Coastal Post Online
February 2001
This is a story about gold. Black gold, white gold and green gold flowing in rivers of the shiny stuff. This is a story about further extractions of gold from Columbia in the name of the War on Drugs.
As Cortez told the Aztecs, "We Europeans have a hole in our heart, which can only be filled with gold." All the gold of the New World has not filled that hole, Cibola the fabled seven cities of gold wouldn't do it.
Even those conquistadors whose gullets were filled with the molten metal, funneled down their throats by natives of Columbia five hundred years ago, did not die satisfied.
For every raider killed in the conquest there were always more Europeans who followed to gather as much gold as they could from the new world, yet never died happy.
George Washington's brother tried to fill his hole in Columbia in 1741, with the storming of Cartagena, which went so badly for him, and Admiral Vernon.
They should have studied Admiral Drake's successful raking of a golden harvest there from the Spaniards' hoard in 1586. Drake hauled crates of loot out of Cartagena in his ship the Golden Hinde, after threatening to bomb it to rubble, as he raped and pillaged the Spanish South American Empire. He buried chests of gold somewhere in west Marin. Maps are for sale.
Medellin Medals
Plan Columbia 2000, with bipartisan support from Congress is said to be another skirmish in the longest American war, the War on Drugs. This is the official storyline. American taxpayers will spend billions to buy killing 'copters, advanced weapons, chemical poisons, and genetically manipulated fungi from American companies. We'll give those to the Colombian army. We are also sending along a few hundred military trainers from our armed services to look after things. The decent folks in the Colombian army will use our help to invade and secure the interior of Columbia from bad, communist drug dealers. There will be a movie.
Our plan is to attack a supply line of cocaine and heroin controlled by the communist Colombians. These bad "commies" aren't really Marxists, but they are competing with allies of the Colombian army, also in the drug trade down there.
The major drug producers in Columbia are the allies of and even in the Colombian military and government, so our good guys have a few human rights problems, like mass murder and ritual decapitations. We're gonna ignore all that in the cause of the War on Drugs, we ignore so much other brutality in it. The army will drive out or kill all the commies with our help. The paramilitary drug lord friends of the Colombian army will be allowed to seize the country and restore it to good, free enterprise drug dealing. Explosions, beheadings, funerals, mass burials, lots of explosions. Plenty of Drugs. Good guys beat the bad guys. That's the picture.
Drugs Are Bad
Don't believe the hype, it is still all about the greed for gold and human blood. We're more creative in what we can turn into gold since Drake's day. Like Rumpelstiltskin who could turn straw into skeins of it, now trolls can turn oil into gold, turn the green leaves of coca and toxic chemicals into gold, turn colored paper and human blood into gold.
It's an a chemical shell game shuffled by the gnomes of Zurich, the hobbits of London and the elves of the fed. Black market billions are the lubricants which keeps the white market twirling with trillions in electronic numbers and paper promises loosely based on gold.
Every expert admits that as a plan for fighting the war on drugs this is fubar, (fucked up beyond all recognition). As a plan for concentrating more gold in the hands of fewer people it is a perfect storm.
The Colombian conquerors have done a pretty good job of that in 500 years of ugly history. Right now the top 3% of Colombians own 70% of the arable land. They want more. Sixty per cent of the population lives below Columbia's rather meager poverty level.
The poor in Columbia have a long history of choosing to pick up weapons rather than hoes from the beginning of the European land grab. Simon Bolivar got the whole South American Independence movement started there in the 19th century. He didn't liberate it for the people, only the owners.
The rich and their henchmen in Colombia have always met rebellions by the poor with utmost cruelty, yet for five hundred years the peasants have always regrouped through the generations. Even the worst wave of killing of a quarter million peasants and workers in the 1950's did not end a centuries long struggle for fairness.
In the 70's a renewed military fight began again with a new generation that didn't believe that the poor shall always be with us. After years of fighting all sides agreed to end the wars and concentrate on drug profits. Since then thirty thousand political leaders of the left were killed by right-wing paramilitary executions after they'd all agreed to a political solution. Our murderous allies in the War on Drugs are a necessary evil, we're told to believe.
After all the peace brokers were killed, only soldiers were left and they returned to military methods. The communist-organized poor have fought the most successful military rebellion against the wealthy in Colombian history. They've won government recognized control of a Switzerland sized area of Columbia.
