Socialism & Cocaine Living Well Together

Anyone who does not know the significance of the cocaine drug trade and the concomitant destruction of human lives is living on some other planet. Originating from Africa, which does not produce cocaine, is this story.

Amid growing demand in Europe, South American traffickers are moving billions of dollars worth of cocaine through the tiny West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, an amount so large it dwarfs all other economic sectors combined and could destabilize the coup-prone country, a top U.N. official said.

"The fear is that the influx of drug money can easily generate a situation of instability, because the appetite among different local partners to get involved is getting bigger and bigger," Antonio Mazzitelli, West Africa director of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, said in a Thursday interview. "It's no different than other wars and conflicts in West Africa in which diamonds or oil have created instability. It's a dangerous situation."

The drive to enrich oneself at the expense of others is a base human condition. And, who might these drug traffickers from South America count among their supporters? None other than the socialist president of Bolivia, Evo Morales.

Those politics have not endeared him to the United States, his nemesis in the late 1980s and 1990s when he led coca growers, or "cocaleros", in protests against Washington-directed forced eradication campaigns. The plant's small green leaf has been chewed as a mild stimulant here for millenia, but is best known outside the country as the base ingredient of cocaine.

The Bolivian government has long worked with U.S. narcotics agents to eradicate the Bolivian coca fields. All of that is coming to an end.

…last month he expressed his desire that all U.S. military personnel leave Bolivia, Morales on Friday said he wants any and all armed foreign troops out.

Bolivia is on a socialist fast track fueled by cocaine money.

His version of socialism requires state control of all basic services, including telecommunications.

Morales has increased Bolivia's annual natural gas revenues from $300 million to $2 billion a year by exerting greater state control over the industry.

Water utilities have reverted to state control and authorities are negotiating the re-nationalization of the country's main telecommunications company, Entel, which is owned by Telecom Italia SpA. Officials have indicated electrical power could be next.

Morales has allied himself closely with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's leftist president, and Fidel Castro, Cuba's aging leader.

Morales trumpets the standard anti-capitalist and western imperialism clap trap of the socialists.

But his vision of socialism is guided, Morales said, by the communal decision-making of Bolivia's indigenous societies and their "way of living in harmony with Mother Earth."

Living in harmony with Mother Earth is just another way of saying that the indigenous peoples were in a near Stone Age developmental stage when first contacted by Europeans and had not yet developed the mechanisms to further exploit the earth.

Utilizing his anti-capitalistic stance, Morales stated that,

…he and other Latin American leaders are exploring possible legal means for demanding compensation for the developed world's "ecological debt."

"It's not possible that some in the industrialized world live very well economically while affecting, even destroying others," said the 48-year-old Aymara Indian. Scientists count this Andean nation's rapidly melting glaciers among the most profound signs of global warming.

How about the industrialized world exploring legal means for demanding compensation from Boliva, and the other South American countries involved in the cocaine trade, for devastating the lives of millions of cocaine addicts and fueling rampant crime?

Links in this blog:
Cocaine could destabilize Guinea-Bissau

Bolivia's Morales recounts police abuse