Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Colombia: How did Santos earn a Peace Prize?

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.

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World AIDS Day: The forgotten victims

Today is World AIDS Day. Michael Fumento writes in Forbes about how former Surgeon General Koop is mistaken when he speaks about AIDS as being “forgotten”,
On World AIDS Day, Let’s Remember the True Forgotten Victims

As to “forgotten but not gone:”

Yet HIV/AIDS will receive over $3 billion in the 2011 federal research budget. That doesn’t include an entirely separately funded “infectious disease” category.  Granted, it’s shy of the 100 billion gagillion that Dr. Evil wanted in order to ransom the earth, but:

  • HIV/AIDS gets about $200,000 per patient death in the NIH research budget, according to calculations from the FAIR Foundation (Fair Allocations in Research). We spend 21 times more per AIDS death than cancer death. Pancreatic cancer will strike about 43,000 Americans this year and is essentially a quick death sentence. It gets 1% of the funding per death as AIDS.
  • Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are the nation’s sixth and 14th-leading causes of death of death respectively, yet HIV/AIDS gets 34 times and 25 times more per fatality respectively.
  • The disparity is all the worse when trends are considered. While AIDS cases and deaths remain level, those of Parkinson’s inexorably climb while Alzheimer’s fly off the chart.

The forgotten victims? The people suffering from illnesses other than AIDS denied of research and treatment due to the disproportionate spending on that illness. Go read the whole article.

Related thoughts from John Derbyshire.

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Stossel & Fumento on the swine flu hysteria

John Stossel has an article on Swine Flu Hysteria which points out what Michael Fumento has been saying all along:

Michael Fumento writes that the facts on swine flu hardly live up to the months of hype

What Michael has been saying is,

Hidden within the latest edition of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
FluView was this sentence: “The proportion of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza was below the epidemic threshold”…

You may recall all those additional deaths we were supposed to suffer as a result of swine flu – 30,000 to 90,000, according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (a number I previously disputed)…

But like New Zealand and Australia, the United States can actually expect considerably fewer overall flu deaths because of the swine flu…

Only 161 new infections were reported to CDC-monitored labs last week, compared to 11,470 at the epidemic’s mid-October peak.

Michael adds,

in addition to the usual bureaucratic desire for growth in power and budget, the WHO was seeking to cover its tracks for an earlier hysteria – that of avian flu. Moreover, it has been remarkably open (Even if I’m the only one to report on it) about seeking to exploit swine flu to engineer hard-left political change including the redistribution of wealth between countries and instituting “social justice.”

That‘s what the fuss is really about.

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Mexicans shanghaied in China over swine flu

The latest headline on the swine flu: China Forces Dozens of Mexican Travelers Into Quarantine

The A/H1N1 flu outbreak is leading to a potential diplomatic row between China and Mexico, as Chinese health authorities round up and quarantine scores of Mexicans — only one of whom is thus far reported to be sick — as they fly in on business and holiday trips.

Mexico’s foreign minister said Mexican citizens with no signs of infection had been isolated in “unacceptable conditions” in China. Patricia Espinosa told a news conference Saturday that such measures were “discriminatory and ungrounded” and that the government is advising Mexicans to stay away from China.

She also criticized four Latin American countries — Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Cuba — for suspending flights coming from Mexico against the recommendation of the World Health Organization.

More than 70 Mexicans are in isolation around China, according to Mexican officials, and that number is rising as Mexican travelers call in to their embassy to report their plight.

China has been rounding up all travelers aboard an AeroMéxico flight that arrived Thursday in Shanghai from Mexico with a 25-year-old Mexican man, who is now ill with human swine flu in Hong Kong. He is the only known Mexican sufferer in China to date. However, Mexicans on other flights say they have been singled out for harsh treatment.

Gustavo Carrillo, a 36-year-old manager of a Mexican technology company in China who lives in Beijing, was taken off his Continental Airlines plane Saturday and rushed into quarantine at a Beijing hotel. He had traveled to the U.S. from China on a business trip and hadn’t visited Mexico.

Mr. Carrillo said health officials took the temperatures of other passengers after the plane landed, but didn’t check his after they saw his Mexican passport. Instead, they led him down the aisle past gawking passengers. “It was embarrassing and humiliating,” he said.

Mexicans who were on the flight to Shanghai with the 25-year-old flu victim complain about how China has enforced its quarantine, offering little information and only basic medical testing. Among them is a family of five, including three young children, who transited to Beijing. They were roused from their hotel room in the Chinese capital in the early hours of Saturday and whisked to an infectious diseases hospital. There, according to the father, Carlos Doormann, AeroMéxico’s finance director, they were isolated in a room with bloodstained sheets and what appeared to be mucus smeared on the walls.

While this is happening, James Fallows reports that

the relief flight to take stranded Chinese citizens back home from Mexico, announced yesterday, has been canceled because of trouble reaching “landing agreements” with Mexican airport authorities.

The hysteria continues.

And no, I couldn’t resist that post title.

In today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern Michael Fumento talks about his article, The Price Of A Porcine Panic: A gut punch to the economy.

Michael, who has written several books on pandemics, has kept an eye on the swine flu news:
Early Calculations Show Swine Flu Hard to Transmit
Mexico’s Devastating Failure to Compare Swine Flu to Seasonal Flu
So just how lethal is swine flu?
More posts at Fumento.com

You can listen to the podcast here, and it’s archived for your convenience.

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It’s not the Surge, it’s the CounterinSURGEncy

Blackfive has an excellent post that you must read:
Counter-InSURGEncy, a primer on our impending victory

The Surge is not our strategy and he is correct that it is not responsible for the tremendous success in Baghdad, the surrounding belts, Al Anbar, Diyala and now even in some of the Shia tribal areas as well. Our strategy is Counter-Insurgency (COIN) and the additional troops, known as the Surge, are simply part of that effort along with every other military member and civilian over there. Read LTC Kilcullen for an elegant primer on COIN in the Small Wars Journal.

COIN is completely different than the nation-building and national institution-building that we had been doing since toppling Saddam and up until the beginning of this year. We had hunkered down on the FOBs heading out on patrols and then back inside the wire. Now we cleared areas and then stayed and lived side by side with the Iraqis, and once they saw that we were staying they “awakened” and determined that al Qaeda brought death and destruction and the Americans brought electricity and water, not to mention security.

Yesterday Michelle Malkin was noticing the news in The Australian

There have certainly been several days in the past month when no US or British soldiers were killed.

During a five-day stretch between October 19 and 23, there were no deaths among coalition forces.

Take a look at the weapons caches turned in by the Iraqis in the past year.

In The First Ten Months Of 2007, Coalition And Iraqi Security Forces Have Found And Cleared 5,364 Caches”

“That Is Twice The Volume Of Material Found And Cleared In All Of 2006.

The Democrats are tripping over themselves not to acknowledge that the COIN is working. To the contrary; Yesterday they were saying that the real reason behind the falling casualty rates in Iraq was that Muqtada al-Sadr had declared a six-month ceasefire.
Today they’re saying that If violence is decreasing in Iraq, it may be because insurgents “are running out of people to kill,”

For more on the real story on Iraq, please listen to these two podcasts where Matt Sanchez and Michael Fumento talk about Iraq.

They’ve been there.

Matt’s writing about the media’s Iraq con job. Go read it. The WaPo‘s shedding a dark light on the news.

James Tarranto talks about the death count in Iraq.

A. J. Strata has more metrics on success in Iraq.

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