El Ecuadorable, as usual, ain’t mincin’ no words…
Translation mine.For those who think he’s just theorizing wildly and doesn’t know what the fuck he’s on about, take a look at what Otto’s dug up on the way the anti-drug war is progressing in Bolivia. Evo decided to take matters in his own hands and turf out the DEA, and now Bolivia is doing a better job of fighting cocaine production on its own than it did when the US was running the show! Meanwhile, that nice, co-operative Colombia? The one that still plays ball with the Yanks? Producing and exporting more coke than ever. (More dead people, too.) Yeah, figger THAT one out. And try not to break yer head.The President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, assured on Saturday that his country will absolutely not lose anything with the departure of the US military from the anti-drug airbase at Manta.In his weekly radio address, Correa said that of 81 recent murders in Manta, eight were common crimes, and the rest were fundamentally linked to narcotrafficking. The Ecuadorian leader recently told the United States that he had decided not to renew their 1999 concession to use the fishing port of Manta to intercept drug-trafficking flights.Washington announced that in response to the decision, it would withdraw its forces, but warned that its retreat from Ecuador would leave a hole in the fight against narcotrafficking. “We will lose absolutely nothing when they leave the US base at Manta. Some have said that we’ll have a resurgence of drug trafficking. These are farces that we’ve lived through,” said Correa.Correa questioned what was really going on at the US centre of operations at Manta: “They were controlling the rest of America, but in Manta there was more drug trafficking and more deaths and crimes related to drug trafficking than ever. What a paradox!” He insists that “in Manta, the city where there’s a North American base to control narcotrafficking, there are more deaths, due to the War on Drugs.”
