Monthly Archives: September 2023

What is included in my trial?

During your trial you will have complete digital access to FT.com with everything in both of our Standard Digital and Premium Digital packages.

Standard Digital includes access to a wealth of global news, analysis and expert opinion. Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting. For a full comparison of Standard and Premium Digital, click here.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the Settings & Account section.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for $69 per month.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the Settings & Account section. If youd like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many users needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel.

You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

You can still enjoy your subscription until the end of your current billing period.

We support credit card, debit card and PayPal payments.

See the original post here:

Tactics are shifting in the war on drugs - Financial Times

GENEVA (20 September 2023) A UN human rights report today calls for a shift from punitive measures to address the global drugs problem to the use of policies grounded in human rights and public health, arguing that disproportionate use of criminal penalties is causing harm.

The report urges States to develop effective drug policies, including by considering decriminalization of drug possession for personal use. If effectively designed and implemented, decriminalization can be a powerful instrument to ensure that the rights of people who use drugs are protected, it says.

Laws, policies and practices deployed to address drug use must not end up exacerbating human suffering. The drugs problem remains very concerning, but treating people who use drugs as criminals is not the solution, said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Trk.

States should move away from the current dominant focus on prohibition, repression and punishment, and instead embrace laws, policies and practices anchored in human rights and aimed at harm reduction.

The UN Human Rights Office report, mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, finds that disproportionate use of criminal penalties discourages people who use drugs from seeking treatment and feeds stigma and social exclusion. According to the latest available statistics from the 2023 World Drug Report, people who use drugs are disproportionately affected by blood-borne viruses, nearly 660,000 die of drugs-related causes each year, and 10 percent of all new HIV infections globally in 2021 were among people who injected drugs.

The ill effects of these policies are profound and far-reaching, the report finds. Militarization of law enforcement in the so-called war on drugs contributes to severe human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings. And disproportionate use of criminal penalties contributes significantly to prison overcrowding.

The report highlights that the effects of these policies are most severe for people of African descent, women, indigenous peoples and young people from poor backgrounds.

Todays drugs policies have the greatest impact on those who are poorest and most vulnerable, Turk stressed.

There has also been an increase in the use of the death penalty for drug-related convictions worldwide, contrary to international human rights law norms and standards. The recorded number of people executed for drug-related offences more than doubled in 2022 compared to 2021, amounting to 37 percent of all executions recorded globally, the report states.

The current overemphasis on coercion and control to counter drugs is fanning an increase in human rights violations despite mounting evidence that decades of criminalization and the so-called war on drugs have neither protected the welfare of people nor deterred drug-related crime, Trk said.

The report shows that an increasing number of countries across regions are adopting policies and practices that decriminalize drug use and treat drug usage as a public health and human rights issue, and applying evidence-based, gender-sensitive andharm reduction approaches. The High Commissioner called on States to build on this positive trend.

ENDS

Go here to read the rest:

End overreliance on punitive measures to address drugs problem ... - OHCHR

The Hot Spring County Sheriff's Office continues to make headlines and even garnered a spot on KARK regarding all the coordinated efforts to find and arrest offenders all around the county for illicit drugs, stolen property and other criminal behavior.

The Little Rock news station spoke to HSC Sheriff Scott Finkbeiner about the non-stop pursuit of criminals his office has undertaken since he took office in January, as they have made over 30 drug arrests in that time, including 10 arrests in three separate incidents last week.

Methamphetamine is the most popular drug, fentanyl is picking up over the last couple of years, Finkbeiner said. We unfortunately had a fentanyl overdose about a week ago.

Even since Finkbeiner's statement on KARK, the department has made another big hit in the local war on crime. The HSCSO released the following statement on Thursday:

"This morning HSCSO made three arrest in the Bismarck area. The investigation lead to the discovery of five suspected stolen firearms $3000 cash, Marijuana and a stolen vehicle. This will result in multiple felony charges. We'd like to thank ADC ORU dog team for their assistance. Thanks!"

Finkbeiner said deputies have increased patrols in specific area looking for the worst of the offenders, and they hope to add a K-9 unit and more deputies to the force. He also wants to see more done, not just locally but also on a state and federal level, to stop or slow the flow of drugs coming into the county.

