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July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
Resources:
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About 9/11
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
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July
2, 2002
Jungle
Fever
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
by Chris Floyd
"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" 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.
In short, the insane attempt to criminalize--rather
than regulate--the perhaps regrettable but clearly ineradicable
human desire to escape reality on occasion has led to a vast,
pervasive corruption--of governments, societies, cultures, institutions--unprecedented
in history. From Al Capone to al Qaeda, outlaw enterprises have
entwined with state power to feed on this pool of illicit profit
and blight the lives of millions.
And now the "war on drugs"
is merging with the "war on terror," with a corresponding
growth in scale and firepower, offering excellent potential for
long-term profits for the "defense"-related industries
that hold such a disproportionate sway in international politics.
This merging also accelerates the moral corrosion that flourishes
under the acidic metaphor of "war"--as we can see in
Bolivia.
When it was first foisted upon on a supine
Bolivian government 18 months ago, the ETF kept a low profile.
But in the new dispensation after September. 11, they have, as
one Bolivian officer puts it, "gotten out of hand."
The ETF is now under investigation for allegedly killing an unarmed
union leader during a protest by local farmers in January. Bolivia's
official human rights ombudsman has logged charges of four other
ETF murders and more than 50 instances of torture and theft since
the Sept. 11 empowerment.
To please their overlords in Washington,
the Bolivian government has forbidden the farmers of Chapare
to ply their ancient trade. When it banned coca cultivation,
the government promised economic aid to help farmers switch to
alternate crops and gain access to international markets for
their new products. But little of this aid has been forthcoming,
and now the 40,000 indigenous families of Chapare face ruin and
starvation, the region's Roman Catholic officials say.
So the farmers try to grow coca again--and
they are burnt out by the ETF. They protest their lack of access
to markets for legal crops--and they are shot dead by the ETF.
Every bullet the mercenaries fire into the body of a farmer is
paid for by the Bush Administration. But the pious Pilates in
Washington deny all responsibility.
"We don't believe them, the human
rights allegations," a Bush spokesman said, even after videotape
of the January murder was produced. And anyway, Washington has
contracted with a private company to pass its blood money to
the mercenaries; this Enron-like accounting trick means the U.S.
has no "official responsibility" for any of the ETF's
actions, the Bush Regime claims.
But some Bolivians disagree. "These
are soldiers with no clearly defined loyalties, and a foreign
power is funding them to run around our country with guns,"
says Juan Quintana, an official with the Defense Ministry. "The
existence of this force is a violation of the Bolivian constitution."
Ah, Juan, you just don't understand--this
is "war." Anything is possible.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
ANNOTATIONS:
"US
Role in Coca War Draws Fire," Washington Post, June
22, 2002
"Coca
Grower Killed in Bolivia," Corpwatch.org, Feb. 7, 2002
"Profound
concern over the violent social conflict in Bolivia sparked by
U.S. funded counternarcotics operations," Letter of
Four U.S. Congressman to the State Department
"CIA
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade," Interview with
Alfred McCoy, Nov. 9, 1991
"The
CIA's Drug Confession," Consortiumnews.com, Oct. 15,
1998
"Otto
Reich: Our Man in Little Havana," American Prospect,
May 25, 2001
"Guatemala:
Memory of Silence," Report of the Commission for Historical
Clarification,"
"Narcotics
Traffickers and the Contras," Senate Committee on Drugs,
Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy
"The
Reagan-Bush Crime Syndicate," Consortiumnews.com, 1996
"US
Role in Salvador's Brutal War," BBC, March 24, 2002
"Enron's
Pipe Scheme in Bolivia," Corpwatch.org, May 9, 2002
"Plan
to Lift Limit on Colombia Aid, Add Counterterrorism Effort,"
San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 2002
"The
Bush Oil-Igarchy's Old Friend Oxy," Alternet.org, Feb.
21, 2002
Today's
Feature
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
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