Model…for new politicians?

Your Eyewitness recently stumbled over this Netflix series, “Narcos”, dramatising the life and times of Pablo Escobar – the Colombian young man who created one of the most lucrative businesses in the world today – cocaine!! Based on real-life events in Colombia and Miami from the seventies to the nineties – it’s news, but the producers concede liberties were taken on personal depictions to jazz up the story!! Americans gotta have their sex scenes, don’t they??
The other night, he sat through three episodes and was so struck by parallels to some recent events in our dear old Mudland that he’s committed to ploughing through the entire series. Pablo – we’ll call him this, OK?? – starts out dirt poor, growing up in rural Colombia. Which means he gotta hustle to make a living or remain a peon in subsistence agriculture. He starts out in 1979 smuggling electronic goods – like TVs and music systems – from Peru and learns the basic rule of the business: the officials at all levels who’re supposed to prevent smuggling, gotta be bribed!!
He’s introduced to the cocaine business from Peru – made from the leaves of the coca plant that had been cultivated since the Spanish era for its cocoa bean – by a fella named “Cockroach”! Village kids crush the leaves with their feet, and the cocaine is extracted through a series of simple processes involving passing it through gasoline, boiling the resulting paste in acid and finally baking it. From these “cocaine” labs – more like kitchens under tents in the Peruvian jungles – Pablo smuggled the cocaine across the border in the wheels of spare tyres of his trucks.
Pablo had contacts in Miami who’d collect packets of cocaine in the suitcases of airline crews or pellets swallowed by mules who flew up to Miami!! At that time, marijuana was the drug on the US’ radar – and the cocaine abused in the ghettoes, where there was addiction, was ignored by the authorities. Pablo transferred his production to Medellín – where he lived in Colombia – and cranked up production and delivery with his own planes. Within a few years US$ BILLIONS were being made. But significantly, cocaine spread into the white suburbs, and the Ronald Reagan administration – and the DEA – took notice of Pablo!!
Meanwhile, back in Medellín, Pablo brought all the drug dealers and shippers together to form the Medellín Cartel. He had so much money he couldn’t launder; he took to burying tonnes of cash in the ground. He also started to build houses and community centres and distributed money freely to the poor!! Finally, he decided to become President of Colombia by running for a Congressional Seat from his district!!
And wins the seat!! That’s as far as your Eyewitness got – but you see the parallels??

…for drug interdiction?
While Caricom – notably WITHOUT T&T! – wrings its hands about Trump’s new American approach to stop cocaine smuggling from South America into Miami via the Caribbean Sea, the US president broadened his field of activity to the Eastern Pacific!! Most of the heroin – also abused in the States – comes from the Asian “Golden Triangle”, where, not so incidentally, it spread after the Brits cultivated the poppy plant to extract opium to exchange in China for tea!! What goes around comes around!!
Last Tuesday, two persons were killed on a drug boat by a US Navy warship, and on Wed another 3 were sent to Davy Jones’ locker!! From this operational expansion we can expect that Trump’s gonna continue turning the screws on Mad Maduro – as his covert CIA field agents prepare for an early transition to a new, more democratic regime.
Mad Maduro continues bluffing that Venezuela can defeat the US forces!! Never the day canoe can bore punt!!

…on drug info
It’s a positive development that former Natural Resources Minister Raphael Trotman contradicted the former Guyana Gold Board Head to confirm that Sanction Man’s name was cited by the FBI as involved in gold smuggling between 2015 and 2020!!
Supports full investigation!!