Widening Destruction Drug War in the Americas
Why, we ask in this Report, is the United States intervening in Colombia's civil conflict? And why is the United States fighting a seemingly counterproductive war against a group of mood-altering...
...stories of the non-stop violent struggle for control of illicit markets are packaged as "drug violence" stories...
...role in the Andes...
...incarceration rate that, thanks largely to the drug war, is by now the highest in the world, the anti-drug effort must be seen as nothing if not serious...
...But for other critical observers, the drug war, far from being a simple vehicle, is an end in itself...
...It sounds familiar...
...drug war, says it is precisely the wartime footing of the new prohibition-"the logic of urgency and exception"-that leads U.S...
...Or is something else going on...
...the low-intensity conflict of the drug war is the vehicle for that purpose...
...eanwhile, the news brings home the confusions of the drug war on a daily basis...
...The juxtaposition of extreme poverty and the extreme profitability created by prohibition gives the illicit drug industry real staying power...
...citizens to "accept the idea that we need to lock up our fellow citizens in service to a higher goal, this war we are fighting...
...For some observers, the goals of the U.S...
...Along with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the agencies most active in this war have been the same ones we saw a decade and a half ago in Central America: the State Department, the Pentagon, USAID and the CIA...
...The United States wants to reconstruct Colombia to its liking, says Walker...
...And what is the connection between these two questions: Is it really a war on drugs that motivates the U.S...
...With drug arrests in the United States currently running at nearly 1.6 million a year," writes Daniel Lazare, "and a U.S...
...interventions over the past half century: control, advantage and security for its interests in the Americas...
...So the destruction widens and we are left to look for the logic behind the racheting up of the drug war...
...For Lazare, the drug war is a deliberate mechanism of fear and irrationality meant to undermine thoughtful democratic participation...
...All I can guess is that they bought their way out," comments a Haitian drug official, explaining why not one Haitian arrested on drug charges over the past five years had ever gone to trial...
...And why is the United States fighting a seemingly counterproductive war against a group of mood-altering substances...
...Mood-altering and mind-bending drugs have problems of their own and we don't mean to belittle them in this report, but gangland murders in Mexico, drive-by shootings in New York and deadly battles over land in the Andes are the product of the economic and social distortions caused not by drugs themselves, but by their prohibition...
...The goal, he argues, is "war itself...
...Colombia intervention are not terribly different from the goals of similar U.S...
...This report is one such attempt...
...And in the Andean countries, particularly Colombia, rising poverty and unemployment, and the collapse of traditional agricultural markets has created an economic climate ripe for the risky incentives of illicit drug money-money from the elevated profits created by the war on drugs...
...It's not hard to do with wages as they are, compared to the money they can offer...
...William O. Walker says it's all about "nation building," an attempt to reconstruct Colombia in ways more conducive to U.S.-dominated stability in the region...
...The drug war itself, from this perspective, serves an undemocratic and interventionist agenda-an agenda with deliberately racist overtones...
...And Graham Boyd, who traces out the racial dimensions of the domestic U.S...
...As nasty as cigarettes-and their makers-may be, there are no headlines about shoot-outs over control of their distribution...
Vol. 35 • July 2001 • No. 1
