Daily Archives: October 15, 2022

On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of the War on Drugs, as a symptom of their capitalist greed. He accused You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.

This is Petros first trip to the United States since he was inaugurated in August. He was received on Sunday night September 18 by hundreds of supporters in Queens, NY who manifested their support to his administrations commitment to working for peace and ensuring the wellbeing of the Colombian people.

Below is a full transcription of his speech on September 20, 2022 to the United Nations General Assembly:

I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.

There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the landsI come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down, but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.

My country is not only beautiful, it is also violent.

How can beauty be conjugated with death, how can the biodiversity of life erupt with the dances of death and horror? Who is guilty of breaking the enchantment with terror? Who or what is responsible for drowning life in the routine decisions of wealth and interest? Who is leading us to destruction as a nation and as a people?

My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon jungle, the ChocWar jungle, the waters, the Andes mountain ranges, and the oceans. There, in those forests, planetary oxygen is emanated and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of these CO2 absorbing plants, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on earth. At any cost, its destruction is sought: it is an Amazonian plant, the coca plant, sacred plant of the Incas. [It is in] a paradoxical crossroads.

The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.

For the worlds power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.

The great sponge that absorbs planetary CO2 evaporates. The savior forest is seen in my country as the enemy to be defeated, as the weed to be extinguished.

Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.

We serve them only to fill the emptiness and loneliness of their own society that leads them to live in the midst of drug bubbles. We hide from them their problems that they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the jungle, on its plants, on its people. While they let the forests burn, while hypocrites chase the plants with poisons to hide the disasters of their own society, they ask us for more and more coal, more and more oil, to calm the other addiction: that of consumption, of power, of money.

What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil? The dictates of power have ordered that cocaine is the poison and must be pursued, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and even more by the mixtures necessitated by clandestinity, but coal and oil must be protected, even if their use could extinguish all of humanity.

These are the things of world power, things of injustice, things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.

According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful of the earth will not even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries. The sadness of existence produced by this artificial call to competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and to having has another face: the addiction to drugs in people who lose the competition, in the losers of the artificial race in which they have transformed humanity.

The disease of loneliness will not be cured with glyphosate [sprayed] on the forests. It is not the rainforest that is to blame.

The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.

The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, the dream of democracy will die in my America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America. Democracy will die where it was born, in the great western European Athens. By hiding the truth, they will see the jungle and democracies die. The war on drugs has failed.

The fight against the climate crisis has failed. There has been an increase in deadly consumption, from soft drugs to harder ones, genocide has taken place in my continent and in my country, millions of people have been condemned to prison, and to hide their own social guilt they have blamed the rainforest and its plants. They have filled speeches and policies with nonsense. I demand from here, from my wounded Latin America, to put an end to the irrational war on drugs. To reduce drug consumption we do not need wars, for this we need all of us to build a better society: a more caring society, more affectionate, where the intensity of life saves from addictions and new slavery. Do you want less drugs? Think of less profit and more love. Think about a rational exercise of power.

Do not touch with your poisons the beauty of my homeland, help us without hypocrisy to save the Amazon Rainforest to save the life of humanity on the planet. You gathered the scientists, and they spoke with reason. With mathematics and climatological models they said that the end of the human species was near, that its time is no longer of millennia, not even of centuries. Science set the alarm bells ringing and we stopped listening to it.

The war served as an excuse for not taking the necessary measures. When action was most needed, when speeches were no longer useful, when it was indispensable to deposit money in funds to save humanity, when it was necessary to move away from coal and oil as soon as possible, they invented war after war after war. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, Libya and Syria.

They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served them as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.

If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.

The great triumph of the attack on reason. Do you not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on your countries is to return to water filling the rivers and the fields full of nutrients? The climate disaster fills us with viruses that swarm over us, but you do business with medicines and turn vaccines into commodities. You propose that the market will save us from what the market itself has created. The Frankenstein of humanity lies in letting the market and greed act without planning, surrendering the brain and reason. Kneeling human rationality to greed.

What is the use of war if what we need is to save the human species? What is the use of NATO and empires, if what is coming is the end of intelligence? The climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people and listen well, it is not produced by the planet, it is produced by capital.

The cause of the climate disaster is capital. The logic of coming together only to consume more and more, produce more and more, and for some to earn more and more produces the climate disaster. They applied the logic of extended accumulation to the energy engines of coal and oil and unleashed the hurricane: the ever deeper and deadlier chemical change of the atmosphere. Now in a parallel world, the expanded accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death.

