One of many wars being fought beneath the media radar is the war against the Colombian drug cartels. Evidently, that war is going fairly well judging by this report on Strategy Page:
Last year, cocaine production fell by 28 percent in Colombia. In addition, security forces seized and destroyed a record 200 tons of the stuff. The main causes for this decline are a drop in demand from the 17 million cocaine users world-wide. Another side-effect of the global recession. But the cocaine gangs are also being driven out of business by the security forces. Many are moving operations to Peru (where production was up 4 percent last year, to 302 tons) and Bolivia (up 9 percent to 113 tons). Last year, Peru and Bolivia together produced about as much cocaine as Colombia.
The president of Bolivia is a former coca farmer (although he only backs the traditional chewing of the coca leaves, which has a mild narcotic effect). In Peru, the most productive coca growing areas are controlled by Shining Path, a vicious leftist movement that was almost wiped out in the 1990s, but is now making a comeback via cocaine profits.
As more Colombian cocaine operations move to Peru and Bolivia, the ones remaining in Colombia come under greater pressure from the security forces, and a population glad to see the drug trade move somewhere else, or just disappear. The reason for the many recent defeats of the drug gangs and leftist rebels has been better trained and equipped military and police units.
Not only is the war going well but Colombians themselves are prospering despite the current economic climate:
The leftist rebel group FARC's allies in the United States and Europe have tried to paint the government as the bad guys in all this, but that has had no effect on Colombians, who are safer and more prosperous than they have been in decades. Violent deaths have declined sharply in the last six years, and the economy is booming. The global recession caused a less than one percent dip in GDP during the first quarter of the year, and that's apparently as bad as it's going to get.
Sounds like Columbia is both safer and more prosperous than most major cities in the U.S. It might be a nice place to which to flee from the economic devastation about to be visited upon our once prosperous land by people who think that the best way for a nation to heal our economic woes is to emulate third world countries by burying our woes under a mountain of taxes and debt.
RLC