Word: peru
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...drugs: We saw what happened in Peru - the missionaries shot down. Are you comfortable with the U.S. military's role and the CIA's role in South America in the war on drugs...
Wars invariably claim innocent casualties, and the war on drugs is no exception. The tragic shooting down by Peru's air force of a Cessna bearing U.S. missionaries was a classic case of what the military might call "collateral damage" - innocents killed in the course of a military operation gone awry...
...Viewed in isolation, Peru had been one of the success stories of the war on drugs during the 1990s, when the cultivation of coca, the source of cocaine, was reduced by half with strong policing and incentive programs to wean peasant farmers onto alternative crops. But that didn't cut the supply to the U.S. market - the drug cartels simply shifted their agribusiness across the border into neighboring Colombia, where the long-running civil war created a healthy environment for an industry on the wrong side...
...effort to target the narcotic trade in areas under guerrilla control. According to the U.N. Drug Control Project, the early effects of Plan Colombia have already raised prices for coca in the region, and - wouldn't you know it - there are already signs of new cultivation under way in Peru. Of course, the U.S. is ready for that, having trained Peruvian navy personnel at a secret base in the Amazon to go after jungle farmers and intercept boats bound for Colombia and Brazil...
...basic paradox of the war on drugs: The more government agencies succeed in choking the supply, the higher the price it fetches and the greater the incentive for producers, traffickers and dealers to take the risk of bringing it to market. Even once the cause of the Peru missionary tragedy is established and steps are taken to prevent a recurrence, the drug war will remain unwinnable until the U.S. appetite for narcotics is suppressed. And that's something no amount of AWACS patrols or special forces training or mandatory minimum prison sentences can achieve...