From the lands of jungle and beauty. There where they decided to make an Amazon rainforest plant an enemy, extradite and imprison its growers, I invite you to stop the war, and to stop the climate disaster. Here, in this Amazon Rainforest, there is a failure of humanity.

Behind the bonfires that burn it, behind its poisoning, there is an integral, civilizational failure of humanity. Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, there is the real addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, to profit and money. This is the enormous deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity.

I propose to you as president of one of the most beautiful countries on earth, and one of the most bloodied and violated, to end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace. I call on all of Latin America for this purpose. I summon the voice of Latin America to unite to defeat the irrational that martyrs our bodies. I call upon you to save the Amazon Rainforest integrally with the resources that can be allocated worldwide to life.

If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it if you dont want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.

It is time for PEACE.

Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality.

From Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace. Only in peace can we save life in this land of ours. There is no total peace without social, economic and environmental justice. We are also at war with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace.

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Colombian president Gustavo Petro calls for an end to the War on Drugs ...

This June marks the 50th anniversary of the war on drugs, an ongoing campaign that has to a large extent reshaped American politics, society and the economy.

"[The goals of the war on drugs] were to literally eradicate all of the social, economic and health ills associated with drugs and drug abuse," said Christopher Coyne, professor of economics at George Mason University. "It doesn't get much more ambitious than that."

Since 1971, America has spent over a trillion dollars enforcing its drug policy, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania. Yet many observers, both liberal and conservative, say the war on drugs has not paid off.

The campaign, launched by President Richard Nixon, has spanned multiple administrations and led to the creation of a dedicated federal agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Law enforcement was given an unprecedented level of authority with measures like mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants, recently reevaluated after the death of Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by police in a botched drug raid.

"The drug war is a failed policy and the things that they said would happen people would stop using drugs, communities would get back together, we'd be safe, they'd get drugs off the street those things didn't happen," said Kassandra Frederique, executive director at the Drug Policy Alliance, a national nonprofit that works to end the war on drugs.

Despite a steep decline in illicit drug usage in the earlier years, drug use in the U.S. is climbing again and more quickly than ever. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the number of illicit drug users rose to 13% of Americans 12 years or older in 2019, nearly reaching its peak from 40 years ago. If the goal of the war on drugs was to decrease drug usage and prevent drug-related deaths, it hasn't made much progress.

"We are still in the midst of the most devastating drug epidemic in U.S. history," according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at Brookings Institution. In 2020, overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 90,000, compared with 70,630 in 2019, according to research from the Commonwealth Fund.

Yet, the federal government is spending more money than ever to enforce drug policies. In 1981, the federal budget for drug abuse prevention and control was just over a billion dollars. By 2020, that number had grown to $34.6 billion. When adjusted for inflation, CNBC found that it translates to a 1,090% increase in just 39 years.

According to the White House, the national drug control budget is estimated to hit a historic level of $41 billion by 2022. The largest increases in funding are requested to support drug treatment and drug prevention.

"In the overall scheme of how much the U.S. government spends, it's not a huge amount," said Coyne. "The bigger issue is that there's a burden from an economic perspective because when you make something illegal, it has a series of consequences that affect all areas of life."

Take mass incarceration for example. Mass incarceration leaves a heavy burden on both the federal and state government's budgets. The Prison Policy Initiative, a think tank and criminal justice advocacy group, found that 1 in 5 currently incarcerated people in the U.S. are locked up for a drug offense. The same research estimates that it costs an average of about $37,500 annually to house an inmate in federal correctional facilities and that mass incarceration costs the U.S. at least $182 billion every year.

"States found their budgets enormously strapped by having to put funds toward correctional facilities that grew into enormous complexes," explained Felbab-Brown. "One unfortunate way that states dealt with it was privatizing correction, something that's a specific feature to the United States. That has been a very problematic and fraught policy, partially driven by the tendency to arrest nonviolent drug offenders."

There is also a massive racial disparity that comes with drug incarcerations. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, nearly 80% of the people in federal prison and almost 60% of people in state prison for drug offenses are Black or Latino. In 2019, despite making up just 13.4% of the U.S. population, the FBI reported that more than a quarter of the drug-related arrests were of Black American adults.

Nkechi Taifa, a justice system reform strategist, advocate and scholar, and founder and CEO of The Taifa Group, called the war on drugs the "New Jim Crow." "It disproportionately targets and impacts people of color," she explained.

Meanwhile, America's attitude toward drugs is changing. This spring, New York became the 15th state, along with the District of Columbia to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Oregon, in February, became the first state to decriminalize the possession of any small amounts of drugs.

