Calderon is probably clean and untouchable; but what good is that when everyone else around him becomes tainted by narco-money? How can Gen. Perez Molina avoid the same fate?
One Guy vs. Systemic Problem
Calderon is probably clean and untouchable; but what good is that when everyone else around him becomes tainted by narco-money? How can Gen. Perez Molina avoid the same fate?
“[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries…” - Zero History, William Gibson
That's a really good question.Originally Posted by bourbon
I guess it's really the test of nation, not of Calderon and not of Perez Molina. It's something that we in the US have to ask ourselves also. How can our leaders reduce the use of drugs in the US, when everybody around us wants to get high?
It's pithy for us to say that "good leadership" can solve this, but a cultural slide is a cultural slide. It may be that the cultural processes are too strong both on the user and the seller side for this to be overcome by the single-man leadership model.
Blast from the past...
http://ph.news.yahoo.com/former-guat...012409900.html
Former Guatemala dictator Rios Montt found guilty of genocide
Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt was found guilty on Friday of genocide and crimes against humanity during the bloodiest phase of the country's 36-year civil war and was sentenced to 80 years in prison.
Hundreds of people who were packed into the courtroom burst into applause, chanting, "Justice!" as he received a 50-year term for the genocide charge and an additional 30 years for crimes against humanity.
It was the first time a former head of state had been found guilty of genocide in his or her own country.
Rios Montt, 86, took power after a coup in 1982 and was accused of implementing a scorched-earth policy in which troops massacred thousands of indigenous villagers. He proclaimed his innocence in court.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
Could not have happened to a nicer guy.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
I guess they hadn't invented "pop-centric" yet.
But wait, isn't this the guy that Saint Ronald of Reagan said was "totally dedicated to Democracy"?
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
Well, Rios Montt did have the beans (for those toeing the government line) or bullets (for everyone else) thing. The civil war might have been shortened if he had been as dedicated to keeping the first part of the promise as he was to keeping the second.
It seems to me that history is telling us that the absolutely ruthless ways that the Guatemalan and Sri Lankan governments took to counterinsurgency are more likely to be successful than any post-9/11 COIN 2.0. And both of those still took decades!
One of the things an Estonian friend of mine and I share in common is time spent in Guatemala. He once told me, "You know how much I love Reagan and how much I appreciate what he did for my country, but he was dead wrong on Central America."
Last edited by ganulv; 05-11-2013 at 11:54 PM.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
Coming from another place where Reagan had it dead wrong, it was a bit jarring to encounter Eastern Europeans who thought he was absolutely wonderful. Eventually realized, of course, that different places have different perspectives, and policies that were disastrous in one place may have been effective in others.
I vividly remember the day when (then VP) Bush I praised Ferdinand Marcos for his adherence to democracy and to democratic principles. I introduced myself as a Canadian for a while.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
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