By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
(Op-Ed Columnist, published in the New York Times)

June 13, 2009

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

(Read on here)

Tonight, Rad Rich and I got free tickets to the Pelosi event and even the reception. We walked past the jeering crowd of tea-party people and my friends from the peace movement to attend the green-room reception for Nancy Pelosi and I got to talk to her for two minutes.

I introduced myself as Nick from Friends of Brad Will and told her who Brad was and she said she was sorry about his death. I told her that we were concerned about human rights abuses taking place in places where we have free trade agreements like Peru and the deaths there last week. She replied that she was waiting for Obama’s cue on that. I replied that indeed Obama had mentioned union leaders in Colombia in the debates, but that people were dying now and this tends to happen wherever we have these free trade agreements — corporations get better access to resources and indigenous get displaced. She thanked me for telling her. Then Rad talked to her about student loans.

listen to this guy

This morning, three human rights activists representing Friends of Brad Will, Houston Indymedia, and Houston Food Not Bombs met with The Consul General at the Peruvian Consulate in Houston.

Ellie Sequeira, Rachel Clarke, and Nick Cooper expressed concerns and delivered a letter (below) about the role of the Peruvian government, oil corporations and free trade in the deaths of dozens of indigenous Peruvians. (more…)

June 1 2009
Kristina Aiello
for NACLA

These efforts to suppress political dissent are part of a growing trend of increased governmental aggression towards activists and social movements occurring across Latin America. Accompanying this repression are huge increases in military spending authorized by the Bush administration to combat drug trafficking and “terrorism” in Latin America via programs like Plan Colombia and now the Merida Initiative.

The Obama administration has a chance to walk U.S. anti-drug policy back from this long favored militarization stance. But recent actions taken by the new administration are disappointing for those seeking a dramatic change in U.S. policy in the region.

Read the rest of this clarion call, here.

The Obama administration plans a new round of ‘public safety’ programs in Latin America.

by Jeremy Bigwood

Published in In These Times, May 13, 2009.

From the article: “Obama may not understand the dangerous waters his administration is drifting into by expanding “public safety” policing programs. If the history of the OPS and similar projects are any indication of what will come, U.S. policing initiatives in Latin America and elsewhere could result in violence and political repression.”
Read all of it, here.

Oaxaca City, January 14th, 2009: Members of Section 22 and APPO came to demand Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno’s release from prison. In the clip, his sister Lybia reads the families statement at the offices of the 5th District Judge. Background info: On October 16th 2008, Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno was imprisoned for the 2006 murder of American Journalist Brad Will, unjustly, as eye-witness and forensic evidence has proved his innocence. He was scapegoated by the Mexican government in order to appease U.S. demands that the case be prosecuted, as a prerequisite for funding to Mexico under the Merida Initiative. He remains
incarcerated at Santa Maria Ixcotel prison, in the City of Oaxaca, to this day.