Friday, June 29, 2007

Quote of the Day: Africa “under attack” by Colombia

“Africa is under attack, targeted by cocaine traffickers from the West (Colombia) and heroin smugglers in the East (Afghanistan). This threat needs to be addressed quickly to stamp out organized crime, money-laundering and corruption, and to prevent the spread of drug use that could cause havoc across a continent already plagued by many other tragedies.”

--Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa in a press release discussing the U.N.’s World Drug Report.

(The report can be accessed via this link).

Source- United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime


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7 comments:

redwood said...

sharp eye, Erwin. with all the dispair in Africa, this is a troubling.

5:59 PM
Erwin C. said...

Just one of many components in the globalization of the drug trade.

6:01 PM
redwood said...

have you ever seen any evidence that drug dealers muck with elections? ; )

I have. And that's why I'm not as hard on the Latin American Left--Castro, Chavez, et al--who are inclined to scrap elections.

What Liberals in North America don't see is that Lula, et al. are not distancing themselves from Chavez.

At the very least, staying close pressures the Right to play by the rules.

Instead of implicitly bashing Chavez and the commies, therefore, we should be empathizing with their frustrations and explaining their particular histories to our ignorant American audience.

11:42 AM
Anonymous said...

The reason your "ignorant American audience" will remain ignorant is because Latin America holds "zero" interest. The suggestion that it is better to have totalitarianism than free elections for fear of tampering by drug traffickers is an example of why no one cares.

Latin America--with few exceptions-- seems content to sit back and blame US hegemony for all its misery, while the hard work of reform and lasting change never ever gets done. So enter Chavez and his ilk, who will just leap-frog all that process with a wave of his sceptre, in exchange for limitless power.

Excuse us "ignorant Americans", but no one here is interested in a story that ends the same way every time, particularly when it is WE who are always the villains.

10:40 PM
redwood said...

Villain is as villain does. Read more about William Walker, Leonard Wood, and Henry Kissenger. If they don't rise to your definition of 'villain,' we two Americans have different ideas about how to treat other people.

but the idea that Latin Americans have not tried to make their elections free and fair is a claim that can only be made without knowledge. unbelievable admission.

and as far as no one being interested in stories that end the same way with Americans as villain, well, WE can always stop the actors from taking the same sort of actions against other people: Cuba 1901, etc, not mention Vietnam 1959, Iraq 2003.

1:36 PM
Anonymous said...

Like I said, spending your days recounting the injustices inflicted upon you, and doing precisely nothing while your own politicians rob you blind and sell you down the river.

I ask you by way of example, my friend: who is worse, the people who murdered 30,000 of their neighbors in Argentina in the 70s, or Kissinger for encouraging it? Do Latins get a mulligan if they perpetrate crimes against their own?

I promise to follow your reading list, if you and your Latin friends will follow mine: Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman.

9:38 PM
redwood said...

well then, take this opportunity to refer us to passages written by any one of the three thinkers you cite--Keynes, Smith, Friedman--on the political histories (or political economies) of any particular nation in Latin American. I'm guess nutty Freidman has said something.

11:12 PM

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