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Blogs Are Jesus’ Version of Anal Sex for the Mind

This is the super deluxe anal version of the blog round-up!

1. Why We Should Boycott the Olympics Over Tibet (by the way, I said we should boycott the Olympics over Darfur about a year ago, but no one listened)

2. This is Greg. Greg blogs at PBH. Greg found himself on Drunken Step Father recently. Greg is now a minor internet celebrity:

3. If you’ve been brave enough to keep your eyes open while the financial world squirts its various toxic semens directly into your toxins, well, you’re god damn braver than me. Point is, you shouldn’t be listening to anybody: keep your money in a big potato sack at home, and if anyone ever questions you about your love for delicious potatoes, just tell them you got a sweet stock tip that their future market is rising in relation to the oncoming apocalypse. But anyway, check out these helpful tips on our crumbling financial world: Common misconceptions about the Federal Reserve, Congress Passes New Budget, Hold Onto Your Wallets, and Memo to Voters: None of the Candidates Will Lower Your Gas Prices; A Glance At Clinton’s “Plan”.

4. Double Dousies from the Seminal! First off, props for mental images of elderly abuse in ‘When Obama faces off against John McCain, one on one, he will smack the old man down.’ I was personally thinking of Barack Obama as Pedro Martinez and John Walnut-Face McCain as Don Equally Fucked Up Face Zimmer a la 2004 AL Championship Series:

And secondly, Veteran FBI interrogator Jack Cloonan: “If you want to recruit young jihadis….torture them.:

“If you want to recruit young jihadis….torture them; admit that you tortured them because when they’re ultimately convicted and whatever their ultimate fate is, there will be poems, songs and their images are going to be emblazoned all over that world.”

By the way, if any of you Seminal guys are reading this (which I’m assuming you do, since trackbacks tend to make us BLOGGERS wet like school girls at a David Hasselhoff convention), we should get together… you know, maybe post some pictures… do some blog roll exchanges… maybe do a collaborative expose on the nefarious effects of Chinese imports and the recent prevalence of restless anus syndrome?

5. White People:

Though many would have you believe that white people come of age at Summer Camp, it’s simply not the truth. Immediately following graduation but prior to renovating a house, white people take their first step from childhood to maturity by hosting a successful dinner party.

It is imperative that white people know how to host a good dinner party as they will be expected to do it well into retirement.

At the most basic level, these simple gatherings involve 3-6 couples getting together at a single house or apartment and having dinner and talking for 5-6 hours. Though it might seem basic, these events are some of the most stressful situations in all of white culture.

Hosts are expected to deliver a magical evening. The food must be home made with fresh, organic ingredients, the music must be just right (ambient, new, but not too loud), and the decorations inside the house should be subtle but elegant. The ultimate goal is to do a better job than the couple at the last dinner party, and attempt to make everyone jealous and sort of dislike you.

6. Racist sentiments should be condemned, even when Jesse Jackson makes them.

7. 3,987 dead and no one knows from Ablogistan:

The drop in awareness comes as press attention to the war has waned. According to the News Content Index conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined since last year, dropping from an average of 15% of the newshole in July to just 3% in February.

As news coverage of the war has diminished, so too has public interest in news about Iraq. According to Pew’s News Interest Index survey, Iraq was the public’s most closely followed news story in all but five weeks during the first half of 2007; however, it was a much less dominant story between July 2007 and February 2008. Notably, the Iraq war has not been the public’s top weekly story since mid-October.

8. A Lesbian Cheating Girlfriend With A Clown Fetish. Possibly the greatest video in history:

9. Other Shizzee: Government uses the logic of the rapist: Struggling only makes it harder for you, What if I told you that 10 months before 9/11, Saddam Hussein did something very big, and pissed off the US Administration?, There’s No Such Thing as a Free Trade?, President Bush Is A Liar And A Coward, Getting High on a Can of Coke, and Are our suburbs going to turn into slums?

[tags]blogs, bloggity blog, blog roundup, interwebs, oh boy blogs[/tags]

The Grand Delusional

I will make this brief. This week was the fifth anniversary of one of the most disastrous endeavors in American history. The invasion of Iraq has cost America thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and devastated any future prospects of a normalized state in Iraq for the foreseeable future (not to mention the untold diplomatic damage such unilateral action has caused). It’s fitting that on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Bush would declare “a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror” was achieved by the five years spent in Iraq. It appears the Chief Executive is either delusional or myopic: the Iraq war neither combatted terrorism (and in fact stoked more of it) and has yet to be a victory in any sense of the word. On the same day, poll numbers showed that Bush has also achieved the lowest approval rating of his Presidency — 31 percent — which is also among the lowest among modern presidency’s (lower then Clinton during impeachment, lower then Carter during the Tehran hostage crisis, and even lower than Nixon after Watergate).

