Reply #20: Focus should be on the grinding poverty [View All]

[Clara T]

High in the Andes

The standard U.S. view portrays Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia as nations terrorized by powerful drug-trafficking cartels, often working in alliance with left-wing guerrillas. According to this view, the hard-pressed Andean governments may need U.S. support in order to protect their populations and prevail against the narco-terrorists. This standard view is almost totally incorrect.

The real problem facing the people of these countries is grueling poverty caused by the astounding greed of local elites and the grim workings of the international economic system, maintained by equally greedy elites in the industrialized nations.

In Bolivia in the first half of the 1980s, gross national product declined 2.3 percent per year, official unemployment went from 5.7 percent to 20 percent, and inflation stood at 10,000 percent in 1985. The world price of tin declined 57 percent between 1980 and 1988; over the five-year period 1983-87, Bolivian exports shrank 38 percent. The government closed most state-owned tin mines, throwing thousands of miners out of work.' More than one out of every six Bolivian children die before their fifth birthday.'

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For the Bush administration, fighting drug wars represents a way to appear to be dealing with a problem that is wracking American society- without having to admit the ugly truth, that drug abuse is not forced on the United States from the outside, but is the result of lives made desperate by the poverty, the unemployment, and the alienation of American society.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Foreign_Policy/Drugs_IA.html