Welcome, Comrade Mary Anastasia O'Grady!

From her (still unsubstantiated) claims that Venezuela's government is funding Evo Morales and the coca growers' movements in Bolivia, to her frequent defenses of disgraced Bush advisor on Latin America Otto Reich, to her inferences that Jimmy Carter and Cesar Gaviria covered up what she claimed (without evidence) was an electoral fraud in Caracas last year, it seemed that O'Grady and we were destined to always view the same hemisphere through opposite lenses.

Until now...

In her recent column, Blame U.S. Drug Policy for the Bolivian Uprising, Mary Anastasia O'Grady sings in harmony - an amazing feat coming from a voice that croons only from the right side of the larynx - with the Narco News editorial position that we posted in the April 18, 2000 Opening Statement of the Authentic Journalism renaissance.

Welcome aboard, Comrade O'Grady!

More from her fascinating recent column at the jump... O'Grady's ideological spin on Latin American events has sometimes been fun grist for this mill of Authentic Journalism. As I mentioned in my 2002 White Paper on the Venezuela coup and counter coup, "Three Days that Shook the Media," O'Grady started railing against President Hugo Chávez before Chávez-bashing was cool: "Three days prior (to Chávez's July 31, 2000 reelection), Mary Anastasia O'Grady wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal titled 'A Chavez victory will only worsen Venezuela's problems.'"

In 2004, we linked to Philip Cryan's critique of O'Grady's attacks on defenders of human rights in Colombia as "still fighting the Cold War, on the wrong side."

But her new column is even more interesting, not for where it's wrong, but for where it is right about the disaster of the US-imposed drug war in Latin America.

O'Grady begins her column sounding a lot like many of our reporters here:

Congress did not repeal the 18th amendment to the U.S.  Constitution in 1933 because it had decided alcohol abuse was passe.  It did so because it judged that the costs of Prohibition were higher than the benefits and that a regulated market would be a better way to manage a popular but sometimes harmful depressant drug.

The unintended consequence of Prohibition was the rise of violent organized crime and the spike in official corruption that accompanied it.  After 13 years of Prohibition, most Americans didn't like what Al Capone et al were doing in the streets and to the country's legal institutions.

So far, so good, eh? Next, she comes to the money point, from the point of view of someone who might read five years of reports on Narco News but who considers good news to be bad:

That's something to think about in light of the death spiral of democracy in Latin America's Andean region, the center of gravity for coca growing and processing and the bull's eye of the U.S.  war on drugs.

The poor Andean region, with its young and fragile democracies, is where a lot of "illegal substances," as currently defined, originate.  Criminal networks trading in drugs burrow into the institutional pillars of these states and hollow them out.  They also exploit down-and-out locals in dire need of an income by enlisting them to meet the demand for outlawed substances.

The drug lords are becoming ever more sophisticated in fighting their side of the "war." As they grow frighteningly more powerful in politics, they threaten to destroy freely elected governments.

Of course, what she describes as "the death spiral of democracy" is her spin on what we have reported is a more authentic democracy, a democracy from below. I'm sure she meant to say, more specifically, "the death spiral of the idea that democracy can only exist with unbridled free markets" but, you know, working for a print newspaper and all, she probably had to trim her column for space considerations!

Next, she delivers some of her trademark ideological red meat:

Bolivia is the latest victim of this economic reality.  In the past two years, two Bolivian presidents have been forced from office by a violent minority.  Its leader is Evo Morales, who has organized the peasants that grow a form of coca specifically bred for making cocaine.

I would be remiss if I didn't ask aloud where she gets such a bizarre ethnobotanical claim that the humble coca bush of the Chapare region is "specifically bred for making cocaine" when it is a plant that was cultivated for thousands of years before cocaine hydrochloride existed. Paging Jeremy Bigwood for botanical fact checking! We'll get his expert take to you shortly.

And O'Grady seems a bit confused on which side the violence came from in the recent falls of two Bolivian presidents (and two more who were next in line). We've reported extensively that it was disgraced president Gonzalo "Goni" Sánchez de Lozada who resigned after he massacred dozens of unarmed civilians. (See Luis Gómez's two-part series documenting the crimes for which Goni, hiding out in Washington DC suburbs and in Miami, is currently sought by Bolivian justice. See also Gómez's news breaking report on the afternoon of June 9, 2005 on the violent death of miner Juan Coro, documenting, for the first time, who committed the only murder during the most recent wave of protests in Bolivia.)

How an anti-big government columnist of libertarian tendencies somehow missed that it was the State doing the violence in Bolivia is one of those puzzles that goes unanswered. But you know what? It's okay. O'Grady is still inching her way in her June 17 column to a fine logical breakthrough. She writes:

...scratch the surface and one finds that the question of the natural gas reserves merely sparked the blaze.  The tinder box of organized anger already existed, built of long-simmering resentment against the government's aggressive eradication of coca crops.  It didn't take much imagination for Mr.  Morales to blame the U.S.  war on drugs, American "imperialism" and capitalism in general for the lack of peasant progress...

Political militancy among the coca growers can be traced to the government of Hugo Banzer.  The late President Banzer came to power in 1997 through an alliance with the left-wing MIR party, whose leadership had been implicated in the drug trade.  To diminish U.S.  concerns about that alliance, Banzer pledged to vigorously prosecute the war on drugs.