Sources: CNN: Poll: Bush’s popularity hits new low and BBCNews: Bush speech hails Iraq ‘victory’.

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See Also: Conservatives sure were smart about Iraq — in the early ’90s, Jeffrey Goldberg On Iraq, What does “win” mean?, Five Years of the War in Iraq: Where’s the Media Coverage?, Five years ago, Cheney on Two-Thirds of Americans’ Opposition to Iraq Occupation: ‘So?”, Comparing The Sacrifice, and OIF Anniversary Interview.

[tags]george bush, victory in iraq, speech, low poll numbers, america[/tags]

Life As Disenchanted & Disoriented Graduate Student

Fuck. Well I’ve managed to spend a solid month in the captivity of my room, entrenched with my seemingly limitless studies and essay-writing. My latest piece involves an analysis of the profit-squeeze hypothesis (a early 1970’s Marxist framework on the end of the “Golden Age” of capitalism) and subsidiary alterations to the hypothesis that I feel are relevant. Talk about god damn specialization of labor. Any input on how to remedy my essence back into being centered and social again would be much appreciated. Yes, I have though about E. PS This is how we look… now:

Gender & Globalization

Gender & Development Economics

Feminism has been vital in the struggle for solutions at the decentralized, local, and institutional level; it has fought discrimination and inequalities at many levels; it has changed institutions and decision making processes; it has incorporated new agendas in the politics of daily life; it has affected national policies; it has made an impact on international agendas; and it has been influential in first bringing human welfare to the center of debates on economic and social policy. (Beneria 2003, 89)

In development economics, concerns for gender equality, power imbalances, societal and cultural relevance, and female empowerment have been recognized as issues of importance to successful growth strategies. However, the gendered perspective has failed to embed itself inside the mindset that somehow seeks convergence without confronting the social and economic relations that create and continue inequity. Rather, gendered economics has often become a peripheral issue addressed as a side concern; at others times, abandoned in the spectrum of development economics. Indeed, though economics is often at the forefront of women-related issues, it has proven to be ‘the least open of the social sciences to the challenges raised by feminism’ (Beneria 1995, 1839). The current course of market liberalization pursued has created a chronic condition where gender disparities are prolonged and further institutionalized, rather than alleviated, by development policy. Pervasive male-dominated social and cultural norms have persisted, continuing the asymmetrical access to economic and institutional capabilities that would be ideally evenly distributed under globalization. Future development economic paradigms must incorporate the gendered standpoint to ensure connexion towards parity, equal access to increased economic, social, and political resources, and overall female empowerment.

One of the most heavily discussed aspects of economics has been the framework of the microeconomic household unit that originates around the idea of family and intra-household relations. The cornerstone of household neoclassical microeconomics – and the most aptly critiqued by feminist economics – has been the concept of household altruism. The neoclassical familial notion also bases itself on joint utility, where household members share, attain, and maximize equal amounts of utility. Economists of both Marxian and classical viewpoints treat the household as a wholly cooperative unit, indifferent to gender power imbalances in the attempt for gender neutrality (Folbre 245). Though most economic schools often address gender issues and would regard themselves as ‘gender neutral’, this neutrality arises from an explicit disregard of including gender in their framework of analysis. Pointed out by Diane Elson, “Most economic theory, whether orthodox or critical, is also male-biased, even though it appears to be gender neutral. The male bias arises because theory fails to take adequate account of the inequality between women as a gender and men as a gender” (38, 39). Neutrality, however, in the sense of freedom from all social values, is neither possible nor desirable and permits standard analytic techniques of mainstream economics to obscure the exercise of power (Harding 10).

