Cocaine production rising despite coca-field spraying
Bogota, Colombia – A key component of the U.S.-backed war on drugs appears to be failing.
Production of the plant used to make cocaine increased 8 percent last year in Colombia, to 330 square miles, the United Nations said Tuesday – even as authorities sprayed coca fields totaling 25 times the size of Manhattan. The findings come on the heels of a similar report in April by the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, which showed Colombia’s coca production skyrocketed 26 percent from 2004 to 2005, in part due to a near-doubling of the area surveyed.
The two reports are the strongest evidence yet that a cornerstone of the U.S.-led war on drugs – the aerial fumigation of coca fields – is failing to meet its goal of halving coca production in the Andes.
The results may hamper efforts by President Alvaro Uribe to win additional U.S. backing for Plan Colombia, the anti-drug strategy that has cost American taxpayers $4 billion since 2000.
The U.N. report said Colombian coca production expanded for the first time in five years, by 23 square miles.
“If this is the start of a return to much higher levels of coca, then it will be a problem,” the U.N. agency’s executive director, Antonio Maria Costa, told a news conference in Bogota. “But I don’t think that will happen. The government has every intention to continue its eradication efforts at the same high level as the past few years.”
Partly offsetting the rise in Colombian production were declines in the world’s two other coca-producing countries, Bolivia and Peru. Overall, coca production in the Andean region rose 1 percent, to 616 square miles from 2004, according to the U.N.’s Andean coca survey.
BRIDGEPORT, Conn.
Mayor won’t resign over cocaine use
Mayor John Fabrizi admitted Tuesday that he had used cocaine while in office and said he wanted to apologize “to all the people of the city” but had no plans to resign.
The admission followed the inadvertent release of an FBI document in which an alleged drug dealer claimed an associate had a video of the mayor using cocaine.
The 49-year-old Democrat said he had not used drugs in 18 months and had sought help for a drug addiction that he had hoped to handle privately.
“I thought that these were personal, private matters, … that I could deal with these issues with my family…,” Fabrizi said. “I now recognize my actions affected many others, and I want to apologize to my family, my friends and all of the people of the city of Bridgeport.”
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
Ex-police official’s Dirty War trial begins
A 76-year-old former police investigator went on trial Tuesday on charges of involvement in murder, kidnapping and torture under the former military dictatorship, in the first Dirty War prosecution in two decades.
As Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz was led into a federal courtroom in La Plata, about 35 miles southeast of the capital, Buenos Aires, some 500 demonstrators shouted “genocide!” and “murderer!”
Etchecolatz, former chief investigator for the Buenos Aires provincial police, faces charges in connection with five killings, kidnappings and torture during the so-called Dirty War against political dissent during a 1976-83 military junta, authorities said.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
Senator seeks curbs on Fluff (sandwiches)
A state senator is taking aim at a childhood food staple: Fluff.
Sen. Jarrett Barrios was so outraged that his son Nathaniel, a third-grader, was given a peanut butter and Fluff sandwich at the King Open School in Cambridge, he said he plans to file legislation to ban schools from serving the sandwiches more than once a week as a main meal.
“A Fluff sandwich as the main course of a nutritious lunch just doesn’t fly in 2006,” said Barrios.
The sandwiches – known as Fluffernutters – have long been a favorite of New England kids.
“I’ve been eating Fluff nearly my entire life,” said Don Durkee, 80, whose family started the company that makes Fluff in 1920. “The irony of this is Marshmallow Fluff happened to be invented in Somerville, Barrios’ home district.”
