FTAC–A Note: Iron River, Narcotics, and the Ecology of Latin American Mass Migration

11 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Canada, Caribbean Basin, Central America, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, United States of America

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arms smuggling, iron river, Latin America, mass migration, narcotics, North America, transnational crime, violence

This post continues my practice of trying to make accessible and somewhat permanent useful observation composed in passing elsewhere online or in correspondence. In short Twitterese, I’ve diagrammed the argument as, approximately (NA=North America; LA=Latin America), “NA cash->LA narcotics->NA; NA arms->LA cartel & gang violence->migrants->NA.” Close enough. “NA”=”North America”, of course, and “LA”=”Latin America”.

Here follows an online comment already made plus short associated and supporting reference.

Our narcotics habits and black market enthusiasms fuel the cartels and gangs of Latin America, and those are not known for healthy governing practices. The abused, impoverished, terrified, and threatened migrate to El Norte where they believe there will be at least better security, order, and rule-of-law.

We Americans (and Canadians) are not only a powerful market for everything that may be obtained only through smuggling, we’ve had a business going in running arms into Latin America (along with all the outlaws of the world). Term for exploration on the web: “America, arms, iron river”. I have collected articles on the subject dating back to 2007.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mexico-guns/iron-river-of-guns-flows-from-u-s-to-mexico-idUSN1223853620070713 (2007)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opinion/international-world/guns-mexico.html (2021)

The sad truth about my Fellow Americans is that we’re greedy as sin, –or desperate and both–and we pay a high price for it x addictions x homelessness x social failures x social pathologies. Neither our Far Out Left nor Rabid Reactionary Right seems to have a clue as regards the full ecology of corruption, crime, narcotics, trafficked labor (2nd largest abuse of all), and above all our most prized possession: money–would that our ethics, principles, values, and general American spirit modify the national appetite for good times and loot.

Cheatham, Amelia and Diana Roy. “Central America’s Turbulent Northern Triangle.” Council on Foreign Relations, last updated June 22, 2022.

Gaynor, Tim. “‘Iron river of guns’ flows from U.S. to Mexico.” Reuters, July 13, 2007.

Grillo, Loan. “Slow the Iron River of Guns to Mexico.” The New York Times, February 26, 2021.

Kilmer, Beau. “Americans’ Spending on Illicit Drugs Nears $150 Billion Annually; Appears to Rival What is Spent on Alcohol.” RAND, August 20, 2019.

Krauze, Leon. “Biden must stop the ‘iron river’ of U.S. weapons devastating Mexico.” The Washington Post, March 10, 2021.

Llana, Sara Miller. “US guns fuel Mexico drug war? The politics behind the issue.” The Christian Science Monitor, June 15, 2011.

Mallene, Laura. “Europeans Spend $30 Billion A Year On Drugs.” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, November 28, 2019.

Martinez, Gabriela. “The flow of guns from the U.S. to Mexico is getting lost in the border debate.” PBS New Hour, June 12, 2019, updated July 2, 2019.

Mathema, Silva. “They Are (Still) Refugees: People Continue to Flee Violence in Latin American Countries.” Center for American Progress, June 1, 2018.

Morris, Nathaniel and Gema Kloppe-Santamaria. “The Many, Varied Violences Behind the Central American Exodus.” IPI Global Observatory, November 15, 2022.

Oppenheim, James S. “An American Report Card.” BackChannels, October 4, 2019.

Pendergast, Curt. “Arizona guns quietly smuggled across border as bullets fly in Mexico.” Tuscon Arizona Daily Star, November 25, 2019, updated June 26, 2020.

Rubio, Yury. “Twenty-first Century Slavery: How to Stop Human Trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico Border.” The International Affairs Review, December 15, 2022.

Seelke, Clare Ribando. “Trafficking in Persons in Latin America and the Caribbean.” PDF. Congressional Research Service, October 13, 2016.

VICE News. “How the US Fuels Mexican Cartel Violence.” Video. YouTube, August 22, 2021.

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Taliban: Another Russian Wrecking Crew

10 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Afghanistan, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Afghanistan, narcotics, Russia & Taliban, Taliban, Taliban TCO

When something stinks, people flee from it.

With arms and materiel supplied by Russian smugglers — and now with the same captured from overrun government forces — the Taliban have been picking up all the chips left abandoned by NATO’s general withdrawal. Game over. Fold up the board. Hand it to the world’s foremost advocate for Rule by the Ruthless Rich. Whether in weeks, months, or years, the Taliban too will have cleared themselves from the field — they are destroying themselves by the hour and don’t know it — and there will remain Afghanistan, bereft of order, debased, depopulated, disillusioned, disorganized, traumatized — rather like Syria, also deeply beholden to Moscow and Tehran for all of the miseries dispensed by the Tyrant in Damascus.

There is another side to Taliban mayhem and misrule.

Call it a new plant.

Narcoticus Talibanus

KABUL—The escalating war in Afghanistan is directly linked to the multibillion-dollar global trade in illicit drugs, as the Taliban seek to expand and consolidate control over the production and trafficking of narcotics and to diversify from heroin into methamphetamine, in what an Afghan counternarcotics officer called “a coming catastrophe for the world.”
Afghan and international counternarcotics experts said violence in Afghanistan has spiked in recent years alongside increased cultivation of opium poppies, used for heroin production, and ephedra, a plant that grows wild across the country and is being used to make methamphetamine.
O’Donnell, Lynne. “The Taliban Are Breaking Bad: Meth is even more profitable than heroin–and is turbocharging the insurgency.” Foreign Policy, July 19, 2021.

And you thought the Taliban were bringing Islam to Afghanistan.

As listed by Hanif Suvizada in an article in The Conversation (Dec. 8, 2020), here is how the Taliban makes its money — drugs, protection (“mining”), other extortion plus taxation, skimming from “charitable donations” to finance terrorism, export that might be legitimate if it didn’t include poppy and looted minerals.

Mashal, Mujib and Michael Schwirtz. “How Russia Built a Channel to the Taliban, Once an Enemy”. The New York Times, July 13, 2020.

Noorzai, Roshan, Ezel Sahinkaya, Rahim Gul Sarwan. “Afghan Lawmakers: Russian Support to Taliban No Secret.” VOA, July 3, 2020.

O’Donnell, Lynne. “The Taliban Are Breaking Bad: Meth is even more profitable than heroin–and is turbocharging the insurgency.” Foreign Policy, July 19, 2021.

Reuters. “Russia says boosts arms supplies to Central Asia amid Afghan conflict.” August 5, 2021. Open query: with corruption practically a given worldwide, what part will make it to the Taliban?

Ross, Jamie. “Trump Appears to Defend Russia Arming the Taliban Against U.S. Troops.” Daily Beast, July 29, 2020 .

Rowlatt, Justin. “Russia ‘arming the Afghan Taliban’, says US.” BBC News, March 23, 2018.

Savage, Charlie, Eric Schmitt, Michael Schwirtz. Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.” The New York Times, July 29, 2020.

Sufizada, Hanif. “The Taliban are megarich — here’s where they get the money they use to wage war in Afghanistan.” The Conversation, December 8, 2020.

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