News from Bolivia, and elsewhere.
Posted in history, war on drugs on Mar 15th, 2009
Morales penned an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, defending Bolivia’s production and use of coca leaves. I couldn’t agree with him more. In it, he mentions the U.N.’s stance on coca–and once again Banzer (he of the torture rooms) rears his ugly head:
In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized, war on drugs on Mar 13th, 2009
An excellent post about the U.S. assuming its responsibility in the world drug epidemic. Basically, it calls upon our benighted country to grow up! Read the whole thing, for sure, but here are some snippets:
I was raised in the New York State wine country, and my father made his living supplying the wineries. No one [...]
Posted in war on drugs on Mar 10th, 2009
In an otherwise informative article from the Guardian–which discusses the 6,000-plus drug-related dead in Mexico last year, the new shipping route for cocaine between South America and West Africa, and the generally acknowledged failure of the “war on drugs”–the paper’s editors screwed up the headline: “Cocaine Production Surge Unleashes Wave of Violence in Latin America.”
I’ve [...]
Posted in history, war on drugs, washington on Mar 6th, 2009
This has been kicking around for a while, but the BBC has a detailed article out now about newly discovered torture cells from the 80s that are currently being excavated by the Morales administration–in the basement of the Ministry of Interior. The horrific story comes from the Banzer era in Bolivia (repeated, remarkably, under the [...]
Posted in war on drugs on Feb 24th, 2009
California assemblyman Tom Ammiano is slated to bring legislation to the floor today to decriminalize and tax marijuana–a great first (or, for California, second) step to wind down the insanity that is the U.S. war on drugs.
On a related front, ex-LatAm presidents Cardoso, Gaviria, and Zedillo (Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, respectively) have a WaPo editorial [...]
Posted in war on drugs on Feb 19th, 2009
Inca Kola News somehow got its hands on the 2008 International Narcotics Control Board’s world report a whole day before it was supposed to be published–and he’s made some pretty charts. What do we learn? Well, even though Bolivia has far less coca-cultivated land than Bush buds Peru and Colombia, Bolivia’s the one to get [...]
Posted in war on drugs on Feb 12th, 2009
Former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil are calling on Barack Obama to decriminalize marijuana, according to Bloomberg. Zedillo, Gaviria, and Cardoso rightfully point out that no gains have been made in the War on Drugs. “It makes no sense to continue a policy on moral grounds without getting the desired results,” said Gaviria.
True enough, [...]
Posted in TV, war on drugs on Feb 10th, 2009
Tonight at 8 p.m. E.T., Dan Rather Presents, on HDNet, will air “Yankee Go Home,” a look at Bolivia’s repudiation of Washington’s War on Drugs efforts in the Morales era. There’s even an interview with the Bolivian president himself! If you’ve got HDNet on your cable box, be sure to torrent it so those of [...]
Bolivia Weekly