BBC Mundo.com
Una colección de reportajes especiales de la BBC Mundo sobre el impacto socioeconómico y cultural del narcotráfico en México. Con fotos, videos, dibujos y textos. No se lo pierda.
The April 2004 issue of France's
reference "geography and geopolitics journal" is dedicated
to the geopolitics of illicit drugs. With papers by P.-A.
Chouvy & L. Laniel (issue editors), and L. Astorga,
P. Chassagne, P. Gootenberg, A. Labrousse, D. Mansfield, G.
Muti, L.
Laniel & P. Perez.
The June issue of the Journal
of the European association of libraries and information services
on alcohol and other drugs (Elisad) contains the first ever
review of DrugSTRAT, and much more.
Welcome to DrugSTRAT's
"Images" page with graphic resources about illicit
drugs and drug law enforcement (and more). A good photograph
or sketch often tells more than a long text, and so from here
you can access both DrugSTRAT's
own online exhibitions and, whenever
possible,
links to great material available elsewhere. More contents will be added in the future, so
watch this space, visit DrugSTRAT
again soon, and don't forget to vote (in the little orange-colour
box at the bottom of every page).
Online
exhibitions
N°34. México, D.F., 2012
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N°33. Varia, La Vega, Tenjo, Zipaquirá, Colombia
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N°32. Varia, Bogotá y Medellín, Colombia
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N°31. Bogotá, Fuegos Artificiales, Colombia
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N°30. Bogotá Skyline, Nightime, Colombia
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N°29. Bogotá Skyline, Daytime, Colombia
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N°28. El Valle, Chocó, Colombia
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N°27. Playas del Chocó, Colombia
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N°26. Poporos and other drug-related masterpieces at the Gold Museum, Bogota
Poporos y otro objetos maestros ligados a las drogas en el Museo del Oro de Bogotá
Poporos et autres chefs-d'œuvre liés à la drogue au Musée de l'Or de Bogota
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N°25. Kerala, India
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N°24. Monstros de Portugal
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N°23. Palácio Fronteira, Lisboa
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N°22. Bogotá, 2004
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N°21. Insurgentes con Yucatán
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N°20. Tepotzotlán, Edomex
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N°19. Ciudad
de México
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N°18. Cochabamba,
etc.
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N°17. Santa
Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia
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N°16. Celebrating
gas & oil nationalization in La Paz, 1st May 2006
Celebrando la nacionalización de
los hidrocarburos en La Paz, 1° de Mayo de 2006
Célébrations de la nationalisation des
hydrocarbures à La
Paz, 1er mai 2006
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N°15. Harvesting
Coca in Yungas de La Paz
Cosecha de la coca en los Yungas
de La Paz
Récolte de la coca, Yungas de La Paz
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N°14. Wachus,
Yungas de La Paz
Wachus, Yungas de La
Paz
Wachus, Yungas de
La Paz
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N°13. Coca
Landscapes, Yungas de La Paz
Paisajes de coca, Yungas de La
Paz
Paysages de la coca, Yungas de La Paz
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N°12. Road
to Yungas de La Paz,
Bolivia Carretera
a los Yungas de La Paz
Route des Yungas de La Paz
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N°11. The
ADEPCOCA market at Villa Fátima, La Paz
El mercado de ADEPCOCA en Villa
Fátima, La Paz
Le marché d'ADEPCOCA à Villa
Fátima, La Paz
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N°10. Drying
coca near Eterazama, Chapare
Secado de la coca cerca de Eterazama,
Chapare
Séchage de la coca près
d'Eterazama, Chapare
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N°9. The
Coca Market at Sacaba, Cochabamba
El mercado de la coca de Sacaba, Cochabamba
Le marché de la coca de Sacaba,
Cochabamba
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N°8. Coca
in Chipiriri, Chapare, Bolivia
Coca en Chipiriri, Chapare, Bolivia
Coca à Chipiriri, Chapare, Bolivie
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N°7. Bolivian
Kids
Niños de Bolivia
Enfants de Bolivie
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N°6.
La Paz, Bolivia,
seventeen pics
La Paz, Bolivia, diecisiete imágenes
La Paz, Bolivie, dix-sept photos
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N°5. Making
Ypadu in Lima with Anthony Henman
Preparando ypadu en Lima con Anthony
Henman
Préparation de l'ypadu à Lima avec Anthony
Henman
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N°4.
Cannabis in
Morocco Cannabis en Marruecos Cannabis
au Maroc
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N°3.
