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Headlines : InternationalNew coca spat leaves Colombia flying solo
This week, Bolivian President Evo Morales, who made his name as a leader of the country’s coca farmers, announced he wanted to expand the amount of coca that can be planted for legal uses, such as chewing the leaves (a longstanding traditional custom) or using them as religious and cultural symbols.
[Posted By atrain]Republished from the Christian Science Monitor
PUNTO ASIS, COLOMBIA – A decision by Colombia’s conservative President Álvaro Uribe to restart the country’s aerial fumigation of coca leaf plantations near the border with Ecuador appears to have further isolated him in a region increasingly unfriendly to Washington’s war on drugs.
Last week’s move has sparked a diplomatic row, with Ecuador recalling its ambassador to Colombia and vowing to file an official complaint to both the Organization of American States and the United Nations. Ecuador’s leftist president-elect Rafael Correa, a close friend of Venezuela’s anti-American president, Hugo Chávez, has even started recruiting other Latin leaders to oppose aerial fumigation.
It’s simply unacceptable that they continue spraying from the air with glysophate,” Mr. Correa said this week, referring to the herbicide used, a more concentrated version of Monsanto’s Round-Up. “It kills legal crops on the Ecuadorean side and, apparently, also kills farmers….
Posted by atrain
Ari Paul has written for The American Prospect, In These Times, Tikkun, Z, Punk Planet, openDemocracy.net, Reason and other newspapers and magazines. He is also a reporter for The Chief-Leader, a New York weekly covering labor in the city.
Venezuela is in South America. So. Surprise! Hugo Chavez is American. What are they talking about “anti-American”? Silly rabbits.
Nice post. Gracias.
If Uribe makes Correa make a stink about this — Round up ready facts are going to make the headlines and those cancer rates are to get quoted all OVER the place. Who doesn’t know that that coca story is a cover?
Uribe you are SO busted.
Peru’s Garcia is quoted as saying that Cocaine leaves, oh NO GET THIS, ““can be consumed directly and elegantly in salad,” . . . adding that a chef had recently served several coca leaf-based dishes at the Government Palace.
LOL. I guess he and Hugo musta hit it off at a recent conference or something. Bienvenido Alan.
But Uribe, whose government insists the herbicide is innocuous, has shown no willingness to back down. He pointed out that after Colombia suspended fumigation along the border a year ago in response to Ecuadorean complaints, plantations of coca leaf, the base ingredient used to make cocaine, boomed. Uribe described the situation as a global security issue.
“The whole world will have to comprehend that Colombia cannot permit the FARC to continue filling the area with drugs,” he said of the border region, where leftist FARC guerrillas are active. “Because, with 10,200 hectares [25,205 acres], the FARC is capable of financing the destruction of the world.”
What a dumb mother fucker that guy is.
Seńores/as,
It seems that Mr. Uribe is not so clean of the drug business himself.
Pr. Uribe’s hidden past