They agree to "discuss" their beloved war but hell's gonna freeze over before they kick their addiction to murder, mayhem, militarization of LatAm societies (not to mention our own), funding fascists, mafia dons and death squads, spying on everybody, "scorched earth" policies toward peasant farmers (FIVE MILLION peasant farmers displaced from their lands by state terror in Colombia alone), Pentagon expansion of its "Southern Command," prison profiteering and trillions of dollars of illicit cash pouring through the pockets of U.S. banksters.
It's been too good, ya know?
My guess: This is a tit for tat on Cuba. The rest of the western hemisphere wanted to have Cuba at the Summit of the Americas, because the rest of the western hemisphere, and most of the world, recognizes Cuba's government as legitimate--but the U.S., whose LatAm policy is dictated by the Miami "welfare" Mafia, HATES Cuba and wants to rip it out of the Caribbean and send it to Mars (if only NASA would use its ever-shrinking budget more creatively). So-o-o-o, they told Santos (a rightwinger with the sensible idea that drugs should be legalized--a notion shared by everyone in LatAm except the big drug lords), he can have his "discussion" of legalizing drugs but only if Cuba is sent to Mars. So he said (thinking that the Mars idea is a couple of centuries off, due to technical difficulties) agreed. Cuba can sit this one out, while everybody else discusses legalization (some more sincerely than others--ahem). In any case, Cuba is the ONLY country on earth that has no U.S. "war on drugs" problem to discuss!
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"The United States will discuss drug legalization" BUT "there is no indication the U.S. position firmly against legalization has changed. 'We are ready to discuss the issue to express our opinion on why it is not the way to address the problem," said the winner of the Doublespeak Award for this year.
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On the other hand, if my thesis about Big Pharma having its patent ducks and other ducks in a row, with a marketing war plan to sell addictive or recreational drugs, at current illicit or even more inflated prices, this sop to LatAm, by the U.S., about "discussing" legalization (in exchange for Cuba being excluded), COULD be a "flag run up the pole" by a U.S. government that is ever devoted to big, transglobal, corporate war plans.
A new market! Whoopee! Could save capitalism! (--for a while anyway).
I've been watching this one for a while, and there are even deeper and more hidden aspects to this matter (LatAm opposition to the U.S. "war on drugs," especially Colombia's non-criminal rightwing promoting the idea). Hard to suss out, but I think one of the major hidden matters is Bush Junta criminal activity in Colombia in cahoots with their mafia don 'president of Colombia,' Alvaro Uribe. There are aspects of this that have been visible, to those paying attention (such as Obama administration/Leon Panetta/William Brownfield efforts to get witnesses against Uribe out of Colombia and out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors). Santos seems to be in quite a struggle for the soul of the rightwing party in Colombia, against Uribe, whose coddling by the U.S. means that he remains a political threat in Colombia.
Why have they been coddling Uribe? Likely because he knows too much about the Bushwhacks. What does he know? My guess: basically, that the Bush Junta turned the U.S. "war on drugs" on its head and was using it to consolidate the cocaine trade into fewer hands and to direct its trillion+ dollar revenue stream to certain beneficiaries (the Bush Cartel, the CIA, U.S. banksters). There is evidence, too, that the Bush Junta was actively aiding Uribe's vast, illegal spying operation (which drew up "hit lists" of trade unionists and other advocates of the poor, for elimination by the Colombian military and its paramilitary death squads, as well as spying on judges and prosecutors for blackmail purposes). The Bush Junta may also have been using Colombia to "train" death squads for use in Iraq and Afghanistan and to experiment with Pentagon/USAID programs for clearing areas of local leaders and community organizers and installing puppet local governments with allegiance to Rome.
So there's THAT--that the Obama administration feels obliged, for some reason, to protect Bush Jr, Rumsfeld, Cheney and others from investigation and prosecution. They VERY LIKELY committed war crimes in Colombia, in addition to their war crimes elsewhere. And I think that it is no accident that the Bushwhack-appointed U.S. ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, SECRETLY negotiated and SECRETLY signed (with Uribe) a U.S./Colombia military agreement (circa 2009-2010) that included "total diplomatic immunity" for all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. 'contractors' in Colombia--an agreement that was subsequently ruled illegal by the Colombian supreme court (on whom Uribe, with the help of the Bush Junta, was spying). (Lucky for Colombia that they have an honest and courageous supreme court. Wish we had one.)
