Diary secrets of Dutch woman fighting for FARC
Diary secrets of Dutch woman fighting for FARC
Quote:
COLOMBIAN forces have captured the intimate diary of a Dutch woman who joined the country's Marxist rebels, in which she gives a rare view of life with the guerrillas deep in the jungle.
In July, elite troops swept into the camp of a commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), known by the alias of Carlos Antonio Lozada.
He was wounded in the firefight and carried off by bodyguards, while women in the unit, who were bathing at the time, had to flee into the jungle in their underwear.
As the troops sifted through the camp, they came across two surprises. The first was Lozada's laptop computer, which held a treasure trove of intelligence, including confidential army plans of counter-guerrilla operations, revealing the extent of FARC infiltration into the military.
The second surprise was two battered notebooks, the journals of a guerrilla, written in Dutch.
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http://news.scotsman.com/internation...?id=1460942007
Interestingly Enough. . .
. . .I'm writing a research paper right now (or, perhaps, I should be writing) for my agricultural development class on counter-narcotics and development strategies in Colombia.
Most of the stuff I've seen from development groups is that they consider Plan Colombia a pretty big failure. The combined approach of alternative development and forcible eradication has alienated a lot of small farmers (whose marginalization over the last sixty years is the cause of the Colombian insurgency) and seriously undermined development. The guerillas are on the run, but coca production is not down, and the development people are even more wary than ever of working with the Colombians, and charge the US with putting too much pressure on Colombia to attain coca crop reduction targets, and too little emphasis on sustainable long term development. Simple eradication is not sustainable, and unsustainable "development" is really just relief. . .
Matt
How America Lost The War On Drugs
Very long article in Rolling Stone. They definitely went for quantity over quality, but an interesting read nonetheless. From the end of the article:
Quote:
The drug war, in the end, has been undone in no small part by the sweeping and inflexible nature of its own metaphor. At the beginning, in the days of Escobar, the campaign was a war as seen from the situation room, a complicated assault that spanned multiple fronts, but one which had identifiable enemies and a goal. Today, the government's anti-drug effort resembles a war as seen from the trenches, an eternal slog, where victory seems not only unattainable but somehow beside the point. For the drug agents and veterans who busted Escobar, the last decade and a half have been a slow, agonizing history of defeat after defeat, the enemy shifting but never retreating. "You get frustrated," Joe Toft, a former DEA country attache in Colombia, tells me. "We've never had a true effort where the U.S. as a whole says, 'We're never going to crack this problem without a real demand-reduction program.' That's something that's just never happened."
LA Times - Little-known mafia is cocaine 'king'
Quote:
GIOIA TAURO, ITALY -- Europe is fast overtaking the U.S. as the leading destination for the world's cocaine, and a single Italian mafia is largely responsible.
The 'Ndrangheta crime syndicate, a ruthless and mysterious network of 155 families born in the rough hills here in southern Italy's Calabria region, now dominates the European drug trade. By establishing direct ties with Colombian producers and building a multibillion-dollar empire that spans five continents, the syndicate has metamorphosed into one of the craftiest criminal gangs in the world, authorities say.
" 'Ndrangheta is king," said Sabas Pretelt de la Vega, a former Colombian interior minister who is his country's ambassador to Rome.
The 'Ndrangheta (pronounced en-DRAHN-geh-tah) peculiarly combines the modern skills of multinational-corporation high finance with a stubborn grip on archaic rural traditions. Some members live in garishly opulent villas outside Madrid and invest in bustling restaurants and hotels in Germany, whereas others, including key bosses, remain in the dreary, closed Calabrian mountain villages of their birth. It is a mafia of businessmen in Dolce & Gabbana, of sheepherders in scruffy woolens.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...ck=1&cset=true