SPIRIT IN THE SKY

It was another gorgeous weekend here in lovely downtown Noho. It's rare to get two in row with such perfect weather. Around here you have to treasure these times because you know the dreary gray of November will arrive all too soon.

There was a balloon rally at the airport. I didn't dare go down there, I crewed for a balloon for many years and would have lost the whole weekend with that crowd, but I live close enough to watch from my own stoop and the sky was littered with flying machines all weekend. There were balloons and skydivers of course, and a whole squadron of helicopters. The ultralights were the surprise participants however. You don't usually see them at a rally and there had to be a least a dozen different ones.

I love to fly but you would not normally catch me on one of those flying lawnmowers; however, there was one that looked like a stealth bomber, it had no tail and it had a little bullet shaped fuselage. God knows how it stays in the air but I would have taken a ride in it had I been given the opportunity. Maybe I'll make it to the field next time I see it in the sky....

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THE BIG GUNS COME

Meanwhile, the War on Some Drugs and Users continues unabated. Troubling events are occurring in Boliva even as we speak. Thanks to Jules Siegel who sends this translation of an article - Drug War Crushes Bolivian Social Project- written for Por Esto!, the primary newspaper in the Yucatan, by my friend Maria Botey, correspondent and professor at the NarcoNews School of Authentic Journalism.

It's an all too typical story of a foreign government aided and abetted by our own DEA, committing human rights abuses against its populace in the name of the War. It seems the government has siezed a borax factory and imprisioned it's owners under the unsubstantiated pretext that they were diverting chemicals to cocaine labs.

This was a company that was actually diverting some of its profits into community projects that were recently cited by the United Nations as the world's second best poverty eradication program among twenty countries.

To quote Maria:

The plant's workers, who refuse to lose their source of employment, consider the sentence to be the result of a highly irregular prosecution organized by international competition (Chilean and American) acting with the complicity of the prosecuting attorney and other obscure Bolivian interests to take control of the continent's mineral reserves.

The Bolivian government encouraged by foreign investors (read that multi-national corporations), intends to take possession of the business. These actions are being funded by your US tax dollars under the umbrella of the War on Terror and Some Drugs.

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TO FIGHT TINY FARMS?

To underscore the futulity of the eradication campaign in Boliva, the AP files this report, War on drugs leaves poor Bolivian farmers hungry, desperate detailing the abject failure of our five year old program to eliminate the cultivation of coca leaf in that country. The prohibitionists tout the initial results of this campaign as a success story but as you can see, the effects were temporary:

They yanked out more than a billion plants. Bolivia went from supplying half of the United States' cocaine demand -- the crop brought an estimated $500 million into this country of eight million people each year -- to supplying very little. American diplomats called Plan Dignity their most successful anti-narcotics mission ever in South America.

But oranges, bananas, manioc root and other crops urged on peasant growers haven't proved profitable because few buyers come to these isolated regions, and farmers have begun drifting back to growing coca. Coca production in Bolivia is up 23 percent since 2001, the White House Drug Policy Office says.

They call this a success? Ironic that the US funded operation is called Plan Dignity. I doubt Hilaria Perez Prado, a mere campensina trying to eke out a living from the tortured earth and who was recently left for dead after being shot in the chest by soldiers would agree. She will never fully recover from her injuries. I imagine she's pretty indignant and rightly so.

Stanley Schrager, former director of the narcotics section at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, Has this to say of the indigenous population trying to survive this harsh environment:

''There is an idea out there -- I call it the myth of the innocent coca farmer -- that he is simply trying to put food on the table to feed his kids,'' Schrager said. ``But in reality he is at the beginning of a chain of events that ultimately leads to the drug trade and drug addiction in the United States, and thus bears some responsibility for the ruined lives which are the result of this addiction.''

I wonder when the last time was that Mr. Schrager, who probably never left the comforts of La Paz, wondered where he would get food to feed his family or water that wasn't tainted with herbicides? Has he ever walked or rode a donkey for hours to buy flour? How easy it is to judge the starving when your belly is full.

Last word of the day goes to Godofredo Reinicke, a human rights activist in the Chapare.

''It's easy to understand why people are growing violent. They're hungry''.

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COLLATERAL DAMAGE

These are the children of Chapare where this war is being waged. Do they look like the children of drug lords to you? --Me neither.

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