Economic need and U.S. demand for cocaine had sent thousands of unemployed Bolivian miners to the Chapare region years earlier to grow coca for export to Colombia where it could be processed.  Mr.  Morales comes from a family that reportedly did just that.

Unfortunate that O'Grady wasn't with the 60 Narco News School of Authentic Journalism scholars that visited that region last August and saw, first hand, how much of the coca leaf grown there gets chewed traditionally. She must have missed this excellent report by Authentic Journalism scholar Sean Donahue: The Heart of the Bolivian Coca Trade, about the legal coca market warehouse in Sacaba, on the road from Cochabamba to the Chapare, where the work includes regulating the coca leaf trade to ensure that it is all accounted for and does not go to make cocaine, including some illustrative photos by Bigwood.

In fact, in Sacaba, O'Grady would have found more grist for her essential and positive argument that government repression in the form of prohibitionist drug policy is the problem, not the cure.

O'Grady continues:

...after the anti-cocalero campaign "you could feel that there was less money, less economic activity at the grass-roots," a former Bolivian official close to the situation told me.  The reason, he says, was that the eradication had taken an economic toll.  Some 5% to 8% of gross domestic product had been lost, and not evenly.  It had hit the farmers and had had a multiplier effect on the rest of the lower-income tier of the economy.

In April 2000, the brewing hostility over the economic hardship found an outlet.  Plans to award a water contract in Cochabamba to the U.S.  Bechtel construction firm produced a surprising rebellion in the city, Bolivia's third largest.  Traditional tranquility was disturbed by road and bridge blockades and other forms of protest.

It is true that the Bechtel project, while offering greater convenience and sanitation, threatened the livelihood of small water carriers.  But the resistance went way beyond what the "aguateros" or even wealthy special interests, on their own, could have produced.  The real force behind the rebellion was an uprising of the displaced cocaleros...

O'Grady then commits a common racial stereotyping, suggesting that the indigenous Bolivians aren't smart or organized enough to carry out such tasks as "transportation, food and logistics" by themselves. So she's looking for external boogeymen and raising various undocumented claims or "conspiracy theories" as to from where the well-organized blockades in Bolivia sprang up:

Mr.  Morales's genius has been to forge the coca growers into a broader political movement.  His backers are a worrisome lot.  Judging from his many photo ops with Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Mr.  Morales now has friends who can supply tips on revolutionary politics and material aid as well.  Colombia's FARC guerrillas, who profit from their own cocaine businesses, are rumored to also be interested in Bolivia.

Protesting peasants and paramilitary roadblocks require transportation, food and logistics.  Someone is funding the effort.  That could be hostile tyrants in the region but it could also be the cocaine industry in Bolivia.

Again, no documentation or fact: just simple innuendo about what "could be" and an unsubstantiated claim that someone (else) is funding the protests in Bolivia. But I'll forgive her, for now, for her inability to grasp that poor folks who have had to do for themselves under repressive conditions for more than 500 years are probably better able to organize blockades of the roads that run through their towns than, say, the staff at the Heritage Foundation, or Wall Street journalists, would be if they attempted to do the same!

But despite her lapses, mainly blind spots caused by too much exertion to insert an ideological explanation for human events, O'Grady comes to the following conclusion:

The destabilizing effects on the region's political system are at a level that Americans would not tolerate at home, as they demonstrated when they voted down Prohibition.  It is reasonable to ask whether it is morally defensible or wise or even pragmatic to expect Latins to carry a similar burden when there are so many better ways to fight drug use on U.S.  soil.

And there you have it. O'Grady joins the ranks of the proud anti-prohibitionists.

This is not an entirely new position for her: she began slouching toward saying it aloud in her 1999 column "American Cokeheads Underwrite Colombian Misery."

And after Goni resigned and fled Bolivia O'Grady almost came out and said it, in her October 24, 2003 column (not available online, but here's a quote from it): "Bolivia's 'indigenous' movements ironically draw much of their power from cocaleros clamoring for free markets and property rights. By denying farmers the opportunity to sell the crop that yields the best return, the government effectively confiscates their property. One can argue about the merits and costs of prohibition."

There, she tried to fit the modern-day story of Latin America's social movements into a neat little economic libertarian box, with a fantasy vision of "cocaleros clamoring for free markets." But the Mary Anastasia O'Grady we have come to know over the years could not remain content sounding like, say, a dry Cato Institute attempt to analyze the drug war in Latin America through a libertarian lens. Love her or leave her, dislike her sometimes overreaching factual claims, O'Grady is a better, more dynamic writer, than most who share her ideology. And it would be interesting to see, for example, her take on the media circus surrounding the drug war in Nuevo Laredo, where there is no left-wing boogeyman to be found in Mexico's Fox era. She might snap a cleaner photo there.

But hey, in this sixth month of the year 2005, O'Grady, analyzing the same beat as we report here at Narco News, arrived at the same conclusion: Drug prohibition must end for democracy to survive.

Her argument is a mirror image of that of Narco News (after all, mirrors invert left and right): She says, in effect, They're winning the South! Therefore we have to legalize drugs to stop them! We've said, for five years, We're winning the South! Therefore drugs will be legalized! Poetic, ain't it! We both seem to agree, though: the social movements on the rise in Latin America are the sword by which the United States is going to have to, sooner or later, repeal drug prohibition.

Thank you comrade O'Grady!