Even many conservatives are reevaluating their support for the war on drugs. "What we need to come to grips with is addiction is a disease and no life is disposable," remarked Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey and former chair of the Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission, during a New Hampshire townhall meeting in November 2015. "It can happen to anyone and so we need to start treating people in this country, not jailing them."

Others, like Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy think tank, remain more cautious when it comes to changes in our drug policy. "Just as we don't abandon our efforts to prevent violent crime because murders, rapes, and robberies are still committed, we should not abandon our efforts to protect our neighbors and their children from the harms illicit drug use causes," he commented. "We should pursue our goal with every tool we have, such as education, interdiction, law enforcement and treatment."

While the U.S. might be on the path to potentially reversing some of the harshest impacts of the war on drugs, America's battle against illicit substances is likely here to stay.

"I see more of the same," said Coyne. "I don't think the war on drugs is going anywhere anytime soon as a political program and as a political talking point."

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The U.S. has spent over a trillion dollars fighting war on drugs - CNBC

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Heriberto Cogollo (Colombia), Carnival Los Cabildos de Cartagena (The Carnival of Cartagenas Cabildos), 1999.

Each year, in the last weeks of September, the worlds leaders gather in New York City to speak at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly. The speeches can usually be forecasted well in advance, either tired articulations of values that do not get acted upon or belligerent voices that threaten war in an institution built to prevent war.

However, every once in a while, a speech shines through, a voice emanates from the chamber and echoes around the world for its clarity and sincerity. This year, that voice belongs to Colombias recently inaugurated president, Gustavo Petro, whose brief remarks distilled with poetic precision the problems in our world and the cascading crises of social distress, the addiction to money and power, the climate catastrophe and environmental destruction. It is time for peace, President Petro said. We are also at war with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace.

Colombia has been gripped by violence since it won its independence from Spain in 1810. This violence emanated from Colombias elites, whose insatiable desire for wealth has meant the absolute impoverishment of the people and the failure of the country to develop anything that resembles liberalism. Decades of political action to build the confidence of the masses in Colombia culminated in a cycle of protests beginning in 2019 that led to Petros electoral victory. The new centre-left government has pledged to build social democratic institutions in Colombia and to banish the countrys culture of violence. Though the Colombian army, like armed forces around the world, prepares for war, President Petro told them in August 2022 that they must now prepare for peace and must become an army of peace.

Enrique Grau Arajo (Colombia), Prima Colazione a Firenze (Breakfast in Florence), 1964.

When thinking about violence in a country like Colombia, there is a temptation to focus on drugs, cocaine in particular. The violence, it is often suggested, is an outgrowth of the illicit cocaine trade. But this is an ahistorical assessment. Colombia experienced terrible bloodshed long before highly processed cocaine became increasingly popular from the 1960s onwards. The countrys elite has used murderous force to prevent any dilution of its power, including the 1948 assassination of Jorge Gaitn, the former mayor of Colombias capital of Bogot, that led to a period known as La Violencia (The Violence). Liberal politicians and communist militants faced the steel of the Colombian army and police on behalf of this granite block of power backed by the United States, which has used Colombia to extend its power into South America. Fig leaves of various types were used to cover over the ambitions of the Colombian elite and their benefactors in Washington. In the 1990s, one such cover was the War on Drugs.

By all accountswhether of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime or the U.S. governments Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)the largest consumers of illegal narcotics (cannabis, opioids, and cocaine) are in North America and Western Europe. A recent UN study shows that cocaine use in the United States has been fluctuating and increasing after 2013 with a more stable trend observed in 2019. The War on Drugs strategy, initiated by the United States and Western countries, has had a two-pronged approach to the drug crisis: first, to criminalise retailers in Western countries and, second, to go to war against the peasants who produce the raw material in these drugs in countries such as Colombia.

In the United States, for instance, almost two million peopledisproportionately Black and Latinoare caught in the prison industrial complex, with 400,000 of them imprisoned or on probation for nonviolent drug offences (mostly as petty dealers in a vastly profitable drug empire). The collapse of employment opportunities for young people in working-class areas and the allure of wages from the drug economy continue to attract low-level employees of the global drug commodity chain, despite the dangers of this profession. The War on Drugs has made a negligible impact on this pipeline, which is why many countries have now begun to decriminalise drug possession and drug use (particularly cannabis).

Dbora Arango (Colombia), Rojas Pinilla, 1957.

The obduracy of the Colombian elitebacked by the U.S. governmentto allow any democratic space to open in the country led the left to take up armed struggle in 1964 and then return to the gun when the elite shut down the promise of the democratic path in the 1990s. In the name of the war against the armed left as well as the War on Drugs, the Colombian military and police have crushed any dissent in the country. Despite evidence of the financial and political ties between the Colombian elite, narco-paramilitaries, and drug cartels, the United States government initiated Plan Colombia in 1999 to funnel $12 billion to the Colombian military to deepen this war (in 2006, when he was a senator, Petro revealed the nexus between these diabolical forces, for which his family was threatened with violence).

