CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - This is known as the most dangerous city in the world and it feels like it. Half of Juarez - just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas - looks like a ghost town; the other resembles a battle zone briefly gone quiet so that cars can get out. Many assembly plants are silent, commercial centers are as lifeless as the cotton fields east of town, restaurants and bars are half-empty, and even the facade of the morgue is riddled with bullets. Thousands of run-down cars seem to be just cruising, their drivers having no destination in mind. Street vendors in the small plaza where the cathedral stands do little more than talk to each other, and the soldiers riding around with their fingers on the triggers look more tense than the civilians. [continues 613 words]
Dealing with Drugs and Revolution One day, a major study will have to be written on the perverse pleasure U.S. administrations take in fostering Latin American demagoguery. It could cite as an example Evo Morales -- the leftist, Jurassic, U.S.-bashing coca grower who almost won the Bolivian presidency. He is the meticulous creation of the American government. In 1998, the United States "urged" Bolivia to put into practice the "Dignity Plan" in the Chapare region. The Bolivian military uprooted thousands of acres of coca plantations. By last year, coca leaf was reduced from close to 100,000 acres to 7,000 acres (another 24,000 acres are legally grown in other parts of the country). Tens of thousands of families lost their livelihood overnight, unable to sell for a profit the pineapples and bananas with which they attempted to replace coca bushes worth $400 million. The result was revolt -- violent clashes with the police, some people killed, others injured. [continues 757 words]
