The South may yet rise above us

A new star is rising in América’s quest for more honest and effective drug policy. His name is Néstor Kirchner, he is president of Argentina, and he has recently fired a score of top military officials in a narco-scandal rocking the country. He has recently confronted white-collar narco-traffickers in the airline business, moved the threads to widen the investigation to Spaniard involvement in drug trafficking. And he has now taken the Armed Forces out of drug enforcement tasks placing that work back under civilian command. These bold actions of the past two weeks have been so far ignored by the English-language Commercial Media: they are loathe to give the man of the hour his fifteen minutes, because the drug policies of a hemisphere are at stake.

Yesterday, Kirchner met, in Montevideo, with his superstar counterparts, Lula da Silva of Brazil and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, during the inauguration festivities for Uruguay’s new president Tabaré Vásquez, who now becomes the fourth center-left spoke to the rising Southern Cone. Less flashy than his presidential neighbors in Caracas and Brasilia, unsupported by Washington unlike his obedient counterparts in Bogota and Santiago, Kirchner is getting the job done not with mere words, but with deeds.

If Kirchner and other leaders of South American countries are going to take on the U.S. CIA narcotics industry, they are going to need to stick together and prepare for some heavy duty shit. We still have Colombia in our control, and that is a big problem for the other countries - particularly for Venezuela, at least as things stand now.

Where are the laurels and attaboys from Washington for a Latin American president who finally and unequivocally fights against narco-trafficking at its highest points on the pyramid scheme? Where are the glowing profiles by the international press of South America’s most daring drug-warrior head of state? Could it be that Kirchner’s emerging drug policy – one that responds decisively to real life events and not to some tired ideological script, and that goes after the big sharks rather than the small fry – is, itself, such a grand threat to the status quo of the drug war and its money-laundering business interests that it is one of those matters of which cannot be spoken?

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....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.