with a disgraced ex-member of the Administrative Security Department -- Colombia's equivalent of the FBI -- accusing a former boss of organizing electoral fraud to help Uribe in the 2002 election, maintaining links with far-right paramilitaries and plotting against Venezuela's left-wing president, Hugo Chavez.

In television and radio interviews, the popular but famously short-tempered Uribe dismissed Semana as "frivolous" and portrayed its editor as a high society fop.

"It seems appalling to me that freedom of the press is used to portray a government as illegitimate without checking facts properly," Uribe said.

His main rival in the upcoming election, Horacio Serpa of the left-leaning Liberal Party, accused Uribe of "intimidating our country's free press." Carlos Gaviria, presidential candidate of the left-wing Alternative Democratic Pole, said Uribe was questioning "freedom of the press." A Gallup poll in March gave Uribe 64 percent voter support compared to 20 percent for Serpa and 10 percent for Gaviria.

Also today, British newspaper The Independent calls Colombia the real victim of the war against drugs. This is an excellent and fairly short article, by the way, and well worth a read:

Thirty-five years into the US-funded "War on Drugs" and supply of the industrial world's favourite stimulant remains steady. In Bogota, Sandro Calvani, head of the UN's Drugs and Serious Crime unit, said eradication was simply making the traffickers better at farming. "In the last five years there's been a significant reduction in hectorage ... But the narco-traffickers have responded by caring for the coca plant better. They're treating them like tea plants."

As a result, the plants, though fewer, are producing more.

The logic of Washington's war, endorsed by Britain, is to limit demand by choking the supply line. Billions of Washington dollars have been spent every year on spraying tens of thousands of hectares with pesticides, but there has been little or no impact on the street value of cocaine, according to this year's US State Department narcotics report.

This random violence and territorial conflict has driven entire communities out of rural areas and into Colombia's chaotic cities. Unofficial estimates put the number of displaced people at more than three million, an internal refugee crisis rivalled only by the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Also, given the political realities of Bolivia and Peru, much of the growth is expected to shift to those countries. I don't know how long it's going to take, but one of these days we're going to realize the futility, not to mention injustice, of attempting to inflict the consequences of our own society's addictions on smaller, less prosperous nations. It's just sad. Back in the states, no less conservative and respected a magazine than the Economist said recently, "

The drug trade itself undermines democracy, but so do heavy-handed American efforts to contain it. As long as rich-country governments insist on imposing an unenforceable prohibition on cocaine consumption, Andean governments will continue to be faced with the thankless task of trying to repress market forces.

Cocaine: the facts (also from The Independent)
* Price per kilo: Colombia £1,100; US £20,700; EU £22,800
* Colombia produces 80 per cent of the world's cocaine
* Cocaine accounts for an equivalent of 1 to 3 per cent of Colombian GDP
* One hectare of the crop produces 1.45kg of refined cocaine
* Cocaine use has stabilised in the US, but has increased in the EU
* Nine million people in the EU, 3 per cent of all adults, have tried cocaine, while up to 3.5 million are likely to have used it in the past year and 1.5 million took the drug in the past month
* In Britain and Spain, more than 4 per cent of 15-34 year-olds consumed cocaine in the past 12 months
* 75 per cent of those who try cocaine become addicted
* Although the US accounts for just 4.5 per cent of the world's population, it accounts for 60 per cent of the world's drug consumption
* Each day 5,000 more people worldwide will try cocaine
* Between 2.5 and 4 hectares of rainforest have to be cleared to produce 1 hectare of the drug
* Each dose of cocaine destroys 0.7 square metres of rainforest