As part of this war, the Colombian armed forces dropped the terrible chemical weapon glyphosate on the peasantry (in 2015, the World Health Organisation said that this chemical is probably carcinogenic to humans and, in 2017, the Colombian Constitutional Court ruled that its use must be restricted). In 2020, the following assessment was offered in the Harvard International Review: Instead of reducing cocaine production, Plan Colombia has actually caused cocaine production and transport to shift into other areas. Additionally, militarisation in the war on drugs has caused violence in the country to increase. This is precisely what President Petro told the world at the United Nations.

The most recent DEA report notes that cocaine use in the United States remains steady and that deaths from drug poisoning involving cocaine have increased every year since 2013. U.S. drug policy is focused on law enforcement, aiming merely to reduce the domestic availability of cocaine. Washington will spend 45% of its drug budget on law enforcement, 49% on treatment for drug addicts, and a mere 6% on prevention. The lack of emphasis on prevention is revealing. Rather than tackle the drug crisis as a demand-side problem, the U.S. and other Western governments pretend that it is a supply-side problem that can be dealt with by using military force against petty drug dealers and peasants who grow the coca plant. Petros cry from the heart at the United Nations attempted to call attention to the root causes of the drug crisis:

Sandra Vsquez de la Horra (Chile), Los Vientos (The Winds), 2016.

According to the irrational power of the world, the market that razes existence is not to blame; it is the jungle and those who live in it that are to blame. Bank accounts have become unlimited; the money saved by the most powerful people on Earth could not even be spent over the course of centuries. The empty existence produced by the artificiality of competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and to possessions has another face: the drug addiction of people who lose the competition in the artificial race that humanity has become. The sickness of loneliness is not cured by [dousing] the forests with glyphosate; the forest is not to blame. To blame is your society educated by endless consumption, by the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of the powerful to fill with money.

The War on Drugs, Petro said, is a war on the Colombian peasantry and a war on the precarious poor in Western countries. We do not need this war, he said; instead, we need to struggle to build a peaceful society that does not sap meaning from the hearts of people who are treated as a surplus to societys logic.

As a young man, Petro was part of the M-19 guerrilla movement, one of the organisations that attempted to break the chokehold that Colombias elites held over the countrys democracy. One of his comrades was the poet Mara Mercedes Carranza (19452003), who wrote searingly about the violence thrust upon her country in her book Hola, Soledad (Hello, Solitude) (1987), capturing the desolation in her poem La Patria (The Homeland):

Fernando Botero (Colombia), La Calle (The Street), 2013.

In this house, everything is in ruins,in ruins are hugs and music,each morning, destiny, laughter are in ruins,tears, silence, dreams.The windows show destroyed landscapes,flesh and ash on peoples faces,words combine with fear in their mouths.In this house, we are all buried alive.

Carranza took her life when the fires of hell swept through Colombia.

A peace agreement in 2016, a cycle of protests from 2019, and now the election of Petro and Francia Mrquez in 2022 have wiped the ash off the faces of the Colombian people and provided them with an opportunity to try and rebuild their house. The end of the War on Drugs, that is, the war on the Colombian peasantry, will only advance Colombias fragile struggle towards peace and democracy.

Warmly,

Vijay

Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. Eds.

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From wounded Latin America, a demand comes to put an end to the ...

Beginning with an exuberant punch of drums, guitar and keyboards, and marching to a shimmering bounce throughout, you would think that this song would have been recorded and released by The War On Drugs immediately after conception. However, Oceans of Darkness, with a lyrical theme in keeping with its title (And all I do is push, push, push / And youre making it so hard to love) standing in contrast with its bright, major chord energy, was not such a sure thing.

As front man Adam Granduciel puts it, well into working on their 2021 collection I Dont Live Here Anymore, bassist Dave Hartley found the demo, and got them to record it: We were frustrated and exhausted at the time, but we set up in a circle after dinner and worked it out as the tape was rolling. Its rare that a song of ours could feel this complete after only a few takes, but it had all the desperation and urgency that we had been looking for. Ultimately, Oceans of Darkness did not surface in that album, but now sees the light of day as part of its box set reissue.

"Oceans Of Darkness" is joined on The War On Drugs' latest by another previously unreleased song, Slow Ghost.

See the article here:

The War On Drugs, 'Oceans Of Darkness' - WNCW