We really, as a county, as a country and state, need to look at these problems so find the root causes of this, how can we address these issues, Finkbeiner said.

See the rest here:

HSCSO making a dent in the local war on drugs - Malvern Daily Record

During the Prohibition Era, the U.S.-Mexico border was rife with liquor smuggling. One rancher who lived about twenty miles north of Nogales, Arizona, decided to get into the game with his string of self-directing mules. At night, the rancher would lead the mules south through the canyons into Mexico. The next night, hed load up the team with booze and let them go. The mules would make a beeline back, while the rancher went home another way. The mules consistently arrived before dawn, ready to be unloaded.

It took the feds two years to discover what was going on. They finally tracked the liquor-laden mules to the ranch and arrested their owner. He was fined, and the mules were sold to a miner who used them to haul ore.

I tell this story not to be quaintProhibition was a time of deadly violence on the border (and in Chicago, for that matter)but to draw a parallel to today.

Alcohol smuggling boomed under Prohibition, just as drug smuggling booms today under draconian drug laws. We can end it the same way.

We keep hearing that getting tough on the border is the solution to drug smuggling and migration. But weve been getting tough on the border for more than thirty years. And despite the billions spent, irreparable environmental damage, and massive body countmore than 7,800 have died since 1998, making the Mexican border the deadliest land border on Earth for migrantsmore drugs and migrants seem to be entering the United States than ever.

The reason people and contraband keep flowing into this country is because there is a market for them. We, of all people, should understand the laws of supply and demand.

Alcohol smuggling boomed under Prohibition, just as drug smuggling booms today under draconian drug laws. We can end it the same way. Legalization is already happening with marijuana; here in Arizona, it seems as if there are pot stores on every corner.

This is progress, although national standards and regulation of the industry are clearly needed. Predictably, marijuana legalization made the cartels switch to harder drugs like fentanyl, with deadly results. We must take away the illegal market by treating all drugs like we treat alcohol and cigarettesas a public health challenge, rather than a law enforcement problem. That means legalization and taxation and using the profits to expand education, health care, treatment and other support services for addicts.

Like drugs, the United States is dependent on immigrants. Our population would be declining without them and experts say they are keeping the economy afloat. On a macro level, immigration is good. But on a micro level, as were seeing on the border and in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities, migration causes painful dislocation and difficulties for both the migrants and the communities receiving them.

Migrants and refugees need to be carefully screened, given work permits, and settled in towns and cities across America where their labor is needed. Locals need help to prepare. Money spent on useless and harmful political stunts, like the nearly $200 million it cost the taxpayers of Arizona to place and then remove shipping containers in the desert that did nothing to deter migrants, could be used for this purpose.

Those of us who live and work on the border dont want open borders. We want an end to the fantasy that more crackdowns on the border will solve complex problems, or that the border was somehow under control when Trump was in charge. Those of us with memories longer than three years recall migrant surges were happening then too. We want an end to the border-bashing, wasteful spending, and threats to invade Mexico and kill even more people than the tens of thousands already killed by the war on drugs.

With more than $64 billion in trade and 350 million legal crossings every year, the U.S.-Mexico border is a thriving part of our economy and in many ways a model of peaceful, international cooperation. If we reframed these challenges of drugs and migration not as intractable local problems but as a national concern with positive solutions, we could reduce the needless death and suffering happening on the border and across our two great nations.

September 21, 2023

9:46 AM

Follow this link:

The Drug War on the Border Doesn't Work - Progressive.org

J

oe Clark lives two blocks from Summit Sierra High School, located on King Street in Seattles Chinatown-International District.

The neighborhood always felt safe, Clark says, until his daughter Julienne began sharing alarming stories about her walk to the school.

"'When I walk to school, I can see people shooting up in their neck to get a vein, and if they can't find a vein in their neck, you see them bent over, looking between their toes,' Clark recalls Julienne saying to him.

Bearing witness to the suffering of people struggling with addiction is just one part of his daughter's story, he adds, that has led to her being too afraid to walk to school by herself.