While able to recognize the importance of the household, feminist economists have also picked up where others have not: that within this unit, issues of imbalance are stoked by overarching social and cultural normatives that formulate the basis and justification for intra-household economic disparities. Paradoxically, most neoclassical and critical economics see the household as an oasis, free from the dictations and ambitions that motivate the markets and as a construct built around a distinctly ‘non-market’ orientation of selflessness and collaboration. Indeed, it seems that “the invisible hand swept the moral economy into the home, where an imaginary world of perfect altruism could counterbalance the imaginary world of perfect self-interest in the market” (Folbre 252). In the same sense, the ability of money to monopolize labour power for ‘productive work’ depends on a system of non-monetary social relations to assemble labour power for ‘reproductive work’ (Elson 40). The orthodox tradition in economics has continued to rely on this basic link without questioning the consequences of its corresponding institutions and norms on human behavior and social goals (Beneria 2003, 68). Indeed, it appears that the neoclassical method seems unable and unsuitable for ‘capturing the relatively autonomous behavior’ of the reproductive economy (Walters 1877). The over-reliance and concentration of classical economics on the economic man as a self-interested organism has led to a conception failure of organizations and units, including the household, that are oriented primarily by other motivations.

Feminist economists have posited that intra-household relations must be seen as a continuation of patriarchal social normatives that seep into household economies. Rather than the gender division of labor, income, and access to other resources in the family as an optimal outcome of free choice, it may be seen as “the profoundly unequal accommodation reached between individuals who occupy very different social positions with very different degrees of social power” (Elson 38). The experience of subordination makes people less likely to have a well-defined preference function and dispose people to shape their preferences to what is available, rather than for what they want. Social norms constrain the choices that people make about division of labor in the family (Elson 38). Access to resources has also remained skewed along gender lines, including access to education and nutrition. Girls and mothers in particular in areas of the developing world receive a smaller proportion of necessary calories and protein than do men (Folbre 249). Typically, the division of labor in the household remains rigid along gender lines and consequently women often encounter a double-work burden scenario when they enter the productive economy, yet still remain entirely responsible for the reproductive economy (Blin 5). Even if displaced from the productive sector, men do not usually take on the responsibilities of reproductive work, leaving women to the substantial burden of both productive and reproductive work (Walters 1977).

Further, the dominance of females in the household economy has led to an invisibility of productivity that is done outside of the formal markets, creating a significant gap in amount of work done primarily by females and work recognized by formal economic channels. This is most recognizable on the macro level, where economic data excludes the reproductive economy and on the meso and macro levels, where neo-classical analysis excludes gender (Elson 36). Macroeconomics includes paid work but excludes unpaid work, an important consideration because of the rigidities associated with both. Gender has a predominant influence on the organization of the reproductive sector because of inflexibility in the division of labor and its coordination in informal, noncommercial spheres (Walters 1870). According to a survey done by the United Nations Development Programme in 1995, unaccounted work done in the reproductive economy accounts to $16 trillion, or 70 percent, of total world output. Of this $16 trillion, $11 trillion or 69 percent, represent women’s work (Beneria 2003, 74). In parallel to market expansion and the process of globalization, a large proportion of the population engages in unpaid production that is only indirectly linked to the market. Women are disproportionately concentrated in the unpaid sector that includes agricultural family labor, particularly in subsistence farming in developing economies (Beneria 2003, 74). Through this gap comes profound underestimation of household work, leading to public policy that undercuts this economy through the debilitation of social welfare programs that increase expenditure and exertion in the ‘invisible economy’.
Though the success of the macro economy is often reliant on the household economy, macro policy is typically formulated without regard to implications for healthcare, nutrition, and other aspects that will affect the reproductive economy. Macro-policy generally takes the reproductive economy for granted, assuming it can continue to function adequately no matter how its relation to the productive economy is disrupted. Economic policy that stress rolling back the state and liberating market forces give scant consideration to how this will impact the reproductive economy (Elson 41, 42). Since it is women who undertake most of the work in the reproductive economy, this is equivalent to assuming that there is an unlimited supply of unpaid female labour, able to compensate for any adverse changes resulting from macro-economic policy, so as to continue to meet the basic needs of their families and communities (Elson 42). When social services are reduced, eliminated, or privatized, programs that give women the ability to enter the labor market, such as state-funded healthcare or childcare, are diminished and women’s incomes tend to decrease (Howes 1907). Ironically, shortage of labor, specifically female workers, has been a frequent ailment of rapidly growing economies like those in Singapore and Mauritius (Walters 1876).