Coca in Peru
Coca en Perú Coca
au Pérou
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In early April 2005, I was fortunate
enough to attend a major 4-day conference titled "Una
semana de paz con la coca" (a week of peace with
coca) organised by the Peruvian NGO Comunidad
Tawantinsuyu at the Universidad
Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru's largest public
university (my trip was funded by INHES,
where I work as a researcher). The conference gathered together
some of the world's top experts in coca and coca legislation
matters, and came complete with a cycle of movies and documentary
about the sacred leaf. Representatives of Peruvian and Bolivian
coca-growers' sindicatos (trade unions) were also in
attendance and some of them addressed the conference. At
the same time in Lima, there was a convention
of some of Peru's most important cocalero unions, which
I also had a chance to attend (and even speak at). There, Pien
Metaal of the TNI
and Anthony Henman (author of the classic Mama Coca)
suggested I talked to Genaro Cahuana, one of the leaders of
the Federación Provincial de Campesinos de La Convención,
Lares y Yanatile (FEPCACYL) sindicato, to ask
him whether he would agree to my visiting the FEPCACYL headquarters
in Quillabamba, help me take photographs of coca fields and
talk to local "grassroots" cocaleros. Genaro
kindly agreed, and so I flew to Cuzco and, after visiting some
archeological jewels (see Sites of Peru,
below), I undertook the 8-hour journey by bus to Quillabamba.
Quillabamba is the main town of La Convención valley,
which is a large, traditional, coca-growing centre. Coca has
been grown there since the Inca empire, when La Convención
valley was a coca-growing colony that supplied the imperial
capital, Cuzco. At the FEPCACYL headquarters, I met Miriam Valenzuela,
who very kindly took me around the fields and introduced me
to her family, who have been growing coca in La Convención
for generations. So, although I took the pictures shown here,
they are really the result of an international team effort.
I hope you enjoy them!
Machu Picchu es un viaje a la serenidad
del alma, a la eterna fusión con el cosmos, allí sentimos
nuestra fragilidad. Es una de las maravillas más grandes de
Sudamérica. Un reposar de mariposas en el epicentro del gran
círculo de la vida. Otro milagro más. Pablo Neruda (Alturas de Machu Picchu)
There are no drugs appearing
on these three series of photographs. But the breathtaking landscapes
and architectural jewels captured in them were contemplated
and built by people who were making regular use of one of the
most fascinating plant on the planet—coca. Coca cultivation in Peru will be illustrated in a
forthcoming DrugSTRAT
exhibition (see Coca in Peru above),
to which these series are a prelude. They are also a tribute
to the great coca civilisations of the Andes. I hope you enjoy
them.
N°1.
A Kid's Eye
View of Aerial Spraying
Las fumigaciones en la mirada de los niños
Les épandages aériens vus
par les enfants
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Although these sketches speak
for themselves—– and pretty loudly – a little
background information is in order. DrugSTRAT
obtained these drawings from one of the researchers of the
Ecuadoran NGO Acción
Ecológica who in June 2001 carried out an epidemiological
survey (.doc
version; .pdf
version; summary)
to study the effects of the aerial spraying of coca crops
carried
out in nearby Colombia on Ecuadoran territory. The study was
commissioned by the office of the Ecuadoran ombudsman
(Defensoría
del pueblo). The drawings presented here are by primary-school
kids living in the Sucumbios Province of northern Ecuador, which
borders Colombia's southern Putumayo Department. Sucumbios and
Putumayo are in the Amazon. The Putumayo is Colombia's largest
coca-producer area and is subject to a government aerial spraying
campaign of drug crops under Plan Colombia. Spraying drug crops
with herbicide from the air is a U.S. idea, and the U.S. government
subsidises Plan Colombia heavily. The U.S.-based firm Dyncorp
is paid by the Colombian government to implement the spraying
(more on Dyncorp in Sami
Makki's book). Dyncorp also operates in Ecuador (not
in aerial spraying) on the Manta military air-base, which the
Pentagon rents from the Ecuadoran government as part of its
Forward Operating Locations (FOL) strategy. The active ingredient in the
herbicidal mixture sprayed on illicit drug crops (and whatever
surrounds them) in Colombia is glyphosate.
The base of the mixture used in Colombia is retailed in diluted
solution under the brandname Roundup
Ultra by the multinational firm Monsanto.