For her, it escalated to a different level of being followed, of things being thrown at her, things said to her that are inappropriate for a 15-, 16-year-old girl to hear, Clark says.

Stories like Clark's are one reason why drug policy is now at the center of this years city council races. Voters tell pollsters drugs are a top issue, but what exactly do they want?

RELATED: Seattle 'poised' to get serious about public drug use, Mayor Harrell says

The answer to that is complicated in a city like Seattle, where nearly half of respondents in a recent Crosscut/Elway poll called themselves progressive," and where many people remember the failed War on Drugs, in which punitive drug policies disproportionately harmed people of color.

Nearing the corner of 12th Avenue South and South King Street, Clark suggests crossing the street to avoid walking through the middle of what looked like it could be a drug deal. He sometimes feels afraid, too, he says. But he doesnt believe a heavier law enforcement presence is the best path forward.

We need to come up with solutions to help this need that they're in, and not have more police or more police activity, because that's not going to help anyone, he says.

Last spring, Clark wrote to his local representative, Councilmember Tammy Morales, asking for help. Like Clark, Morales doesn't think law enforcement is the answer. She favors drug treatment and harm reduction.

Emails went back and forth. But after a few months, the emails from Morales's office just stopped.

There's been no response. And it's kind of disappointing that she runs on this platform of being a progressive, but she doesn't respond to her constituents, Clark says.

KUOW contacted the staffer on the email thread for comment but did not hear back.

Morales voted against a new law passed by the council this week, which allows the Seattle city attorney to prosecute public drug use and possession cases. It emphasizes a public health approach, which encourages referrals to drug treatment programs. But the ordinance doesn't allocate any new funds for those programs.

The bottom line is that this bill will not address the fentanyl crisis in any meaningful way," Morales said before casting her no vote.

"While we sit here on the dais, people are dying and we're spending a lot of energy on a bill that won't help them.

On the other side of the drug debate is candidate Tanya Woo, an activist in the Chinatown-International District who is running to unseat Morales in District 2. She showed up before the council's drug ordinance vote on Tuesday to urge Morales and her colleagues to pass it.

How many of you have had a friend die from fentanyl? We've seen too many deaths and we need something to be done. We cannot have a perfect plan be an enemy of a good plan, she said.

Woo favors more treatment and hiring and deploying more police.

For his part, Joe Clark is thinking about the upcoming election and who hell support in the race for District 2.

I don't know, I don't know, he says.

While he's impatient with Tammy Morales, he doesnt agree with the approach of her opponent Tanya Woo, either.

RELATED: Is the 'generation gap' back in Seattle City Council races? District 2 offers clues

In the meantime, Clarks family has made a big decision. His daughter now takes a 40-minute bus ride to school in Bellevue, rather than walk the two blocks to her neighborhood high school.

But Clark still thinks about the kids at Summit Sierra who don't have a better option.

"I have the privilege to have my daughter go to a different school. What about the people who don't?"

Read more:

'When I walk to school, I can see people shooting up.' How Seattle's ... - KUOW News and Information

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Whats the most important gift you can give someone? Perhaps its to give your child a great name something cool but not weird, and not one of those names that everyone has, like Methamphetamine Rules!

What? Yes, an Australian journalist has called her son Methamphetamine Rules (Meth for short?). What were the parents thinking? Methamphetamine is obviously a girls name!

Kirsten Drysdale said she was testing whether the authorities had the power to change a babys name if the one submitted by the parents was deemed offensive or unacceptable. Drysdale said she was mulling between Methamphetamine Rules and Nangs Rule, which is the Australian slang for nitrous oxide canisters that some people use to get high. Thank goodness they didnt pick the latter, or the kid would have been bullied mercilessly!

Politicians dont have to worry about naming a child when they visit their counterparts, but they do need to bring a gift. The European Parliament has a vault where diplomatic giftsare kept. Items down in the vault include a pot of French mustard and a Huawei smartphone given to European Peoples Party chief Manfred Weber in 2013 thats clearly recording all of the important events at the Parliament. Nothing of interest has happened yet but its only been a decade.