The efforts of policy and market reform fail to include a gendered perspective as well. While individual and micro-economies can be explicitly gendered, markets and firms are not characteristically conceptualized as gendered in a comparable way, though they may operate in ways that are particularly constraining and disadvantageous to women (Elson 38). Political, cultural, and social institutions and monetary relationships that are not in themselves intrinsically gendered nonetheless become bearers of gender (Elson 39). At the meso and macro level, the operation of markets, firms, and public sector agencies are gendered via the social norms and networks which are functional to the efficient operation of institutions (Elson 39). Policy reform, often trying to ameliorate gender role rigidity, will reflect a male hegemony by the social norms they situate themselves on (Elson 40). Even though policy reforms may not be male-biased by design, they will be male-biased indirectly by omission (Elson 40). This provides a difficult basis for seeing substantive change: gender inequality remains entrenched in key domains, especially in the labor market and in political decision-making, which is critical for developing the policy environment for gender equality (Grown 204). Often the current development economics field sees an unequivocal link between macro-level economic growth and alleviation of poverty and social problems. At times the economic development and its resulting social transformations are ambiguous at best: the progress that has been made toward gender equality and women’s empowerment is partial, has benefits and costs, and may not be sustainable (Grown 204). Policy reform aimed at aiding the disadvantaged and disempowered, who are often female, typically leave out the gendered perspective, creating a considerable gap where macro-oriented development transformation will fail.

Significantly, social and cultural normatives have continued to foster economic inequities between males and females in the developing world, despite rapid market liberalization and neoclassical belief that barriers to entry and discrimination would be eradicated with free markets. The process of globalization for the developing world has often meant engaging in export oriented industries, inducing a feminization of the labor force, primarily facilitated by the growth in manufacturing and service industries. This has meant a transformation of the labor force that on the surface implies a greater access to relatively high paid labor for females. The classic example has been the clothing industry, that’s global work force is two thirds female, and accounts for one fifth of the total world female labor force in manufacturing (Joekes 20). While women possess a competitive advantage in the feminization of the labor force, the advantage stems from negative gender norms, discrimination, and exploitative conditions (Blin 5). Indisputably, feminization has been connected to the “deterioration of working conditions and as part of the race to the bottom resulting from global competition” (Beneria 2003, 82). Thus, although women may formally be able to participate in markets, they tend to find themselves excluded from the traditional business-social networks. Similarly, although women may formally be able to participate in paid employment in the private sector, they tend to find themselves excluded from skilled and professional positions, which obtain higher incomes (Elson 40). Caren Grown sees a inherent hierarchy of average earnings and poverty risk associated with the segmentation of the labor force: formal wage employees are at the top (highest average earnings and lowest poverty risk), the self-employed in the middle, and casual wageworkers at the bottom (lowest earnings and highest poverty risk) (205). Women in developing countries are crowded into the casual wageworker bracket, creating a situation that possesses a dual hazard, as women’s low wages are often a source of competitive advantage for developing countries, illustrating therefore why it is so complicated to implement policies that increase women’s market power (Grown 206). Walters recapitulates this quandary succinctly, stating that gender segmentation is maintained in developing economies regardless of large numbers of women entering the labor force because increased female participation that ‘does not undermine male power’ in the formal and informal economy is seen as acceptable (1877). Despite the belief that globalization would bring about social modernization and homogeneity, markets and economies continue to reflect harmful gender normatives that are embedded and entrenched.

