THE REAL CRIMINALS

For years I've received letters from Colombians imprisoned for drugs in the
United States. They write from the depths of helplessness, after trying
lawyers, Colombian consulates, appellate courts, human rights organizations,
bishops, congressmen/women, the UN; like a person who, having exhausted the
resources of rational hope, throws a message in a bottle into the ocean.
They tell me to help them. But how? And there are hundreds.

They all tell me variations of the same story. The terrifying story of the
workings of the American criminal justice system, from entrapment (a
monstrous legal practice which allows the police to incite someone to commit
a crime in order to capture them for trying to commit it), to the
inescapable, final sentence: "life plus 50 years" in prison, or "two life
sentences plus thirty years." The only hope for change, equally monstrous,
is to incriminate others in exchange for prison benefits; one person
condemned to two life sentences plus 30 years had the chains taken off for a
few hours to walk around the prison yard, in exchange for information about
someone more important than himself.

Carlos Lehder, for example, has the right to see the sun thanks to his
testimony against Panamanian General Manuel Antonio Noriega. If Noriega
could testify, say, against the Cuban vice-president, Raul Castro, he might
be freed immediately and placed in the federal witness protection program.
Furthermore, he could be paid a salary.

But the vast majority of the prisoners who write me are poor couriers
captured with a couple of kilos of cocaine balls in their guts, or low
ranking money launderers. They can't snitch on Fidel, or Saddam Hussein, or
the Pope, so they're condemned to rot for two and a half lives in prison.
And if they denounce the people who convinced them to get into the
business -- from the DEA agents who provided the drugs, to the Customs
Agents who allowed the drugs in, to the lawyers who convinced them to
declare themselves guilty, to the social workers unable to obtain an
important name, to the director of prisons who prohibited any visits, to the
prison priests who insist they convert to the Presbyterian Church -- they'll
be even worse off.

The process has been the following:

Americans invented drug abuse. Drugs have always been consumed,
every-where. But the massive consumption of drugs is a consequence of the
Californian counterculture of the sixties, of the Vietnam war, of Hollywood,
of rock music, and of the Wall Street yuppies. Drug abuse is part of the
American way of life.

Next, Americans instigated the massive production of drugs in Latin America.
Veteran Vietnam pilots arriving in Yucatan in Mexico, in Santa Marta in
Colombia, in Chapare in Bolivia, and in Huallaga in Peru, taught the local
people how to grow and refine coca. Indirectly, the production was driven by
the insatiable American market of 40 million habitual consumers of
marijuana, cocaine, crack, and heroin.

Then the US declared war against drugs. Unable to make their own citizens
obey the law, they decided to export their laws, to attack the production of
drugs abroad.

It's a fat business. US banks keep 95 percent of the drug profits, which
because they are illegal, are fabulous. Thanks to the international
prohibition on drug production, the governments of the drug-producing
countries generally submit to US demands: for air spaces, marine areas,
confiscation of investments abroad, weapons sales, and herbicides to combat
the crops. And miscellaneous things like the Panama Canal, which will be
kept after the deadline of the Carter-Torrijos treaty, under the pretext of
controlling the flow of illicit drugs.

DEA agents, or other undercover police, charge a commission on the
confiscated drugs that they help to import, and a commission on the money
they help launder. American lawyers charge their clients to give them false
hopes and bad advice. American legislators are re- elected based on the
prestige of defending American children from the harmful drugs with which
those evil foreigners from Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Burma, Laos,
Afghanistan, Turkey, Cuba, and Pakistan try to poison them.

The criminals are not the ones in prison throwing bottled rescue letters
into the ocean. The criminals are those that write the laws in the US
Congress.