This week, Keir Starmer leader of the U.K. Labour Party and next British prime minister barring a complete meltdown visited Emmanuel Macron and very subtly threw shade at the French president with his choice of gift.

Starmers present for Macron was an Arsenal football shirt and Arsenals club crest is a cannon pointing at France (if you stand with your left arm facing France). On the back of the shirt was Macron 25, a clear reference to the Battle of Sandwich in which the English defeated the French on August 24, 1217. As everyone knows, the next day August 25 the English forces celebrated by eating sandwiches (probably). Shots fired by Starmer!

Macron is a football fan he supports Olympique de Marseille but that Arsenal shirt was 100 percent put in the bin within 10 minutes of Starmer leaving.

A day after Starmer was allowed into the Elyse via the tradesmans entrance, the red carpet was rolled out for King Charles, with an itinerary that included a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe and a banquet dinner at the Palace of Versailles (where royals have always enjoyed a warm welcome). Apparently, the choice of dinner venue was a close-run thing between Versailles and a branch of Flunch.

Listen, if you promise never to try and sneak into the Concerned Women event ever again, I wont call the police.

Can you do better? Email [emailprotected] or on Twitter @pdallisonesque

Last time we gave you this photo:

Thanks for all the entries. Heres the best from our postbag theres no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze.

And now, for my friends to the right, I will perform a double backflip U-turn on my climate-change policy, by Tom Morgan.

Paul Dallison is POLITICOs slot news editor.

More here:

The best gifts ever? Being named after drugs and declaring war on ... - POLITICO Europe

At 32 years old, Mercosur faces an existential crisis. Talks to establish a trade agreement between the Mercosur customs union and the European Union (EU)20 years in the makingwere on the brink of stalling out for good before they restarted on September 14. Still, if the two parties dont seal the deal by years end, it could put Mercosurs future in doubt. Spain, the most vocal European advocate of the deal, steps down as EU president in December, and Brazilian President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, its biggest South American champion, hands off Mercosurs rotating presidency in January. European politicians are turning their attention to next years European Parliamentary elections. Even before the latest crisis, Mercosur was in trouble. Trade flows between its membersBrazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguaypeaked in 2011, at US$54 billion, and havent fully rebounded since. Political disagreements divide the bloc, too. Members clash over whether to readmit Venezuela, which the union suspended in 2016 for breaking with democracy. Uruguay is already toying with going it alone by negotiating free trade agreements (FTAs) with China and Turkey as well as by applying to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, an 11-country FTA with many of the major Indo-Pacific economies. If the EU-Mercosur agreement doesnt come together quickly, other Mercosur members may have no choice but to go it alone, following Uruguays lead.

Petro signals a big shift on drug policy. If hes counting on U.S. support, he should move fast. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who consistently blasts the war on drugs as a failure, just unveiled a new drug policy for Colombia. Petros policy shifts away from the forced eradication model of years past and toward crop substitution and the creation of alternative livelihoods for rural communities that depend on growing coca. For now, Washington is listening. As synthetics have overtaken plant-based drugs and U.S. drug overdose deaths have topped 100,000 per year, the Biden administration has increasingly focused on harm reduction, rehabilitation, and stopping the flow of precursor ingredients for fentanyl, meth, and other synthetics produced largely in China. Report after report to Congress, the executive, and by leading NGOs show that forced eradication operations using Colombias police and military just havent worked. Instead they have pushed coca cultivation into new areas (including Colombias national parks) and wreaked havoc on the environmentall while coca production hit an all-time high in 2022. Biden administration officials suspended satellite monitoring of Colombias coca crops and voiced support for the Petro governments holistic approach to counternarcotics last October. Even so, Petro wont have an easy time implementing his plans. For one, he faces weak domestic support: 65 percent of Colombians believe the narcotrafficking situation is worse now than when Petro took office, and 61 percent disapprove of his government. Republicans distrust Petro. If the party wins control of the White House in 2024, expect the next administration to pressure Colombia to return to a more traditional approach to drug policy. The clock is ticking.