Persistent gender inequalities are particularly exemplified in regional contexts where cultural and social-wide reactions to globalization have adjusted or pressured existing relations. In the oft-heralded free-market prototypes of East Asia, economic growth was often correlated to the degree of gender wage gaps and the Asian economies with the most rapid growth had the widest wage gaps (Beneria 2003, 83). In the Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), rejection of the free-market, globalized ideal has originated from disdain for the culturally transformative powers associated with it. Islamic societies often openly reject what they view as the “imposition of Western values and norms, many of which are transmitted through channels associated with global markets” (Beneria 2003, 69). Cultural preferences and limited job opportunities have kept many women out of the educational systems and labor force (Roudi-Fahimi 16). In 2006, 17 percent of the labor force was unemployed in MENA, compacted by a much higher rate of 30 percent among young women. Though the percentage of women in paid employment in MENA rose from 25 percent in 1980 to 30 percent in 2006, this still falls significantly lower than the world average of 52 percent (Roudi-Fahimi 15). Of the 10 million illiterate youth in MENA, 66 percent are female, symbolizing the unequal distribution of economic and educational resources between male and females in the region (Roudi-Fahimi 16). In Africa, where development sought to incorporate women into the economy, globalization has pushed them out, with the result that many African women now scrape together a living in the ‘survival economy’ of the informal sector (Horn 111). Crowding and segmentation also remain a severe problem, meaning that in Latin America, female labor force participation remains isolated in the service sector, while in Africa, women remain clustered in the agricultural sector (Howes 1905). A persistent global problem continues to be that developing countries themselves often do not recognize gender-based inequities as a source of failed development. Indicative of this is the fact that from 1995 to 2003, of the 125 reporting data on the economically active population, only 69 reported such data by sex or education (Grown 206). As hypothesized by Beneria, the links between gender and globalization should not be seen as responding only to structural and economic forces: they are also shaped by interaction between these forces and the different ways through which gender constructions have been reconstituted (2003, 77). Undeniably, employers and men benefit from low-cost female labor, with occupational segregation, labor market segmentation, and gender wage differential reproducing and perpetuating traditional patriarchal inequalities both within modern capitalist systems and developing economies (Folbre 251). The process of globalization and free market expansion can accelerate the transformation of gender roles, though this is often not a benevolent process. It often intensifies sexist or gender-based discriminatory and exploitative practices and reinstitutes tensions regarding individual freedom and collective security (Beneria 2003, 84). Though norms for gender roles have at times changed very rapidly, they have tended to changed in ways that ‘preserve male power’ (Walters 1877). Gender roles have continued to play an intrinsic role in substantiating and institutionalizing inequalities that persist in the developing regions.

In a world where transformative economic policy is often created by neo-liberal economists in the West and enacted by government actors in the developing countries, strategies have been conspicuously absent of a holistic approach to the social and cultural pressure created and exacerbated by such significant transformations. In the words of Lourdes Beneria, for economists, “the task of building a socially relevant economic theory should be a priority” (2003, 88). Classical and critical economics alike have departed from successfully incorporating the sociological, psychological, and cultural issues that continue to affect economics. As Horn bemoans, “caught in the simplicity of economic equations, planners have failed to see the social structures, power relations and knowledge systems embedded in communities where development theory is applied” (110). Feminist economics, which is socially and culturally pertinent, and the accompanying gendered view provide the opportunity for economics to be ‘socially relevant’. In order for development economics to work towards alleviating the poverty that plagues the third world and continues to most acutely affect females, the gendered outlook must be incorporated into mainstream economics.

Sources

Beneria, Lourdes. “Gender, Development and Globalisation” Chapter 2. Routledge London. 2003.

Beneria, Lourdes. “Toward a Greater Integration of Gender in Economics”. World Development. Volume 23 (11), pp. 1839-50. 1995.

Blin, Myriam. “Export-Oriented Policies, Women’s Work Burden and Human Development in Mauritius”. SOAS working papers. 2004.

Brainerd, Elizabeth. “Importing Equality? The Impact of Globalization on Gender Discrimination.” IZA Discussion Paper No. 558, August 2002.

Brennan, David. “Defending the Indefensible? Culture’s Role in the Productive/Unproductive Dichotomy”. Feminist Economics. Volume 12 (3), pp. 403-425. 2006.

Cagatay, N., Diane Elson and C. Grown. “Gender, Adjustment and Macroeconomics”. World Development. Volume 23 (11). 1995.

Elson, Diane. “Gender Awareness in Modelling Structural Adjustment”. World Development Volume 23 (11), pp.1851-68. 1995.

Elson, Diane. “Micro, Meso, Macro: Gender and Economic Analysis in the Context of Policy Reform”. 1991.

Folbre, Nancy. “Hearts and Spades: Paradigms of Household Economics”. World Development, Volume 14 (2). 1986.

Grown, Caren. “Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World.” Feminist Economics. Volume 13 (2), pp. 203-207. 2007.

Harding, Sandra. “Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective?”. Feminist Economics. Volume 1 (1). pp. 7-32. 1995.

Horn, Jessica. “Looking from the South, Speaking from Home: African Women Confronting Development.” Development, Volume 43 (4). pp. 32-39. 2007.

Howes, Candace and Ajit Singh. “Long Term Trends in the World Economy: The Gender Dimension.” World Development, Volume 23 (11). 1995.

Joekes, Susan. “Trade-related Employment for Women in Industry and Services in Developing Countries”. Occasional Paper 5, UNRISD and UNDP, Fourth World Conference on Women, Geneva. 1995.

Roudi-Fahimi, Farzaneh and Mary Mederios Kent. “The Middle East Population Puzzle”. Population Bulletin. 2007.

