Who stands to gain from the “peace” agreement?
Michael Fumento asks, A Peace Prize for Aiding and Abetting a Drug Cartel?
Santos made a cushy treaty with what’s been rightly called the world’s most powerful narco-terrorist group.
Fumento explains (emphasis added),
At one time the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) was indeed ideological and sought to violently overthrow the government. Today its ideology is plata (money), and it’s sworn off the traditional money-raiser of kidnappings. Which leaves drugs. And although the FARC controls only a small percentage of Colombian territory, curiously that area accounts for about 70 percent of the nation’s coca cultivation.
Colombia as a whole produces about half of the world’s cocaine supply, includingover 90 percent of that used in North America. Far from any success in reducing this, the latest Colombia Coca Survey, jointly produced by UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Colombian government itself, shows an almost incredible doubling in the coca crop area in just the last two years.
Much of this increase is directly attributable to Santos ending aerial spraying last year, which as can be imagined is vastly more effective than sending troops into areas guarded by narcotrafficantes and their horrible land mines. I saw a lot of missing male legs in Colombia. “Las minas de las FARC?” I would ask. “Si, señor.” But Santos insists aerial spraying will not resume, despite the country’s chief prosecutor having recently called for it.
And then there are the heroin exports. Heroin, you ask?
A 2015 report from the UNODC shows opium-poppy cultivation in Colombia rose by almost 30 percent between 2013 and 2014, to the highest level observed since 2008. “Colombian organizations appear to have shifted their focus from low-level distribution to large-scale production,” notes the Insight Crime Foundation. “While acknowledging the growing importance of Mexico as a supply country for heroin reaching its market,” according to a 2013 UNODC report, “the United States continues to consider Colombia the primary source of heroin in the country,”although Mexico may be moving ahead. The FARC is believed to control a major portion of opiate production.
Read the full article.
Of course Colombians want peace. What they don’t want is the FARC in charge of the whole country.
Too bad the Nobel Committee doesn’t understand that.