More on:

Brazil

Argentina

Uruguay

Paraguay

Trade

Massas pre-election spending spree will hobble the next government. Argentinas Economy Minister and ruling party presidential candidate, Sergio Massa, announced a slew of new spending and social policies that go into effect immediately. The plans include tax breaks for huge swaths of the population, more social spending, and wage increases for government workers. The Central Bank helped out by not raising interest rates, despite accelerating inflation. The largesse wont win over voters tired of economic crisis. But it will leave the next president in even more of a financial bind. The spending spree comes just weeks after negotiating a US$7.5 billion disbursement from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Argentina conducted a complicated shell game to pay off a US$1.8 billion debt with loans from Qatar and the Development Bank of Latin America and a US$1.7 billion swap with the Chinese to cover payments. With the new tranche of capital, the government renewed promises to keep the fiscal deficit at 1.9 percent and 0.9 percent of GDP in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Massas largesse will pull Argentina even further from these commitments ahead of the next rounds of reviews and negotiations with the IMF, set for November 2023 and March 2024.

More on:

Brazil

Argentina

Uruguay

Paraguay

Trade

Visit link:

Latin America This Week: September 20, 2023 - Council on Foreign Relations

The lucrative cocaine business is booming worldwide, after a contraction due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the interesting positions of some of the countries in the region, Latin America has yet to seriously discuss its drug policy and abandon once and for all the prohibitionist and militarist recipes of the United States, the main consumer.

What has made this phenomenon so serious in our continent is social inequality, which is scandalous. For example, the peripheries are overpopulated by people who have no chance of getting jobs in the legal market and who see a way out in trafficking. Business? Big business: A tonne of cocaine fetches a thousand US dollars in Bolivia and sells for 35,000 in European ports.

The problems associated with drug production, trafficking and consumption in Latin America affect the quality of life of the population, are linked to forms of social exclusion and institutional weakness, generate greater insecurity and violence, and corrode governance in some countries, according to a recent report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

In terms of production, Latin America accounts for the worlds total global production of coca leaf, cocaine base paste and cocaine hydrochloride. It also has a marijuana production that extends to different countries and areas, destined both for domestic consumption and export. Increasingly, it is also producing poppy, opium and heroin.

In terms of trafficking, the Caribbean area remains the most frequent route for drug trafficking to the United States, but the non-violent route via Central America has become relatively more important. Recently, river transport from coca-cocaine producing countries via Brazil has gained importance.

The problem of consumption mainly affects the youth population and males more than females. Marijuana, followed by cocaine base paste, crack and cocaine hydrochloride are the most widely consumed illicit drugs in the region, generating greater problems among young people with high social vulnerability, adds ECLAC.

Prohibitionism began more than 100 years ago as a way of controlling dangerous substances, often through militarisation, police, repression and prisons. Viewed in the big picture, the danger of the substances ends up being the militarised response to them, rather than the substances themselves. This war under the US vision of the problem is not the way out for the region, which has been in this war for at least four decades and got nowhere, but a lot of money is spent (not invested). The beneficiaries of these policies are the arms industries and the battalions of drug trafficking workers who see it as a way of securing their livelihoods.

Today the criminals are much more articulate, they move through high society and, at the same time, attract poor people to do the dirty work because of their lack of economic prospects.

In South America there are two major drug trafficking routes. One is the southern route Paraguay, central-southern Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay which is important because it has larger urban centres and a larger airport and port structure, a logistical development that facilitates the transport of drugs, including a well-structured road network, which facilitates the export of cocaine to Europe, which is currently the big business.

The second is the Amazonian route, which leaves Peru and Colombia and heads towards the non-violent, following roads like the one that went from Ecuador to Costa Rica and from there to the Caribbean. It is a more US-oriented route.

Uruguay, which has some good laws to combat trafficking and money laundering, struggles to apply controls. In addition to the traditional domestic money laundering and drug transit services, there has been a growth in the domestic market and the refuge that fugitives from other parts of the world have been able to find in the country, often under the protection of corrupt rulers.