Walters, Bernard. “Engendering Macroeconomic: A Reconsideration of Growth Theory.” World Development. Volume 23 (11): pp. 1869-1880. 1995.

Written by Alec at SOAS for his MSc Political Economy of Development.

Related: Morality and Markets, “The Bottom Billion” by Paul Collier, IMF: Nations should use public funds to strengthen global financial system, Paul A. Volcker Address on Future Challenges, If I Were A Shill for Industry…., and Reproductive Tourism.

[tags]gender, globalization, africa, development economics, feminism, morality and ethics, distribution, females, inequality, politics, diane elson, alexander baldwin, SOAS, feminist economics, political economy[/tags]

The World’s First Narco State

The Article: How a tiny West African country became the world’s first narco state by Ed Vulliamy in the Guardian.

The Text: The roads outside the X Club nightspot in Bissau, capital of the world’s fifth poorest country, are cracked and pot-holed. They have not been repaired since they were torn up by the tracks of military vehicles during Guinea-Bissau’s civil war of the late 1990s. But the cars that are parked outside – Porsche and Audi four-wheel drives – wouldn’t look out of place in the wealthiest quarters of London.

Inside, the music is thumping Europop, a beer costs more than twice the average daily income of a dollar a day. Many of the clubbers, though, are knocking back the imported whisky, which costs up to $80 a bottle. One of the regulars points out the people who represent the various stages of the cocaine supply chain from South America via Guinea-Bissau in West Africa to the UK and the rest of Europe. ‘He’s a pretty big dealer, and that’s one of his security guys. That guy there thinks he’s big news but he’s just small-time. That woman is a mule. She’s been to Europe a couple of times.

Down a street of elaborate colonial-style buildings is Ana’s restaurant. Beneath red-tiled roofs, giant candles flicker in the gentle, humid evening breeze – it could be mistaken for an exotic tourist destination. But ‘the only visitors we get are the Colombians’, sighs Ana, ‘this country is being destroyed by drugs. They’re everywhere. A few weeks ago, the man who used to be my gardener knocked at the door and offered to sell me 7kg of cocaine.’

Among the destitute locals are scores of wealthy, gaudy Colombian drug barons in their immodest cars, flaunting their hi-tech luxury lifestyle, with beautiful women on their arms. Outside Bissau city are exclusive Hispanic-style haciendas with wide verandahs, turquoise swimming pools and gates patrolled by armed guards.

By day, Guinea-Bissau looks like the impoverished country it is. Most people cannot afford a bus fare, never mind a four-wheel drive. There is no mains electricity. Water supplies are restricted to the wealthy few, and landmark buildings such as the presidential palace remain wrecked nine years after the end of the war. But this wreck of a country is what the UN – which declared war last week on celebrity cocaine culture – calls the continent’s ‘first narco-state’. West Africa has become the hub of a flow of cocaine from South America into Europe, now that other routes have become tough for the traffickers.

US drug enforcement agents report that the old cocaine channels through the Caribbean, markedly Jamaica and Panama, have become more intensively policed, forcing the Colombians to develop new routes to traffic cocaine. The increasing might of Mexico’s powerful drug cartels has forced the South Americans to search for trafficking routes to Europe across the Atlantic rather than through Central America.

Moreover, the West African coast can be reached across the shortest transatlantic crossing from South America: either by plane from Colombia, with a re-fuelling stop in Brazil; or by ship from Brazil or Venezuela. The boats leaving South America travel only by night, remaining motionless by day, covered in blue tarpaulins to avoid detection from the air. The journey can be completed in four to five nights travelling this way.

Once ravaged by the transatlantic slave trade, the West African coast is again ‘under attack’, says the Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa, who calls the impact on Africa of Europe’s cocaine habit an echo of that of slavery. ‘In the 19th century, Europe’s hunger for slaves devastated West Africa. Two hundred years later, its growing appetite for cocaine could do the same.’

The seizure of West Africa by Colombian and other drug cartels has happened with lightning speed. Since 2003, 99 per cent of all drugs seized in Africa have been found in West Africa. Between 1998 and 2003, the total quantity of cocaine seized each year in Africa was around 600kg. But by 2006, the figure had risen five-fold and during the first nine months of last year had already reached 5.6 tonnes. The latest seizure, from a Liberian ship – Blue Atlantic – intercepted by the French navy last month, was 2.4 tonnes of pure cocaine.

