US Special Forces To Hunt Drug Cartel Kingpins

Report: Navy SEALs To Hunt Cartel Kingpin Like Bin Laden -- Danger Room

Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is arguably the world’s most wanted criminal, supplanting Osama bin Laden after the terrorist mastermind’s death during a Navy SEAL raid in May 2011. Now the Pentagon reportedly has a plan to send the SEALs after El Chapo too. There are lots of reasons why the report may be off. Chief among them: The Mexicans hate U.S. troops on their soil even more than the Pakistanis do.

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My Comment: I presume that the countries where these drug kingpins reside and/or are hiding in are OK with the idea of US military personnel on their territory.

New Ideas To Curb The Drug Wars Are Being Floated

How Latin America Is Reinventing The War On Drugs -- Sara Miller Llana, Christian Science

Frustrated with US dictates, countries across the region are floating new ideas to curb drug trafficking, from 'soft' enforcement to legalization.

Like thousands of other Bolivians, Marcela Lopez Vasquez's parents migrated to the Chapare region, in the Andean tropics, desperate to make a living after waves of economic and environmental upheaval hit farming and mining communities in the 1970s and '80s.

The new migrants, who spread across the undulating green hills here, planted bananas. They planted yucca and orange trees. But it was in the coca leaf that thrives in this climate that they found the salvation of a steady cash crop – and themselves at the nexus of the American "war on drugs."

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My Comment: What's my take .... in the end these drugs are going to be legalized and managed by government. It will be done to lessen the power of the drug cartels, and to put a handle on the violence that it brings. Unfortunately .... it is going to bring about other problems .... the number one problem being medical/social problems associated with drug addition. We see it in Afghanistan .... where a sizable portion of the population are already addicted to opium/heroin .... bringing enormous social and medical problems that are crippling what is already a crippled medical system. We may not like the war against drugs because of it's human toll .... but maybe it is the lesser of two evils.

Expanding The War Against Drugs To Africa

(Click on Image to Enlarge)

U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels -- New York Times

WASHINGTON — In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of antidrug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.

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My Comment: Africa has been used a major drug conduit to Europe for years. The difference now is that both the U.S. and Europe are now (finally) taking action against those responsible for this traffic.

A Look At Britain's Role In Colombia's Drug War

Fighting cocaine: Two 'Jungla' commandos in Colombia

'I Put The Pistol In My Mouth, To My Temple, Then Under My Chin. But I Just Couldn’t Do It': Former MI6 Officer Reveals True Cost Of Britain’s ‘Silent’ Drugs War In Colombia -- Daily Mail

On the edge of an airfield in Popayan, 200 miles south of the Colombian capital Bogota, two American Special Forces operatives, draped in weapons and wearing Oakley sunglasses, studiously ignore us.

We’re just yards apart, four ‘gringos’ in a foreign land, surrounded by dozens of heavily armoured Colombian ‘Jungla’ commandos. In return, we gamely pretend our American friends are not there.

My colleague and I are filming a Colombian police counter-narcotics operation.

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My Comment: Does not appear successful at all.

Today Is The 40th Anniversary Of The 'War On Drugs'

Former President Richard Nixon, who began the War on Drugs. (UPI Photo/Darryl Heikes/Files)

Ending 40 Years Of Drug War: The Impact On Latin America -- Patrick Corcoran, Christian Science Monitor

Today is the 40th anniversary of Nixon declaring a 'war on drugs.' Many Latin Americans are calling for an alternative strategy, but the short-term consequences could be dire for this region.

The 40th anniversary of Washington's war on drugs has sparked calls for the decriminalization of narcotics, but what may seem like common sense for the US could spell disaster for Latin America.

Pleas for reform have come from a wide variety of voices. David Simon, creator of the TV series "The Wire," recently published an open letter to Attorney General Eric Holder offering a new season of the popular show in exchange for a reconsideration of the war on drugs. In The New York Times, Charles Blow called the war “an unmitigated disaster, an abomination of justice, and a self-perpetuating, trillion-dollar economy of wasted human capital, ruined lives, and decimated communities.”

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My Comment: While many believe that the war on drugs has been a failure, others believe that if drugs are legalized, greater problems would follow. What is my take .... tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands in jail, billions upon billions spent .... yup .... time to re-evaluate our present strategy for something else. Governments will probably (in the end) legalize the sale of narcotics .... but my suggestion is that if that becomes the case .... we should be ready for the onslaught of drug addiction and the social problems that it produces. How much of a problem this can be .... one only has to look at Afghanistan and its 1-2 million addicts to realize that we may get rid of one problem, but the next problem will dwarf what it replaced.

Is The War On Drugs About To End?

A Nicaraguan smokes a joint of marijuana in a poor district of the port of El Bluff. Campaigners say such areas are perfect for drug barons to cash in on people with few expectations. Photograph: Oswaldo Rivas/REUTERS

War On Drugs: Why The US And Latin America Could Be Ready To End A Fruitless 40-Year Struggle -- The Guardian

Mexico's president Felipe Caldéron is the latest Latin leader to call for a debate on drugs legalisation. And in the US, liberals and right-wing libertarians are pressing for an end to prohibition. Forty years after President Nixon launched the 'war on drugs' there is a growing momentum to abandon the fight

The birthday fiesta was in full swing at 1.30am when five SUVs pulled up outside the house. Figures spilled from the vehicles and ran towards the lights. They burst into the house and levelled AK-47s. "Kill them all!" A shouted instruction, only three words, and the slaughter began.