Uruguay has come to occupy an increasingly important position in the international distribution of the drug market. It is not a producer country, nor does it have a high demand, although it is one of the best in terms of per capita consumption: it is located in a strategic place for placing large shipments in Europe. And there are major weaknesses in the systems for monitoring and detecting illicit shipments.

In the large-scale consumption of information on the world of drugs, many things are taken for granted: criminal groups fight, corrupt or illegally deceive states that are always willing to confront them. However, outside of the great discursive hegemonies, even the name by which the phenomenon is known is under discussion.

The term drug trafficking derives from only two components of the activity: narcotics (which are a family of drugs, among others) and trafficking or transit (a link in a productive chain that also includes production, stockpiling, marketing, etc.). Although in terms of language there is no more than an example of metonymy in which the part (in this case, two parts) is taken for the whole, this composition is without

Allan De Abreu, a Brazilian journalist with the magazine Piau, who has been investigating organised crime for two decades. He points out that the caipira route began to be used in the 1970s for coffee smuggling. At that time, Brazil charged very high taxes on coffee exports and Paraguays taxes were negligible, so coffee growers smuggled it to Paraguay to export it from there.

And in the 1990s, when this business ceased to be interesting because of changes in taxation, the direction of the route was reversed and cocaine was taken from Paraguay to Brazil via the same route, trafficking centred in the cities of Punta Por on the Brazilian side and Pedro Juan Caballero on the Paraguayan side, practically a single city. A large part of the cocaine that Paraguay receives from Bolivia and Peru passes through there to Brazil.

To dominate this region is to dominate the route. And the Brazilian cartel First Capital Command tried to control it, which led to a conflict with Pedro Jorge Rafaat, who was the big boss on that border, a story that culminated in Rafaats murder in 2016. The Paraguay River route, which runs down the Paran and reaches the Ro de la Plata, involving Uruguay, is also well established and has had many uses. Sebastin Marset is operating along this route, which culminates in the port of Montevideo, from where the cocaine leaves for Europe.

The Red Command Brazils oldest criminal organisation displaced local mafias from the Amazonian tri-border area and has taken control of cocaine production on the Peruvian side. The Amazonian triple frontier has become a disputed territory for several armed groups from Brazil, which have violently imposed themselves on the local Peruvian and Colombian mafias.

An investigation by Ojo Pblico reveals how this gang operates the Amazon river route, in alliance with Colombian criminal groups, and the recruitment of Peruvian riverside dwellers and indigenous Peruvians for drug production. This came in the midst of a war with Los Cras, a local faction from Tabatinga, which has allied with the powerful Brazilian First Capital Command to dispute territorial control.

But it is the Red Command that has managed to dominate as it has done further south, on the border between Ucayali (Peru) and Acre (Brazil) a large part of the routes in this Amazonian territory where not only drug trafficking, but also illegal logging and fishing predominate.

Meanwhile, the southern port of Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital on the Ro de la Plata, offers drug traffickers the advantage of being a counter-intuitive exit point, due to its greater distance from the ports of arrival and the lack of control, as is the case in Paraguay, which has no control over what passes through the river.

In this narco-business, there have been changes, the most notorious of which is that the gang leader has to distance himself from the drugs and that compartmentalisation is necessary. The first drug traffickers were personally involved in transport and thus always ran the risk of going to prison. With compartmentalisation, the lower levels of the gang do not know who they are working for and this protects the head of the scheme.

According to experts, the third change (or lesson learned over the years) is to be aware of the risk of verticalisation. For example, in the Medelln Cartel everything depended on Pablo Escobar and when he spilled out, everything fell apart.

The Brazilian PCC learned these lessons from history and today enjoys a horizontalised structure, organised in syntony: the syntony of ties (the lawyers), transport, finance, and communication (encryption of messages, which means that eavesdropping is a thing of the past). In the CCC, the head is the tuning, not the capo Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho (better known as Marcola), although nobody doubts that he is the big boss. But if he dies or spills out, the structure continues.

In Brazil, the PCC dominates and regulates crime in So Paulo and refrains from attracting the attention of the media and the police, while Rio is disputed by the militias, the Comando Vermelho and the Terceiro Comando Puro. The truth is that the PCC was born as a kind of prisoners union, after the massacre in the So Paulo prison of Carandiru, which left 111 prisoners dead. The prisoners then realised that they would have to unite against a corrupt state and a murderous police force.

