Losing the War on Drugs

DEA drug thugs have been kicked out of Bolivia and are not welcome back even though diplomatic relations were normalized under a recent agreement signed three years after Bolivia, in 2008, expelled the U.S. ambassador and DEA for inciting political opposition against the leftist government.

It’s a question of "dignity and sovereignty," explained Bolivian President Evo Morales to reporters during a regional summit in Bogota Colombia.

Morales said that he was "personally a victim" of the American drug thugs as a coca growers' union leader before his 2005 election when U.S agents controlled Bolivia's military and police. The DEA goons while working with Bolivia's anti-narcotics police beat him unconscious once during a clash with coca growers.  

"They repressed us in Bolivia. That has ended," said Morales. "For the first time since Bolivia was founded, the United States will now respect Bolivia's rules."

Fat chance of that, I think.

Predictably, the U.S. government denies the Bolivian president’s claims that Philip Goldberg, the ambassador he expelled in September 2008, was “a conspirator” who operated with big Agra-business factions in the country to unseat him from office.

Of course, the U.S. government we all know and love would deny that water is wet if that suited its perpetual and relentless military style campaign in the War on Drugs.

Bolivia is the world's third largest producer of cocaine. For thousands of years the indigenous Andean peoples living in the mountainous regions of Peru, Bolivia and Colombia have chewed coca leaf for medicinal and other positive reasons as part of their cultural and religious daily lives.

Then all of a sudden the heavy handed U.S. government came along with its legions DEA thugs and Drug War statists aiming to wipe out coca leaf use among an innocent populace as part of a futile effort to reduce the supply of cocaine to millions of American recreational drug aficionados who’ve acquired a taste for the substance.

Part of the plan also gave tariff exemptions to the region's cocaine-producing nations which allowed them to export thousands of products to the United States duty-free since 1991 as an incentive for trying to wean the peasants off coca.

The trade exemptions were suspended by the U.S. government in December of 2008; a development which Bolivian officials say has cost their people thousands of jobs and millions of dollars. The agreement normalizing relations doesn’t address the issue of restoring those trade preferences with the United States.

Reduce the supply of a desired product to millions of people in the United States by interfering in the internal politics and trampling upon the human rights of innocent people in a foreign land – that’s the American way.

DEA officials now maintain that cocaine production has been on the rise in the region since the agency was expelled from the country and that Mexican and Colombian traffickers are working to increase production with new and ever-more sophisticated processing labs.

Obviously, the War on Drugs isn’t working.

It serves us right.