[XangadsX]

An excellent article about how success in colombia has merely resulted in a shift BACK to the countries where production began during the early years of the drug war
In the dusty town of Villa Tunari in Bolivia's tropical coca-growing region, farmers used to barricade their roads against U.S.-backed drug police sent to prevent their leafy crop from becoming cocaine. These days, the police are gone, the coca is plentiful and locals close off roads for multiday block parties—not rumbles with law enforcement.

"Today, we don't have these conflicts, not one death, not one wounded, not one jailed," said Leonilda Zurita, a longtime coca-grower leader who is now a Bolivian senator, a day after a 13-piece Latin band wrapped up a boozy festival in town...Since 2000, cultivation of coca leaves—cocaine's raw material—plunged 65% in Colombia, to 141,000 acres in 2010, according to United Nations figures. In the same period, cultivation surged more than 40% in Peru, to 151,000 acres, and more than doubled in Bolivia, to 77,000 acres... Colombia's top police official, said at a Bogota news conference last year. "But evidently…that has produced a balloon effect."

The "balloon effect" is the idea that drug activity squeezed out of one neighborhood or region will simply bulge into another, like air in a balloon. For example, Mexico's bolder efforts to confront drug gangs—which ship cocaine made in South America to the U.S.—are pushing gangs to the weaker states of Central America...U.S. officials also note that Colombian coca cultivation plunged so much that total cultivation across the region is still 35% less than it was a decade ago. Still, coca plantations in Bolivia and Peru are yielding more these days, and new techniques for extracting the leaf's active ingredients make cocaine production more efficient...The cocaine industry has migrated before. Peru and Bolivia, where coca is legal and Indians have chewed it for centuries, were the primary source of coca leaves for a cocaine boom in the early 1980s that spawned kingpins like Colombia's Pablo Escobar...By 2000, 75% of global coca cultivation had moved to Colombia, where the power of left-wing guerrillas and traffickers kept huge swaths of territory out of the state's reach...But the biggest change around El Chapare may be, ironically, the peace. For years, towns like Villa Tunari saw tense and sometimes deadly skirmishes between growers and police...Under a new policy, coca union leaders, rather than police, enforce limits on growing. Each family member can plant one basketball-court sized "cato" of coca. U.N. figures show that Bolivia eradicated more than 20,000 acres in 2010, though the total area under cultivation remained the same.

One reason locals trim back coca farms is to maintain prices, says Ms. Zurita, the coca-grower leader. .. Cocaine: The New Front Lines - WSJ.com

[RerRibreLok]

The cynical side of me thinks its just players in the military industrial complex cashing in on big paychecks as well as the US using the drug war as a fall guy to create unstable conditions to shape foreign political climates.

Plan Columbia

Research studies
The US Defense Department funded a two year study which found that the use of the armed forces to interdict drugs coming into the United States would have minimal or no effect on cocaine traffic and might, in fact, raise the profits of cocaine cartels and manufacturers. The 175-page study, "Sealing the Borders: The Effects of Increased Military Participation in Drug Interdiction," was prepared by seven economists, mathematicians and researchers at the National Defense Research Institute, a branch of the RAND Corporation and released in 1988. The study noted that seven previous studies in the past nine years, including ones by the Center for Naval Research and the Office of Technology Assessment, had come to similar conclusions. Interdiction efforts, using current armed forces resources, would have almost no effect on cocaine importation into the United States, the report concluded.
During the early to mid-1990s, the Clinton administration ordered and funded a major cocaine policy study again by RAND. The Rand Drug Policy Research Center study concluded that $ 3 billion should be switched from federal and local law enforcement to treatment. The report said that treatment is the cheapest way to cut drug use. President Clinton's drug czar's office rejected slashing law enforcement spending.

Guerrillas and oil

Critics of Plan Colombia, such as authors Doug Stokes and Francisco Ramirez Cuellar, argue that the main intent of the program is not drug eradication but to fight leftist guerrillas. They argue that these Colombian peasants are also a target because they are calling for social reform and hindering international plans to exploit Colombia's valuable resources, including oil and other natural resources. As of 2004, Colombia is the fifteenth largest supplier of oil to the United States and could potentially rise in that ranking if petroleum extraction could be conducted in a more secure environment. From 1986 to 1997 there were nearly 79 million barrels (12,600,000 m3) of crude oil spilled in pipeline attacks. Damage and lost revenue were estimated at $1.5 billion, while the oil spills seriously damaged the ecology.

Military Programs

Army Aviation Brigade (2000-2008 cost: $844 million)

This program is executed by the U.S. State and Defense departments. It equips and trains the helicopter units of the Colombian Army. It is subdivided into various specific programs.

Plan Colombia Helicopter Program (PCHP) comprises helicopters provided for free by the U.S. government to the Colombian Army. The program needs 43 contract pilots and 87 contract mechanics to operate.
17 Bell UH-1N helicopters ( Former Canadian aircraft bought via US gov )
22 Bell UH-1H (Huey II) helicopters
13 Sikorsky UH-60L helicopters


Foreign Military Sales

(FMS) helicopters are purchased by the Colombian Army but supported by U.S. personnel.
20 Sikorsky UH-60L helicopters


Technical Assistance Field Team

Based at Tolemaida Army Base (Melgar, Cundinamarca), the team provides maintenance to U.S.-made helicopters.
Joint Initial Entry Rotary Wing School
Based at Melgar Air base (Melgar, Tolima), it is a flight school for Colombian combat-helicopter pilots. Additional pilot training is provided at the U.S. Army's helicopter training center (Fort Rucker, Alabama)


National Police Air Service (2000-2008 cost: $463 million)

The U.S. State Department provides support to approximately 90 aircraft operated by the Colombian National Police. The U.S. Defense Department supports the construction of an aviation depot at Madrid Air Base (Madrid, Cundinamarca).


National Police Eradication Program (2000-2008 cost: $458 million)

This program is executed by a private company, Dyncorp, under the supervision of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), and operates out of Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. U.S. State Department-owned planes spray chemicals to destroy coca and oppium poppy crops in rural Colombia. From 2000 to 2008 more than 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of crops were destroyed.
13 Air Tractor AT-802 armored crop dusters
13 Bell UH-1N helicopters
4 Alenia C-27 cargo planes

Those are just the more expensive ones above.


Aerial herbicide application


Plane sprays herbicides over the jungles of Colombia.
The United States regularly sponsors the spraying of large amounts of toxic herbicides such as Roundup over the jungles of Central and South America as part of its drug eradication programs. Many farmers who live below, and have nothing to do with the drug trade, are exposed to dangerous doses of toxic pesticides which cause severe health problems, birth defects, and deaths, not to mention destroying their legitimate crops, which for many are their sole source of income.
Environmental consequences resulting from aerial fumigation have been criticized as detrimental to some of the world's most fragile ecosystems; the same aerial fumigation practices are further credited with causing health problems in local populations.
Many Latin American farmers say that the fumigation programs are destroying their food crops, and that they are starving as a result.
Whats equally disturbing is the studies that say cocaine production increased since Plan Columbia began and that we continue do similar programs

Meridia Initiative

[Anamehuskeene]

The War on Drugs and The War on Poverty will never be won. Too many people and too much money involved.