But while seizure rates globally are estimated to be 46 per cent of total traffic, the amounts found in West Africa are ‘the tip of the iceberg’, says UNODC. Even though one recent raid in Guinea-Bissau netted 635kg of cocaine, the traffickers were thought to have still made off with a further two tonnes.

The street value of the drugs trafficked far exceeds gross national product. A quarter of all cocaine consumed in Western Europe is trafficked through West Africa, according to UNOCD, for a local wholesale value of $1.8bn and a retail value of 10 times that in Europe.

Nigerian drug gangs have always been an energetic presence on the global trafficking scene, but the target of the South American traffickers have been the ‘failed states’ along the Gold Coast, where poverty is extreme, where society has been ravaged by war and the institutions of state can be easily bought off – so that instead of enforcement, there is collusion. And no more so than Guinea-Bissau, whose weakness makes it a trafficker’s dream prey.

In Guinea-Bissau, says the UNODC, the value of the drugs trade is greater than the national income. ‘The fact of the matter,’ says the Consultancy Africa Intelligence agency, is that without assistance, Guinea-Bissau is at the mercy of wealthy, well-armed and technologically advanced narcotics traffickers.’

Guinea Bissau, with a population of 1.5 million, is ranked fifth from bottom in the UN’s world development index. Even its recent history is one of torment: after 13 years of bloody guerrilla conflict, it won independence from Portugal, spent the first years under a Marxist Leninist dictatorship, then 18 under João Bernardo Vieira, until he was ousted by a military rebellion. Successive crises, two wars and economic collapse brought Vieira back in 2005, with a purge of the army and deceptive stability.

The White House has singled out Guinea-Bissau as ‘a warehouse refuge and transit hub for cocaine traffickers from Latin America, transporting cocaine to Western Europe. Costa says: ‘When I went to Guinea-Bissau, the drug wealth was everywhere. From the air, you can see the Spanish hacienda villas, and the obligatory black four-wheel-drives are everywhere, with the obligatory scantily-clad girl, James Bond style. There were certain hotels I was advised not to stay in.’

A senior official at the US’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) with a long record of fighting transatlantic drug trafficking, explained how and why the capture of Guinea-Bissau took place, and the trail to Europe. ‘Geographically, West Africa makes sense. The logical things is for the cartels to take the shortest crossing over the ocean to West Africa, by plane – to one of the many airstrips left behind by decades of war, or by drop into the thousands of little bays – or by boat all the way. A ship can drop anchor in waters completely unmonitored, while fleets of smaller craft take the contraband ashore.

‘A place like Guinea Bissau is a failed state anyway, so it’s like moving into an empty house.’ There is no prison in Guinea-Bissau, he says. One rusty ship patrols a coastline of 350km, and an archipelago of 82 islands. The airspace is un-patrolled. The police have few cars, no petrol, no radios, handcuffs or phones.

‘You walk in, buy the services you need from the government, army and people, and take over. The cocaine can then be stored safely and shipped to Europe, either by ship to Spain or Portugal, across land via Morocco on the old cannabis trail, or directly by air using “mules”.’ One single flight into Amsterdam in December 2006 was carrying 32 mules carrying cocaine from Guinea-Bissau.

The official admitted ‘this has happened quickly, and the response has been tardy. They’re ahead of the game.’ And it didn’t help that most Western diplomatic presence had left Bissau during the fighting, preferring to operate from neighbouring Senegal. The US and Britain shut up shop in Bissau in 1998, the Americans only last July reopening a diplomatic office in response to the cocaine raids.

Although much of the cocaine goes directly to Spain and Portugal, London is becoming an increasingly prominent final destination, says the official – because of the street prices the drug commands – yet Britain also has no permanent diplomatic presence in Bissau, and has not joined the Iberian countries and the EU in contributing to the latest UN plans to help the country. According to the UNODC, the UK and Spain have now overtaken America in the consumption of cocaine per head.

Guinea Bissau’s cocaine Calvary began three years ago when fishermen on one island found packages of white powder washed up on the beach. They had no idea what the mysterious substance was. ‘At first, they took the drug and they put it on their bodies during traditional ceremonies,” recalls local journalist Alberto Dabo. ‘Then they put it on their crops. All their crops died because of that drug. They even used it to mark out a football pitch’.

The real moment of truth came when two Latin Americans arrived by chartered plane, armed with $1 million in ‘buyback’ cash, which the locals gleefully accepted. The two men were apprehended by police, but released. ‘When people found that it was cocaine and they could sell it,’ says Dabo, ‘some of those fishermen bought cars and built houses.’