Now then, consider the Obama administration's position with all of LatAm calling for legalization of drugs, led by the president of the U.S. client state of Colombia. Very dicey. One of Santos' chips may well be what Colombian authorities know about the Bush Junta.
The guessing game on this matter includes guessing what the U.S. (Obama/Panetta) position actually is, on legalizing drugs. Could be there's a Big Pharma motive. Could be people in this administration who actually believe in good government. Naw. Well, maybe. But their drone marketing and some other things speak BAD government, i.e., corporate ruler/war profiteer government. Granted, though, IF they ARE for legalizing drugs--or a few of them are--they have one helluva fascist police state establishment here, to defeat. And it doesn't seem likely that they would take that on, when they've been such wusses on every other entrenched interest from the insurance companies to war toys.
I've mentioned Panetta a number of times and I think I should explain that Panetta was a member of Bush SR's "Iraq Study Group" (old CIA, very important to understanding Rumsfeld's resignation in 2006) and that Panetta's first visible action as Obama's CIA Director was to go to Bogota, amidst rumors of a Uribe coup to stay in power. It sure looks like he yanked Uribe off the stage, but landed him on a silk cushion, and then vetted and approved Santos. Uribe had been warmongering against Venezuela, as well as running Colombia like a criminal enterprise (funded with $7 BILLION in military aid alone, from the Bush Junta, i.e., U.S. taxpayers). Things that can be implied: The U.S. wasn't ready for Oil War II: South America (quite yet?), and the Colombian prosecutors who were on Uribe's tail were stumbling over U.S. (Bush Junta) collusion on Uribe's many crimes. Uribe needed to be made less visible (for now?).
Also, U.S. corps may want things to settle down in Colombia, now that five million peasants have been driven from their land and the labor unions have been taught a bloody lesson as well. "Free trade for the rich" requires a veneer of happy slave laborers who can vote without being followed into the polling booth by members of a rightwing death squad and who have forgotten that the political spectrum has a leftist strand. They get to choose between rightwing government and rightwing criminal government. That makes things look kind of 'democratic' and Exxon Mobil's, Chiquita International's, Drummond Coal's, Occidental Petroleum's, Monsanto's and others' democracy-sensitive execs can breathe more freely in that context and not be worried about class action lawsuits by the relatives of murdered trade unionists here or elsewhere, or bad publicity or whatever.
I maintain a stance of skepticism about Santos--despite some indications that he is better than Uribe (better, at least, than a Bush Cartel-connected mafia don as president). And I think that we must understand how tightly the U.S. and Colombia are twined together and I think this means that Santos would be unlikely to propose drug legalization if the U.S. government didn't have some interest in this discussion going forward. It MAY BE that Santos is more independent than that. And it MAY also be that Santos has devised a strategy for legalizing drugs in close cooperation with the leaders of the many leftist governments in the region, as a SOVEREIGNTY issue which is shared by both the left and the (non-criminal) right in LatAm, part of the strategy being that the right would propose it. (I mean, you would expect, say, Evo Morales/Bolivia, or Rafael Correa/Ecuador, or even Dilma Rousseff/Brazil, or Chavez/Venezuela, to propose drug legalization, not the rightwing presidents of Colombia and Guatemala.) Santos may have engaged in this cooperative strategy to legalize drugs on his own, against U.S. dictates. Possible. That's all I can say about it, at this point. It's possible.
I will say this. If Santos and the others succeed in lifting the curse of the U.S. "war on drugs" from Latin America--for whatever reason, even if it is a Big Pharma benefit dance in "free trade for the rich" countries--it will be a GOOD THING. A very good thing. Millions are dead from this "war," if we count them all up. Many more millions have had their lives ruined. TRILLIONS of dollars have been misspent, down the drainhole of war profiteers. And our own country lay in ruin as well, by half at least caused by the "war on drugs." It is a bad, BAD, failed war, with untold victims. Even if we have to deal with Big Pharma messing with marijuana DNA and monopolizing this herb, and other such consequences, it is better than the blood-soaked oppression of this "war." Not. One. More. Person. Should. Die. From. This. Goddamned. "War."
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