They have bought better weapons by taxing the business people who work in their area, including illegal drug dealers. Kidnapping and protection rackets are widely practiced as a tax system. The commies of the FARC are a more disciplined military and local law enforcement team than the Colombian government, and they even fund better health clinics and schools in the country under their control.
Their taxes are higher. Because their example is seen as a menace to the Spanish colonial system of Latin America, which is indebted to European and North American banks and multinational corporations, they must be neutralized.
The communist or disgruntled peasants still control a small area of Columbia where cocaine or heroin is grown, produced and shipped out. Since they charge more to "protect" the trade in their area, a military victory should reduce the costs of hard drugs for users in the states and Europe if successful.
The Seven Percent Solutions
The leaf of the coca plant has been chewed or drunk as a tea by natives of South America for thousands of years. Some German figured out how to chemically extract a white powder, cocaine hydrochloride, from the leaves, which he immediately snorted. It numbed his nose and fired his synapses. Cocaine became popular with nasal surgeons and psychiatrists in the 1890's. Some doctors back then were convinced that the personality could be changed by surgically altering the nasal bones. Now it's called plastic surgery. Growing coca bushes and processing the leaves with toxic chemicals to refine it into cocaine can be done anywhere in South America, Africa or Asia to supply demand. Poppies can be grown almost anywhere to supply opium and heroin, and these coca and poppies are even grown legally for the medical and soft drink trade. Columbia will still be a center of the drug trade even if we kill all the guerrillas or drive them into neighboring countries. The paramilitary drug lords will take up the slack.
The illegal drug trade around the world is run by various capitalist clans called bankers and their best customers, there are communist agencies, CIA fronts and Mafia types involved in the heavy work. There are decorated war heroes and freedom fighters that deal drugs. It is frequently engaged in by police, private and national armies around the world. Columbia is in the spotlight now, but the trade can be shifted to many other countries and continents, like any multinational industry. Any attempts to control it are doomed to expensive failure, while attempts to legalize drugs are thwarted because the War on Drugs is so good for government power and corporate profits.
It's not about stopping drugs.
Serpico XXX
It was Richard Nixon who declared the War on Drugs in 1972, although it had been fought as a Police Action since 1917 when cocaine and morphine were forced behind the drug counter. Nixon needed a diversion from his bombing of those domino theory countries. Sending heroin from the Golden Triangle back in body bags to boost the domestic supply and fund covert actions was just part of doing business. The Iran contra scam was part of a complex shell game of drugs, guns and money between Columbia, the United States, Israel, Iran, and the Nicaraguan terrorists the Bush/Reagan team loved. Government agents helped bring tons of cheap cocaine and crack flooding into America in the 80's. The main result of the War on Drugs has been a steady increase in cheaper and the more potent addictable drugs cocaine, heroin and speed. Thirty years and a trillion dollars spent on the War on Drugs have brought floods of cheaper, harmful drugs into the hands of our children and adults. For the most part Americans prefer the more deadly drugs, alcohol and tobacco or the safest drug, cannabis. Fewer than two percent of Americans are actually addicted to white powder, illegal drugs, maybe five times more people use them occasionally. Most users of illegal drugs prefer cannabis/marijuana.
Drug abuse of any kind is not good for your health; there's little argument about that.
An unregulated market makes illegal drugs riskier, but legal drug use kills a half million more Americans than illegal drugs every year. Nobody really knows why some people are self destructive, even how to "cure" addicted people is a mystery. Medical treatment of drug addicts is only marginally more successful than the legal remedies, but according to the conservative Rand Institute, it is seven times cheaper to medically treat drug users than jailing them as prisoners of the War on Drugs.
What's Up With Sacramento
California passed prop 36 in November to begin treating drug addicts instead of locking them up. Leaving it up to legislators to implement the will of the people looks like they will fubar it up as badly as their energy plan. Legislators are under attack for taxation without representation, but they're dug in like the commies in Columbia.
Back To Columbia In A DC-9
Columbia has oil too; we're not just going there for cheaper drugs. Petroleum oil is the "blood of our Earth Mother", according to the U'wa Indians who live deep in Amazonian Columbia, where Occidental Oil wants to drill.
The west has never met an earth mother it didn't want to rape, kill, control or bleed dry. Columbia is a land of tropical resources with an easily disposable workforce to turn them into gold. Refugees from Columbia will continue to flee to Miami and points north. They'd rather shop without worrying about being blown up or kidnapped. It's a pity the American billions spent on Plan Columbia will not even provide secure shopping for that country.