The PCC was born in the prisons and spread from there: it is the fruit of mass incarceration, the result of this, of prisons overcrowded with small-scale traffickers, of absolutely inhumane health conditions. Does it make sense to arrest a micro-trafficker and imprison him so that he can leave with a postgraduate degree in crime?

With the new century, the CCC is heading west to establish itself on the Paraguayan and Bolivian borders, looking for cocaine suppliers to feed its outlets in So Paulo. After Rafaats death, they penetrated Paraguay and Bolivia, and today dominate the entire chain, from production in the Bolivian jungle to export.

To become a mafia, they only need to achieve consistent infiltration of the state. But unlike Pablo Escobar, the CCC has no political ambitions at least for now although it does have Italian mafia-style rituals.

What is striking is that the Brazilians imprisoned in Uruguayan jails who make up the PCC spread their ideology there, which is a strict set of rules. To join the PCC you have to be baptised and for that you have to have a godfather, which means that a member of the PCC will have to propose the candidate and take responsibility for his or her actions. It allows its members to have their own illicit businesses, but they can never fail to carry out the missions entrusted to them, nor divert money or weapons from the organisation. They have criminal courts.

But there is also a different, business model, that of Cabea Branca, a large cocaine wholesaler that was above these organisations. It built an important logistical scheme in transit countries, such as Brazil and Uruguay. The wholesaler buys the cocaine and moves it to its point of exit: his power will be greater according to how many routes he has to make it.

Cabea Branca, who remained unpunished for 30 years (the Federal Police did not even have a photo of him), had a fleet of planes, a fleet of trucks, officials in almost all Brazilian ports, ranches in Mato Grosso that served as warehouses for the cocaine that arrived by plane and from there continued by truck to the big centres.

The operation that led to his imprisonment was oriented towards a policy that did not focus on drug seizures, but rather on investigating money laundering and then seizing the criminals assets.

Ecuador has become one of the worlds largest exporters of drugs. The assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio is one of the predictable consequences of the new state of affairs.

The country has four geographical regions: coast, highlands, Amazon and Galapagos Islands. The coast is dominated by criminal gangs associated with drug trafficking. These gangs have moved into the highlands and the Amazon, but have not yet reached the control they exercise on the coastal strip. They transport drugs from the borders, which they then take to the high seas or remove it from the country in small planes. Their Mexican and European partners receive the drugs at sea, on airstrips in Central and North America or in European ports. In other words, Ecuador is a cog in the global machinery of drug production, transport and sale.

Before becoming one of the links in the trafficking, Ecuador was already a territory where drug money was laundered. The country uses US dollars as its national currency, which made it much easier to introduce dollars into the financial system and into all kinds of investments. Ecuador was laundering dollars before it became the main channel for cocaine outflows.

In recent years, the countrys modernisation has been dizzying. It has even been the case that private builders themselves finance the works being done for governments, such as municipalities and prefectures. There was money circulating discreetly to finance all kinds of enterprises, under conditions that would be incomprehensible if it were not for the fact that the money was not intended to make a profit, but simply to circulate. However, once a person had received money once, he or she could not refuse to receive it a second time.

Ecuador is geographically small compared to its neighbours: it has a quarter of the territory of Peru or Colombia. Over the last twenty years, central and sectional governments have built and improved highways, roads, airports and ports, making the country much more accessible than before. All this infrastructure has been exploited by criminal gangs.

Drug trafficking cases were not alien to the criminal history of the Republic. During the 1990s and at the beginning of the millennium, local drug traffickers were arrested and prosecuted, but they were still small examples of what drug trafficking was all about. Even so, the murder of Congressman Jaime Hurtado in the late 1990s was linked to his investigations into money laundering in the financial system in those years.

