LA Quick Hits: FCH - Security Important, Hugo is Scared, 2 Cool 4 School, Cristina Knocks US (Again), Samper Whines, Have a Coke and a Smile & More

• Understatement of the day: Calderon says security is a national priority.
• Blake says Calderon has told him to focus on security.
• Hugo declines Santos inauguration invite and threatens to break off relations. He said he feared for his life if he went to Colombia.
• Four Colombian reporters detained in Venezuela won't be sent back till Monday.
• It's so hot over here that I sweat just think about going outside, but in the southern cone they are freezing their butts off. Bolivia is closing the schools through Wednesday.
• In Bolivia drug traffickers have made inroads in 27 impoverished communities.
• Cristina backs Mex on Arizona law...imagine my surprise.
• Former Prez Samper laments the decline of the Liberal Party and looks to the PRI for inspiration. Read the interview and see why the Libs in Colombia have no chance. Vague notions and embittered sniping is not going to get anyone elected.
• It's been awhile but activists want justice for the Bolivian disappeared and those that suffered under the Meza regime.
• Coca Colla takes the fizzy drink industry back to its roots, so to speak.

Drugs and LA

Drugs, drugs and drugs. If you would lived in LA you would think nothing else matters to US. Can you blame the people of LA for being resentful. We extol the virtues of the market, preach about the importance of free trade and one product that they can produce in abundance and seems to have impressive demand in the US is the one thing that we chastise them for.

In Mexico they recently snagged 10 tons of coke as well as a Sinaloa cartel head but Mexicans are still wary of an anti-drug aid package proposed by W. Meanwhile coca cultivation is ramping up in Ecuador and I don't care what the LAT piece says Correa will run US out eventually and stop cooperating to control the trade. A concern for US is the fact that we are scrambling for a new base in LA without much success.

I don't drink and I don't smoke. I've never touched a narcotic except once or twice in my younger days as friends shared and I happened to be seated between. So no, I did not inhale, exhale or even hale. That being said I say LEGALIZE IT. Stop punishing the cultivators for our sins. Stop encouraging illegal trafficking. Who is to say that those same networks will be used to smuggle in terrorists or even weapons of mass destruction?

In the Tanks: Heritage on Correa

A Heritage Foundation paper by James Roberts points out the similarities between Hugo and Correa - not much new there. All the usual notes are hit, the drive to socialism, the eagerness to rewrite the constitution, tweak the US and kiss Iranian tush. How we stop the lefty Latin slide makes up the last part of the paper:

The U.S. should do the following:

• Reiterate to President Correa that the United States expects Ecuador to continue to respect democratic neighbors, continue cooperation on fighting drug trafficking and international crime, and invest in its own long-term stability and prosperity through policies that favor political and economic free choice;
• Develop new programs to boost personal contact with Americans and counter the armies of Cuban doctors and Venezuelan security advisers streaming into Ecquador;
• Increase support for civil society groups and beef up public diplomacy efforts to strengthen local voices proposing independent solutions to Ecuador's poverty and governance troubles;
• Demonstrate goodwill regarding possible resumption of free trade talks if the situation improves; and
• Redirect security assistance as necessary and adjust strategies if America loses tenant rights at Ecuador's Manta air base for drug interdiction efforts.

All well and good but kind of vague isn't it? I could come up with this stuff and I am not even an expert, although I play one in the blogosphere. Here's one that I would like to see us try - stop bugging our neighbor's to the south about drug trafficking. If there is money in the drug trade it is only because we want it. It's not Shorty's fault that I am 15 lbs. overweight. It is my fault for insisting on getting the full dinner of baby back ribs with a side order of corn on the cob.

I'll discuss more on it later but the Foreign Policy's cover story says it best - Legalize It.

LA Quick Hits: Elections Colombian Style, Shut 'em Down Hugo Style, A Bunch of Stuff on Drugs - An Arrest, A Fungus and A Runner & More

• Uribe blew off para leader Mancuso's revelation that the paras pressured voters to support Uribe. (en esp.)
  
• Want to know why Hugo is shutting down RCTV? WaPost has the best story thus far on what it is about RCTV that ticks Hugo off.
• Texan lawmakers are asking for $850 million dollars over five years to fight the drug war in Mexico. Once again we are looking for a proxy to do our fighting for us. Once again we are looking for our southern neighbors to bear the brunt of the drug war. Why don't we spend $850 million to get people off drugs or to get them off of our streets?
• Pedro Diaz Parada, allegedly a drug cartel leader, was arrested in Oaxaca. This is the first major arrest of the Calderon crackdown.
• "Franken-fungus" a powerful herbicide may be to controversial and dangerous to spread here but some in DC don't have a problem in using it in LA to combat drugs.
• Colombian authorities stumbled on $54 million worth of loot while conducting drug raids in four houses.
• Cubans wait and wonder as to the state of Fidel's health. I'll say it again, when he dies there will be wailing in the streets. I'm just preparing myself psychological for the sight and the glowing news reports.
• Cuba is keeping a Colombian drug runner under lock and key, even though they haven't charged him with anything drug related. The insinuation in the piece is that if they let him go he may reveal something to embarass the Cubes. Not that I think the Castro Bros. don't run drugs (I do) but I doubt they would have made a high profile case over a weak link.
• A miner's death has some in Coahuila skittish. 65 miners were buried alive last year and safety remains a concern.
• Former LA prezes are being nailed when they leave office. The Herald explains why...I'll do it quicker most LA gov't's are dirty.
  

Solving the Drug War

Alvaro Vargas Llosa visits Colombia, finds cocaine cheap and plentiful and comes up with his own ideas on how to solve the problem:

In a country that has made admirable progress on other fronts, the drug war is preventing the government from finishing off the narco-terrorist organizations. Between 2002 and 2005, Uribe’s “democratic security” policy successfully pushed those organizations, especially the Marxist empire known as FARC, away from many cities. There was a one-third drop in the number of murders and a two-thirds drop in the number of terrorist attacks. The economy picked up handsomely. But then a stalemate ensued in the campaign against the terrorists that cannot be attributed only to the country’s jungles. The mafias that owe their existence to the criminalization of cocaine continue to generate enough funds to match every attempt by the government to beef up its military capability.

The frustration is reopening the debate on the drug war. Some politicians are openly calling for decriminalization. Others propose intermediate mechanisms. Analyst Olga Gonzalez says that “in the last 15 years, hundreds of Colombians have been extradited to the United States and hundreds of thousands of hectares have been fumigated, and yet cocaine remains an excellent business. The link between mafias and politics has now reached the upper echelons of power, as the revelations of ‘para-politics’ show.” She recalls that Colombia had a lucrative marijuana trade in the 1970s. When Americans started to grow their own, the Colombian mafias disappeared. Why don’t American laboratories, she asks, continue to develop the synthetic cocaine for which there is already a prototype? Or why don’t Americans develop a genetically modified coca leaf needing less solar radiation and tropical humidity so that consumers can grow it in their balconies?

Actually, all of these solutions would face the barrier of prohibition at the consumer level. And in the case of synthetic cocaine, the real thing is much cheaper to produce—the drug war notwithstanding. The debate that needs to be addressed is the one about decriminalization. The place to open that debate is not Colombia but the United States. No Latin American government could decriminalize drugs unilaterally without incurring the fatal wrath of the United States, exposing its country to ferocious reprisals. A recent example is former Mexican President Vicente Fox’s attempt to sign into law a bill passed by Congress legalizing tiny amounts of certain drugs for personal consumption. When the seven plagues of Egypt fell upon Fox—courtesy of Washington—the conservative president was forced to rethink.