Gunfire and screams drowned the music. Some victims were cut down immediately, others were caught as they tried to escape. By the time the killers left there were 17 corpses, 18 wounded and 200 shell casings. Among the dead was the birthday guest of honour, a man local media named only as Mota, Mexican slang for marijuana.

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My Comment: With the bloodshed from the drug wars now approaching 30,000 in Mexico alone, the debate is now evolving towards how best to legalize drugs, with the government regulating (and probably selling) these products. This development is not a surprise .... everyone is now of the opinion that prohibition has not worked, and that alternative strategies and policies must be formulated.

Unfortunately ..... I personally believe that this debate is ignoring the consequences if drugs becomes legalized and regulated by the government. The reason why is that this is not the first time we are having this debate. All drugs were legal in the U.S. a hundred years ago, but the catastrophic impact of drugs being made available to the public made everyone realize (at that time) that prohibition was necessary to stem the exponential growth of drug addiction and the problems that are associated with it.

Are we going to repeat our history to a pre-prohibition era .... from my vantage point I will have to say that it is only a matter of time.

Could Mexico's Drug War Spread To The Central Valley?

California Central Valley county

From Visilia Times-Delta:

Experts say cartels have strong ties to drugs in county

We've heard the news stories about violence and outright warfare between Mexican law enforcement agencies and rival drug cartels there.

More than a dozen people were killed during a gunbattle between the rival Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels a year ago. More than 100 civilians were injured or killed in September when two hand grenades were thrown into a crowd at a Mexican Independence Day celebration in the state of Michoacà∞n.

Add to that numerous other murders, some involving torture and even beheadings more than 440 in the last three months of 2008 alone, according to the Associated Press.

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My Comment: With the majority of people in U.S. Federal prison being there because of drug convictions .... I would have to say that the Drug War has always been here.

On Lebanon-Israel Frontier, A Quiet Drug War

Lebanese policemen stand guard as they burn ton of cannabis in Deir al-Ahmar in the Bekaa region of eastern Lebanon on Oct. 27, 2008. AFP - Getty Images file

From MSNBC:

Israeli police believe the trade is controlled in large part by Hezbollah.

ALONG THE ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER, Israel - Filmed with a night-vision camera just before Israeli narcotics officers pounced from nearby bushes, the video shows a Lebanese courier lobbing half-kilo packages of heroin over the border fence into Israel and an Israeli courier throwing back packages of $100 bills.

Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah guerrillas have been battling for years along this frontier. But a quieter war goes on here every night, one between Inspector Gal Ben Ish's narcotics teams and the smugglers who have turned this jumpy border into the main conduit for heroin bound for Israeli drug markets.

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Update: Lebanon's drug mafia blamed in death of 4 soldiers -- LA Times

My Comment: Poppy fields and growing marijuana has been a part of Lebanese culture and history for centuries. The difference now is that Hezbollah recognizes that these drugs are a strategic asset for them in their war against Israel. My only surprise is that they have not expanded this drug/narcotics industry into becoming a major player on the world's drug scene.

The Colombian-African Drug Link

The democratically elected President of Guinea-Bissau, Joao Bernardo Vieira, was killed by renegade soldiers. Both him and the chief of the Armed Forces, General Tagmé Na Waie, who died after a bomb attack, had been accused of complicity in cocaine smuggling.

From Semana International:

At the beginning of the week, when the President of the Western African country of Guinea-Bissau, Joao Bernardo Vieira, and the army chief, Batista Tagmé Na Wai, were killed in a gangland style, two questions quickly arose: Do the murders in this failed state have any relationship with the fact that Guinea-Bissau has become the first narco-state in the world? And second: Are the Colombian drug cartels, very present in Guinea-Bissau, related in any way to the assassinations?

The answer to the first question seems, at first glance, clear: Yes. The tiny African country, a former Portuguese colony, is permeated to such an extent by the drug traffickers and their organizations that it is facing a crisis of enormous proportions. Whereas the country, the world’s fifth poorest nation, has a bad infrastructure, a massive foreign debt and people struggling to earn a decent living, the Spanish-speaking drug traffickers use Mercedes and Porsche cars or four-wheel drive vehicles and live in fancy estates on the outskirts of the main cities.

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My Comment: As Africa deteriorates further .... expect the worse to come to Africa. Drugs is just the tip of the iceberg.

How The Production Of Cocaine And The War Against It Is Destroying The Rain Forest

More than $6 billion has been spent over the past eight years in an attempt to destroy the coca crops that keep the guerrillas and drug cartels in business

The Daily Mail:

The habit that's costing the earth

It doesn’t matter how many bottles you recycle. If you use cocaine, you’re turning virgin rainforest into coca farms – which soon become toxic barren strips like this. Live flies into the heart of the rainforest to expose the hypocrisy of the environmentally conscious middle-class drug user

In a drone of Bell Huey turbines we clear the razor wire and sandbagged machine-gun emplacements of the base, flying low while casting a racing black shadow over the landscape. We head north-west into hostile territory. The machine gunner on my left flicks a red switch on the 7.62mm six-barrelled minigun and a green

LED shows the system is armed. Belts of dull brass bullets stretch back into the bowels of the chopper. Sitting behind an inscrutable black visor, which reflects the topography below, he begins to scan the forest and ramshackle houses nestling on riverbanks for snipers lurking in the jungle drifting 500ft beneath my feet, as the chopper blades emit a pulsating whump.

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My Comment: The drug wars will go on until it is legalized and regulated by the governments of the peoples who consume it. As for the ecological damage .... while many bemoan the damage and voice their opposition to this destruction .... I would wager that many of those who protest have also used the drugs (at least once), and see nothing wrong to legalize it.