Aohell

MANUEL NORIEGA

Darfur in South America

The worst refugee crisis outside of Africa is Colombia, where forty years of constant civil war and narcotrafficking has displaced millions of people from the interior to coastal towns. Indegenous people and Afro-Colombians, the people on the lowest end of the social ladder, are the ones hardest hit, of course. More than 3 million of them are looking for new homes in crowded, unfriendly cities.

The refugees take fire from police, paramilitaries, and leftist rebels, either as targets of violence or as bystanders in the general melee that passes for Colombia. In an economy where the narcotics trade is king, they have no other option but to bow down and accept their fate. Colombia's got the world's highest murder rate with many of the fallen drawn from poor people who tried to stand up to the drug dealers.

To help alleviate the situation, the Colombian government is paying off the paramilitaries and leftists with massive benefits packages. Most of these retired soldiers become full-time civilian drug dealers. The poor of Colombia wonder how in the world this is supposed to benefit them.

Guinea-Bisseau Next Narcostate?

Guinea-Bisseau isn't having much luck these days. Its civil war is over, but it's drug traffickers doing all the rebuilding.

It's got lots of tiny, uninhabited islands, a relatively small population, and extreme poverty. Add to those assets a stretegic location in between South America and Europe, and you got prime real estate for up-and-coming cocaine smugglers. Guinea-Bisseau can't even keep its own population policed, so demands from Europe and the US to clean up the uninhabited islands aren't going to go very far in that nation. Even if those demands came along with cash grants, corruption in Guinea-Bisseau's economy would probably divert a big chunk of that money to hands not originally intended to receive it.

The drug dealers are already paying for the army to provide security for drug shipments. The army has already denied this, so you know it's gotta be true. The justice system is in great shape, and I mean that most sarcastically: there aren't any prisons in the nation, so anyone convicted of any crime - any crime - serves at most one year in detention before release. Police units claim to destroy captured drugs, but there is no independent confirmation those supposedly destroyed drugs actually met their reported fate. These aren't tiny packages, either. The latest collapse in the chain of custody involved 674 kilos of cocaine, about $39 million worth at current prices.

The only big infusions of cash into Guinea-Bisseau are from the drug dealers. They're effectively buying a nation to serve their needs.

Watch out.