Colombia - the drug issue Cocaine

Colombia is the world's leading producer of cocaine.

Colombia is the source of two-thirds of the world's cocaine

Cocaine shipments from South America transport through Mexico and generally move over land or by air to staging sites in northern Mexico. The cocaine is broken down into smaller loads for smuggling across the U.S.– Mexico border. The primary cocaine importation points in the US are in Arizona, southern California, southern Florida, and Texas. Typically, land vehicles are driven across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Cocaine traffickers from Colombia, and Mexico, established smuggling routes throughout the Caribbean, the Bahama Island chain, and South Florida.

Attempts to eradicate coca fields through the use of defoliants have devastated part of the farming economy in coca growing regions of Colombia, and strains appear to have developed more resistant to their use. Whether these strains are natural mutations or a product of human tampering is unclear. The strains have also shown to be more potent than those previously grown, increasing profits for the drug cartels responsible for exporting cocaine. The cultivation of coca has become an attractive economic decision on the part of many growers due to a combination of several factors, including persistence of worldwide demand, lack of other employment alternatives, lower profitability of alternative crops in official crop substitution programs, eradication-related damages to non drug farms, and spread of new strains of the coca plant.

Colombian Armed Conflict conflict in Colombia has been intense since approximately 1964 or 1966, when the FARC and later the ELN were founded and subsequently started guerrilla insurgency campaigns against successive Colombian government administrations.

It is said FARC are bit players in comparison to the paramilitary networks and cocaine barons that paramilitaries protect. So, with both the U.S. and the UN antidrug agencies reporting over a number of years the paramilitaries are more heavily involved than FARC in drug cultivation, refinement and transhipment to the U.S.some ask why they are not targeted. The term Plan Colombia is used to refer to controversial USA legislation aimed at curbing drug smuggling by supporting Drug War activities in Colombia. The plan was conceived between 1998 and 1999 by the administration of President Andrés Pastrana with the goals of social and economic revitalization, ending the armed conflict and creating an anti narcotic strategy. The most controversial element of the anti narcotic strategy is aerial fumigation to eradicate coca. The activity is under fire as it appears to damage legal crops and has adverse health effects upon those exposed to herbicides. Critics of the initiative also claim elements within the Colombian security forces, which receive aid and training, are involved in supporting or tolerating abuses by right wing paramilitary forces against left wing organizations.

Coca eradication is a controversial strategy strongly promoted by the U S government as part of a War on Drugs to eliminate the cultivation of coca, a plant whose leaves are not only traditionally used by indigenous cultures but also, in modern society, in cocaine. This strategy is being pursued in the coca growing regions of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, where it is controversial because of its environmental and its socioeconomic impact. Indigenous cultures living in the Altiplano, such as the Aymaras, considers the coca leave to a traditional product, which they use to fool the feeling of hunger, sleepiness and head aches linked to altitude and other altitude sicknesses. The growers of coca are named Cocaleros and part of the coca production for traditional use is legal in Peru and Bolivia.

The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo or FARC-EP (Spanish "Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People's Army") is Colombia's oldest and largest guerrilla group, established in 1964-1966 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party. The FARC-EP has officially broken from the party and created a political structure it calls the Clandestine Colombian Communist Party. With an estimated 12,000-18,000 members, the FARC-EP is present in 35-40 percent of Colombia's territory, strongly in south eastern jungles and in plains at the base of the Andes mountains. The FARC-EP is classified as a terrorist group by multiple nations and organizations, including the U S.

While the group came to existence in 1966, it continued to be led by former liberal and communist guerrillas, and therefore some analysts believe , in several respects, it was a partial continuation of a revolutionary movement begun in 1948.

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Ejército de Liberación Nacional (usually abbreviated to ELN), or National Liberation Army, is a revolutionary, Marxist, insurgent guerrilla group operating in several regions of Colombia since 1964.

The US State Department considers ELN to be a Foreign Terrorist Organization due to its notorious reputation for ransom kidnappings and armed attacks on Colombia's infrastructure. In 2004, the European Union added the ELN to its list of terrorist organizations for actions and its breaches of humanitarian law.

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The Popular Liberation Army, EPL (Ejército Popular de Liberación), is a Colombian guerrilla group created in 1967.

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Paramilitarism in Colombia refers to the origin and development of paramilitary groups in Colombia. Paramilitary groups, whether of private or public origin, having legal or illegal support, were originally organized during the Cold War proxy wars as small groups, created as preemptive or reactive consequence to the real or perceived growing threat represented by the actions of guerrillas and militant political activitists of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Yet many are just their to protect the drug industry

Cocaine

Mexico drug cartels

Heroin or diacetylmorphine

Why would anyone ask How to make crack cocaine

DRUG DEALER

Amphetamine

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