Three years ago the Watchdog and fifteen year old son spent the better part of a week traveling through Guatemala, visiting projects sponsored by an international Non Governmental Organization (NGO) for the purpose of assisting Mayan villages. Security was not an issue in the capital, along the way, or in the villages.
Today members of that same NGO report that travel in Guatemala is perilous, with the organization suffering multiple cases of staff being kidnapped, presumably for ransom.
What has occurred is the spread of lawlessness due to Guatemala becoming a major transshipment center of illegal drugs via ‘fast boats’ and over land through Mexico to the USA. Just as in Mexico, the government faces drug cartels with great power and resources.
Drug trafficking is the largest and most profitable business in the world, and it is built entirely on the misguided concept of prohibition. Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol. It doesn’t work with illegal drugs. Prohibition simply engenders corruption and criminality. It destroys communities and, as we are seeing with Mexico’s current civil war with over 30,000 fatalities, the Drug War even threatens nations
In a column “End drug war, get past the race issue”, Libertarian columnist John Stossel reports on the observations of John McWhorter: “He also blames the black market created by prohibition for diverting young black men from the normal work force. ‘Because the illegality of drug keeps the prices high,’ he says, ‘there are high salaries to be made in selling them. This makes selling drugs a standing tempting alternative to seeking lower-paying legal employment.’”
Stossel poses the question “Would cheaper and freely available drugs bring their own catastrophe?” McWhorter says no. “Fears of an addiction epidemic are unfounded. None such has occurred in Portugal, where the drug war has been significantly scaled back.”
Vietnam and especially Iraq were two of the three most wrongheaded and disastrous wars in which this nation has been engaged. But they are dwarfed by the harm that has been done by the War on Drugs here and throughout the world, and the Drug War is largely sponsored and driven by the USA.
Despite all of the evidence to the contrary (visit www.DrugWarFacts.org), our fact adverse, ideologically blinded American society will not learn from its past or take heed of its present.
Truly “We have met our enemy, and it is us!!”
