Word: opium
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...many others, the federal forces are seen as an invading force, come to disrupt a local way of life. The resentment is particularly strong in the mountain communities close to generations-old marijuana and opium fields. Here soldiers are insultingly branded "guachos," a slang term once used to describe Indians who served as messengers. "The soldiers are abusive and rude," complains Dolores Gamboa, 42, in the ramshackle mountain village of Santiago de los Caballeros. "But most of all they are dangerous." She proudly shows off a bush of opium poppies in her garden, which she says she planted for decorative...
...Sinaloa is a crucial battleground in President Felipe Calderon's war on drug cartels - a campaign that the Bush Administration seeks to back with $1.4 billion in cash and equipment. It is in Sinaloa's arid mountains that Mexico's drug trade was born, with peasant farmers first growing opium poppies - the raw ingredient for heroin - back in the 1940s. These pioneers developed violent organized crime structures that later took over the business of supplying marijuana, cocaine and then crystal meth to hungry American consumers - a market worth an estimated $30 billion to the Mexican crime families...
...farmers carefully scraping opium sap from their ripened poppies near the lush bank of the Helmand River are counted as a success story by Major Mike Shervington. They may be feeding the global drug trade, but at least they're here. Most locals had fled the village of Kajaki Olya when British forces took on the Taliban in 2006, and today their orchards, spilling with grapes, pomegranates, almonds and apricots lie untended. But the farmers have lately trickled back to tend crops of poppy and wheat - the wheat will feed their families, the opium will provide their income...
...take a stronger leadership role. He gives Raziq money, flour and oil to pass out to the villagers that have returned. Today, he has asked Raziq to convene a shura, or meeting, with the village elders. En route to the gathering, Shervington encounters another farmer tending to his opium harvest. "Last time you brought us shoes as gifts and it made big problems for us," Ghulam Madin tells the major. "The Taliban came and took them away. We had to promise not to take anything from the British forces. This time if we take the gifts, the Taliban will finish...
...military leadership that the cause of the unrest was that political education had been ignored. In the months and years that followed, the government created new textbooks that emphasized both the glories of Chinese culture and the century of humiliation at the hands of foreigners that began with the Opium War in 1839. That patriotic education extended beyond schools to include television, film and the news media. "Whenever there's a crisis, the same narrative of Chinese history emerges," says William Callahan, an expert on Chinese nationalism at the University of Manchester in the U.K. "Not just in the official...