As well as the favourable location, in Guinea Bissau the cocaine gangs have found a country where the rule of law barely exists. ‘It’s an easy country to be active if you’re an organised crime lord,’ says the deputy regional head of UNODC, Amado Philip de Andres. ‘Law enforcement has literally no control for two reasons: there is no capacity and there is no equipment’.

A further development highlighted by the DEA and UNODC is that Guinea Bissau and other West African countries are being targeted by Asian and African cartels trafficking heroin across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, to the US. Last year, the DEA and police in Chicago tracked nine West Africans who had moved heroin originating in South-east Asia through various West African countries, markedly Guinea-Bissau, to the central US.

Estimates vary as to the cogency of the Colombian presence, but one observer suggests there are as many as 60 Colombian drugs traffickers in Guinea-Bissau. Colombians have bought local businesses, including factories and warehouses, and built themselves large homes protected by armed guards. They and their local hired help flaunt their liberty to operate – and the money they make from doing so.

‘We can see these people walking in complete freedom. They are parading their wealth. They’re showing it completely openly,’ says Jamel Handem, of a coalition of civic groups called Platform GB.

Guinea-Bissau’s armed forces and some politicians are thought to be deeply involved in the drugs trade. Last year, two military personnel were detained along with a civilian in a vehicle carrying 635kg of cocaine. The army secured the soldiers’ release and so far there is no sign that they will face charges.

In his large, carpeted, air-conditioned office, a refrigerator humming quietly in the corner, the army spokesman, Colonel Arsenio Balde, brushes aside suggestions the incident proves the army’s complicity in the drugs trade. He says the soldiers were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time: ‘They were on the road hitching a ride and they saw this car driving by. They asked for a ride and then this guy stopped, and later on this car was stopped and they were arrested. You don’t have any evidence of high-level involvement. Just please, bring the evidence. That’s what we’re asking for.’

Government spokesman Pedro da Costa gives a similar response when asked if the government is involved in the drugs trade. ‘I don’t have any information on that,’ he says, curtly. He insists the authorities are keen to tackle drugs traffickers, but don’t have the resources. Like many others in Guinea-Bissau, though, he’s worried that disputes over control of the trade could break out, pushing the country back to civil war. ‘We’re worried, of course. We’re all concerned. If it’s going to bring consequences to our people similar to the war of 1998-99, I think today the motivation would be different. But of course, there is a danger for the country.’

Parliamentary elections, originally scheduled for this month, have been postponed until the end of the year. The campaign could lead to heightened tension between political groups, and provide more scope for corruption. ‘One of the risks now is that they will have a deep penetration of dirty money into politics that will overturn everything in the country,’ says Fafali Kudawo, rector of the country’s first university, ‘because this country is very, very fragile, and he who has money can do whatever he wants. You do not know at any given moment what will change the situation or lead the country to war or to violence’.

The UNOCD Office has drawn up a detailed plan to help Guinea-Bissau. In 2006 it suggested a possible budget of several hundred million dollars to potential donors. They refused to pay. Last year the agency came up with a far more modest programme concentrating on reform of the security services, boosting the judicial police, and building a jail. The estimated cost was $19 million. In December a donor conference in Lisbon produced pledges of $6.5m.

As though the suffocation of society by the cartels were not enough, Guinea-Bissau inevitably suffers from a proliferation of addiction among its own people. ‘Foot soldiers are paid in kind,’ says Antonio Maria Costa, ‘and whatever is left behind is sold domestically.’ With addicts hidden away in villages, many still believe that their hallucinations are the result of evil spirits.

When United Nations workers went to the country’s only excuse for a rehabilitation unit in a mangrove swamp 30km from the capital, they found a man called Bubacar Gano, who calls himself ‘the first man to smoke pedra’ – as crack cocaine is known in the country. He recalls the fishing boat that lost its load in the sea in 2005, saying: ‘Most of the locals who found the packages had no idea what it was or what to do with it. But I knew. After a while I became crazy and aggressive. But it is a difficult thing to stop smoking pedra.’

See Also: Bush and Uribe v. Chavez and Correa by Stephen Lendman, Guinea-Bissau: World’s first narco state, and Africa’s “first narco-state”.

[tags]narco state, west africa, Guinea-Bissau, columbia, drug trade, cocaine, europe[/tags]