Thank You, Latin American Leaders

I haven’t taken a blow to the head and embraced socialism or anything like that. But Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez have earned some thanks from freedom-loving individuals.

The reasons are spelled out in Why the US is losing its war on cocaine. Selected excerpts from the piece (which isn’t too long and is well worth reading for other information that’s tangential to my purpose):

The immensely costly "war on drugs" in Latin America is slowly collapsing like a Zeppelin with a puncture. The long-forecast failure for strategies which involve police and military in forcibly suppressing narcotics ... is now pitifully evident in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries of the Western hemisphere.

The estimated $25bn ... that Washington has spent trying to control narcotics over the past 15 years in Latin America seems to have been wasted. ....

Here, indigent Bolivian President Evo Morales, once a poverty-stricken llama herder and itinerant trumpet player, is resisting pressure from the Bush government to eradicate coca bushes by fire and sword.

The Bolivian leader is no lover of cocaine and his policies are summed up in the slogan "no to drugs, no to cocaine". ....

But he refuses to ban the consumption of coca leaves, which country people regard as gifts from heaven: the indigenous peoples have been chewing them for thousands of years as an aid to survival at 14,000 feet in the perishingly bleak highlands of the Andes which surround this city. ....

[T]he determination of Morales, the leader of a poor country of nine million people, is only a tiny part of Latin America's rejection of the "war on drugs". In a Venezuela enriched by high prices for its oil exports, President Hugo Chavez ... is placing strict controls on his country's co-operation with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). ....

Now a third Latin American leader, the newly elected President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, has announced that his country will ignore US instructions in the "war on drugs". He has announced that he will no longer allow US forces to occupy a large base at the Pacific port of Manta ...

It is terrific to see them taking a stand against the USSA empire and the hysterical, hypocritical drug war. While it isn’t surprising that Hugo Chávez has taken this stance, I would think it was a rather more complicated decision for Morales and Correa. There’s still a long way to go before this story plays out, but it is encouraging to me that a few individuals somewhere are firmly saying “No” to Bush and Co. I hope they continue to stand firm as the pressure ratchets up, and moreover, that others – abroad as well as within the USSA – start developing the spines these men have. They may go down as a result of this policy shift, but at least they’ll go down knowing they stood up against the world’s biggest bully.