The current system of things, the unprecedented power that criminal gangs have come to have, was established over the last twenty years. Allegations of complicity between politicians and drug traffickers in Ecuador became increasingly common. Clandestine airstrips and docks were set up in collaboration with politicians in the coastal region. One incident gives us an idea of the penetration of the state apparatus by drug traffickers: in 2013, a diplomatic pouch full of drugs was sent to Italy. The scandal ended up affecting the foreign ministry and showed what kind of relations had been established between drug traffickers and politicians.

The non-violent coexistence between narcos and politics ended with the coming to power of Lenin Moreno in 2017, when he completely broke with his revolutionary past and dedicated himself to pursuing the corruption of his former coidees: Jorge Glas, his vice-president, was investigated, tried and convicted for corruption. Among other cases, Glas was accused of receiving bribes from the Brazilian company Odebrecht. Right now, the Brazilian justice system has just withdrawn the cases against Glas.

Moreno and his successor, Guillermo Lasso, broke alliances with Russia and cooled their relationship with China. Moreno handed over Julian Assange and in a very short time the United States regained a former ally in the region. The ground was thus prepared for the war on drugs, in which the United States is the countrys main ally. The war against drugs began with Moreno and has continued with Lasso. This war means millions of dollars and huge amounts of arms for the police and the army.

As everyone knows, the war on drugs with US technology and intelligence has not worked in Colombia or Mexico. Why would it work in Ecuador?

A few months ago the US ambassador in Quito accused several police generals of collaborating with drug traffickers. The US embassy withdrew the generals visas, but the government of Guillermo Lasso did not separate them, nor did it investigate or prosecute them. It did nothing: why cant anyone confront the police? Its a question that unfolds into another: why cant anyone confront the narcos?

The accusation that Ecuador is governed by a narco-state takes on full validity in the face of the murder of Fernando Villavicencio. It turns out that those who are supposed to control crime actually collaborate with it. Not only do criminal gangs already totally control cities like Daule, where they tried to assassinate the mayor, and others like Manta, where they effectively killed him last July. Two cities on the coast.

There is still no clear reason why Fernando Villavicencio was murdered. The journalist and politician was determined to denounce cases of corruption during the years of the Revolution. And during the last few weeks he confronted the criminal gangs: he even held a political rally in one of the cities that are the cradle of these gangs. Villavicencios relatives and comrades say that the police were negligent in the protection they were supposed to give him.

At the time he was killed it was uncertain whether he would be able to make it to a second round. His murder has spread terror in the capital and deepened the feeling that there is no way to stop narco violence against the state and society.

Pablo Cuvi, editorialist of the portal Primicias, is already openly talking about legalising some drugs. The basic problem is that the mafias do not want to go legal, because they would have to pay for the crimes related to drug trafficking and because it is more profitable for them to keep the business clandestine. As Clausewitz said, war is a continuation of politics: for many actors, it is preferable to keep the war going, so that they can gain power that they could not conquer through politics. Who, then, is responsible and guilty for the murder of Fernando Villavicencio? It should be borne in mind that criminal gangs have links with the corresmo and even with the current government: the recent discovery of links between Albanian drug traffickers and high-ranking government officials in charge of public procurement is a recent development. The murder of Rubn Chrrez, a friend and adviser to Lassos brother-in-law, points in this direction.

Vernica Sarauz, widow of Fernando Villavicencio, has pointed the finger at Corresmo and the government as responsible, although she lacks the evidence for it to make such a claim. Lasso came out practically unscathed from the investigation against him for being one of the protagonists of the bank holiday, that is, for the collapse of the financial system that meant the loss of savings for hundreds of thousands of bank customers.

The police did not guard Villavicencio as they should have and one of the gunmen they were supposed to take to hospital died in the hands of the police: instead, they took him to a police station. In other words, politicians and assassins acted in full view of the forces of law and order, who let them act. It is like what happens in the film Z, by Costa Gavras.

Finally, we must ask ourselves if Fernando Villavicencio was a CIA agent, as former president Rafael Correa claimed, and as Telesur revealed. If such a thing were to be proven one day, it would not only be local politicians, but also the governments of the region and even that power that is waging war in Europe, who would be behind his assassination

The original article can be found here

See the article here:

The drug trade is taking over Latin America - PRESSENZA International News Agency