Global Eye -- Jungle Fever
by Chris Floyd
Global Eye
June 28, 2002
"War:" a potent, pliable word.
Under the rubric of "war" -- which implies dire emergency,
imminent threat, the abandonment of normal life and the normal
rule of law -- there is no limit to the moral erosion that can
occur. The previously unthinkable becomes routine practice: For
example, a respectable democracy funding mercenary armies and
terrorist forces in foreign countries, like the jihadists in Afghanistan,
the Contras in Nicaragua -- and now the Expeditionary Task Force,
or ETF, in Bolivia.
There, the Bush Regime is paying -- lock,
stock and barrel -- for a band of local mercenaries taking part
in Bolivia's campaign to eradicate coca production in the jungle
region of Chapare, The Washington Post reports this week.
The mercenaries are attached to regular army
units, so they are not, officially, "paramilitaries."
But the many human rights charges they've spawned -- murders, beatings,
rapes, torture, illegal detentions -- sound like that old sweet
song of yesteryear, when Reagan-Bush proxy armies prowled the Latin
American night, killing tens of thousands of innocent people to
keep Yankee investments and American-backed elites safe from riff-raff.
The coca plant has been cultivated in Chapare
since time immemorial, used as a healing medicine and pain reliever.
In the second half of the 20th century, the sale and manufacture
of its powerful derivative, cocaine (along with various opium
derivatives), were taken up by organized crime and its allies
in the Western security services as a high-yield money-maker.
The mob used the profits to buy political influence and augment
its already-considerable infiltration into the "legitimate"
business world; elements in the security agencies used the money
to fund various covert and terrorist operations.
The highly addictive nature of the coca derivative
guaranteed unimaginable profits when the full flood of the cocaine
trade broke upon the lucrative American market. As in so many
cases, a "blowback" then occurred. With so much money
in play, previously acquiescent co-conspirators, like Panama's
Manuel Noriega, got uppity and had to be crushed, while innumerable
rogue operators muscled in on the action. Whole nations were upended
by warring drug lords who passed in and out of official favor
as the political winds shifted in Washington and other capitals.
Having lost control of the profits from the
drug trade -- and having unleashed a social devastation on the
American population that even the most cynical CIA player could
not have foreseen -- Washington then launched the "war on
drugs." This has proven every bit as profitable as the drug-running
itself -- perhaps even more so, as corrupt officials now can play
both sides, drawing huge amounts of tax dollars for the "war
effort" while also raking in bribes from favored crime bosses
to keep the trade thriving.
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