Roundup Ultra is a mixture of glyphosate, water, and
POEA, a chemical that boost
the effects of glyphosate. The Colombia
mixture is much more concentrated than the retail version and
it contains other chemicals, namely
Cosmoflux 411F and Cosmo -in- D, which make it even more potent. Monsanto was one
of the main suppliers of "Agent Orange", the defoliant
used by the U.S. military—with assistance from Dyncorp—in
Vietnam between 1961 and 1972. On January 26, 2007, a French court in
Lyon sentenced Monsanto to a €15,000 fine for misleadingly
representing the effects of Roundup (and therefore glyphosate)
as harmless for the environment (see French newspaper report
of the court decision here). The
children depict the harmful effects of these chemicals on plants,
fish, birds, domestic animals, food crops, and human beings (Acción Ecológica's
survey describes them more scientifically), so we won't go over
that here. But,
you may wonder, why do Ecuadoran kids suffer from the fallout
of a campaign carried out in Colombia? There are two answers.
The first one is that the sprayer planes sometimes (inadvertently?)
cross the border, usually materialised by a river, and dump
their poisonous cargo on Ecuadoran territory. The second answer
is that even when the planes do spray within Colombia, large
quantities of the mixture may still land in Ecuador carried
by the wind. In
2001, a group of Ecuadoran farmers sued Dyncorp in the
United States for its use of Roundup Ultra on Ecuadoran
territory. The lawsuit, which accuses Dyncorp of crime
against humanity, is still underway in mid-2004. If
what the drawings show is the result of "merely" occasional
direct spraying and more regular indirect fallout, one
can only imagine what effects these chemicals have when
sprayed directly and repeatedly on Colombian farmers
and their kids, as is the case at the time of writing
in August 2004.
During the first six months of 2001 alone nearly 254 000
litres of the mixture described above was sprayed
over Colombia (and Ecuador), according to Acción Ecológica.
How many more thousand gallons of this toxic stuff have been
dumped on the Amazonian forest since then is anyone's guess.
If the French saying that truth comes out of the mouthes
of children is correct, then these drawings make up the strongest
possible indictment of aerial spraying of drug crops, and of
Plan Colombia. (Thanks to Olga González of GAC)
Related DrugSTRAT
resources:
Medio
de Contención: the 2005
presidential campaign of Evo Morales Ayma as experienced by the
cocaleros (coca growers) of the Chapare region of Bolivia. The
website of the award-winning documentary, Hartos
Evos aquí hay, by Manuel Ruiz Montealegre
and Héctor
Ulloque Franco.
Jeremybigwood.net
Among the many
superb graphic and written resources available on the website
of American photojournalist and scientist Jeremy Bigwood are
stunning slideshows on two fronts of the U.S.-sponsored drug
war in Latin America: Putumayo and Chapare.You can see them
on Bigwood's site by clicking on the images below. You may also want
to look at his work on the civil war in El Salvador and read
his articles in English, Spanish and, in some cases, French
on various past and present US-Latin American issues (many drug-related).
Jeremybigwoods.net
is definitely worth a thorough exploration.
Aerial
Fumigation in Colombia - Putumayo (February 2002). These
100-odd slides document the various phases of the aerial spraying
process in Colombia from the side of the "fumigators",
i.e. the pilots of the sprayer planes and the crews of the
US-supplied Huey helicopters (the model used in Vietnam) of the Policía
Nacional that protect them during missions. An indispensable complement to the
exhibition above. Evo
Morales and the bridge at Villa Tunari, Chapare (September
2000). This slideshow, with nearly 300 pics, takes us to the
Chapare, Bolivia's largest coca-growing region, at the height
of the protests organised by the coca growers' unions. The show
begins with pictures of Evo Morales, the well-know leader of
the cocalero movement and of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS)
party, which became Bolivia's main opposition
party at the general election of June 2002. Then
the show depicts the blockade and protests at
Villa Tunari (an important road hub in the Chapare)
by the cocaleros in order to fight the US-inspired
government policy of forced (manual) eradication
of coca plants. In total, the protests in Villa
Tunari and elsewhere in 2000 resulted in 10 dead
and 130 wounded among the cocaleros; 2 soldiers
killed; and 2 soldiers and 2 police officers "disappeared".
Although violent and at times dirty, the drug
war in Bolivia abides by some principles of democracy
and decency; for instance, unlike Colombia, poor
coca growers and their children are not
sprayed with toxic chemicals at the taxpayer's expense.
Related DrugSTRAT
resources:Drogues
et antidrogue en Colombie Les
cultures à usage illicite dans la région andine De
la géopolitique des drogues illicites Book
of the month Exhibitions