Venezuela Blows Up the D.E.A.'s Spot

Estaban haciendo una gran cantidad de traslado de droga bajo la figura de entrega vigilada... nosotros pudimos determinar que estábamos en presencia evidentemente de un nuevo cartel (they were making a large quantity of drug shipments under the pretense of monitoring them.. we were able to determine the presence of a new drug cartel).Pedro Carreño, Minister of the Interior, Venezuela

Last year I wrote about the the so-called "War on Drugs" in Latin America and how it is in fact a cover for the U.S.'s drug wars to protect its financial interest in cocaine trafficking. What I neglected to mention was that the U.S.'s drug wars are part of a political strategy as well. Fortunately Chavez's government called the U.S. out on this issue earlier this month in response to criticism from the White House that Venezuela was not cooperating with the U.S. in curbing cocaine smuggling. Minister of the Interior Pedro Carreño explained to the Associated Press that his government ended its cooperation with the U.S. D.E.A. in 2005 because the agency wasn't making any arrests or smashing any cartels. Instead it was smuggling huge amounts of blow through the country. In effect the D.E.A. was itself operating as a drug cartel. Morever the authorities in Venezuela discovered that the U.S. D.E.A. had infiltrated government intelligence agencies and represented a threat to national security. Thus it would appear that the U.S. D.E.A. serves two functions: (a) as a an instrument of espionage it serves to protect U.S. strategic political interests; and (b) as an enforcement agency it serves to protect the U.S.'s financial interest in cocaine trafficking.

The War On Drugs (Revisited)

Acknowledged or not, consciously or unconsciously, the poetic state, a transcendant state of life, is fundamentally what the public seeks through love, crime, drugs, war or insurrection.

-- Antonin Artaud

When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

-- Ernest Hemingway

From New York to Tehran the world is getting high, high, high. Why? That's a rhetorical question isn't it? Why can't we all just get high on life? Let's face it: if life were a drug, it would be rubbing alcohol. It may get you a little drunk sometimes but, ultimately, it's just going to make you go blind or just kill you. For most people in this world, life is about figuring out where the next meal's coming from and for most of the rest it's about drudgery. We spend our time circulating commodities -- consuming them, manufactuiring them and selling them even though some of us wake up to the painful realization that we ourselves have become mere commodities, merely means by which this absurd machine perpetuates its murderous existence. So we get tipsy, twisted and tight trying to attain that sweet perfection that eludes us when sober. We look for the sublime through the eye of a hypodermic needle or try to inhale it -- hot, dry and ethereal -- through the stem of a glass pipe. But let me tell you, I checked and double-checked, baby I've done research and nobody ever found nirvana between the folds of a glassine envelope. Nobody ever found paradise at the bottom of a brandy snifter. What drugs provide is simulation and, as with all simulacra, you have to pay. Drugs are money, they cost money, and the high you get from them is the manifestation not of creativity, not of the reality that makes us all live but of the qualitative experience of a discrete quantity of money. And as with all money, someone had to die for those drugs, someone like the people of Afghanistan and Colombia. So to escape the misery of life in the Babylon system we took drugs and by taking those drugs we only augmented our complicity in the system that creates our misery. The same system that provides those drugs to slake our appetite for the sublime while securing surplus cash-flows and circumventing insurrection. Still we get no satisfaction. Instead we have crime, drugs and war ... and with so little love left in the world, maybe it's time we tried an insurrection.

The War on Drugs

First of all there is no war on drugs -- there is a drug war. Second of all the U.S. is not trying to stop the production and traffic in cocaine and heroin -- it's simply trying to maintain control of the racket. This should be obvious to anyone who read Juan Forero's excellent report on the front page of Saturday's New York Times. Naturally you had to read the entire article to get the entire picture but it's something like this. The U.S. has spent the past six years and $ 4.7 billion supposedly trying to eradicate cocaine production and trafficking in Colombia. However production and price have remained pretty much the same as they were before Clinton launched the program (yes -- this is a Clinton program). And, the reporter mentions at the very end of the piece, the effort has had the effect of furnishing the control of the drug trafficking routes to the right-wing paramilitary commanders instead of the left-wing insurgents. Is it just me or is this just so obviously a racket that you just want to go fucking nuts? Basically the U.S. sent the military into Colombia to wipe out the traffic in blow only they didn't wipe it out -- they just shook down the competition. Now you've got the degenerate children of the U.S. and international bourgeoisie living it up in the night clubs of Los Angeles and New York City run run running to the yayo while U.S. prisons fill up with Black and Latino men who got pinched for allegedly hustling relatively tiny quantities of dope while the U.S. military is maintaining a Civil War in Colombia to keep that coke money flowing. Because it is all about the money. Every year between $ 500 billion and one trillion dollars of drug money is laundered through U.S. banks and companies [see US Senate, (1999); Minority Staff Report for Permanent Sub committee on Investigations, US Senate Committee on Government Affairs, November 9, 1999 and US Senate, (2001); Minority Staff Report for Permanent Sub committee on Investigations on Correspondent Banking: A Gateway for Money Laundering, Senate Committee on Government Affairs, February 5, 2001]. It is this continuous flow of cash money that has kept the U.S. stock market strong despite the dwindling competitiveness of U.S. companies in the world market. Nothing helps financial liquidity like an annual influx of several hundred billion dollars in cash. The leftist insurgents (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) plan to decriminalize the production of coca once in power. Legal proceeds don't need laundering. So Uncle Sam's got to move against them.