The construction of new counterdrug facilities across Ecuador is continuing unabated in 2006 with U.S. State Dept. help, recent procurement documents show. One of the latest projects will unfold in the Port of Tulcan, Carchi Province, just outside the nation's northernmost border with Colombia. A separate endeavor involves construction of an antinarcotics police facility in Esmereldas, capital city of the Esmereldas Province and the location of a main port and terminal for Ecuador’s national petroleum pipeline.

The U.S. Dept. of the Interior earlier this week issued a call for bids to build a fence along the border with Mexico, preceding House passage of legislation on Wednesday and Senate approval just a few hours ago (May 18) to erect 370 miles of such border-protection fencing.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) yesterday shed some light on how it anticipates strengthening the ability of civil-society groups -- who would be hired to work in consultation with the U.S. Dept. of Justice (DOJ) -- to investigate human rights violations in Colombia. USAID earlier this year began soliciting outside input (Narcosphere, Feb. 6, 2006) on the crafting of future U.S-supported human-rights policy in Colombia, and since that time has held several meetings with NGOs from the U.S. and Colombia.

The U.S. State Dept. is planning to deploy a law enforcement training & development advisor to Bolivia, where the still-unnamed private contractor annually will train about 1,500 officers and agents of the Government of Bolivia (GOB). The contractor will serve as an "expert advisor" to the director of the Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS) as well as to the Bolivian National Police (BNP) and the national counternarcotics police, known as Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotrafico, or FELCN. The advisor will be tasked with providing technical assistance to internal affairs investigators at BNP/FELCN as well implementing a management reform initiative.

The Associated Press (AP) launched a recruitment campaign for a reporter whose beat would encompass the activities of Bolivian President Evo Morales. Based in AP's La Paz news bureau, the selected candidate will focus on "efforts by Bolivia's first non-white president, coca growers' union leader Evo Morales, to remake one of Latin America's most corrupt and poorest nations," according to an ad posted today to JournalismJobs.com.

The U.S. Army Contracting Agency (ACA) has awarded a $1 million contract to an Amarillo, Texas man to assist the Colombia Marine Corps in conducting waterway-based counternarcotics missions. Steven Berger, operator of Products & Services of the Americas, will provide strategic- and tactical-operations training to Colombian forces under the contract.

In an apparent move to keep a low-profile on the award, ACA buried the contract notice in the FedBizOpps database-archives on Monday, April 10 -- the same day it had posted the legally required notice for the first time.

An ongoing assessment of potential contamination caused by U.S.-sponsored herbicide eradication of drug crops in South America and domestically will soon begin, according to a recently obtained National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) planning document. The University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) has received a five-year, $6 million federal contract to carry out this and other cannabis-related tasks at its National Center for Natural Products -- which operates the only legal marijuana farm in the U.S.

In addition to analyzing marijuana seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Center will, ironically, grow and harvest up to 1,000 kilos of bulk pot, while separately producing and distributing hundreds of thousands of high, low and zero-potency marijuana cigarettes to be used in clinical research. The Ole Miss facility also must “extract, analyze, store [and] prepare” the cannabis for the sake of determining its potency. According to the project’s "statement of work," one of those tasks includes the extraction and storage of one kilo of pure THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

To access the full text of this report, please visit The Peacock Report, where the article originally appeared.

The Treasury Dept. is embarking upon a monitoring program to ensure that certain Caribbean, Central and South American nations are using U.S. government grants as intended. Treasury's Bureau of Public Debt is overseeing the Grant Performance Monitoring Services initiative on behalf of the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), an "independent" U.S. government agency.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is looking to outsource the housing of up to 7,000 "criminal aliens," primarily of Mexican origin. This group of inmates, who already have been sentenced, currently are serving time at unspecified facilities in West Texas.

The U.S. government wants to heighten its role in coordinating conservation efforts in South America’s Amazon Basin, asserting a shared “responsibility for the stewardship” of this and other critical regions of biodiversity. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) acknowledged last week that commodity markets are driving much of the overfishing, logging, petroleum and minerals extraction in the basin, leading to deforestation and the construction of poorly planned dams and other infrastructure in the area.

Contributing to the challenges of resource management in this region is coca production and narco-trafficking, USAID claims. Governmental corruption and “limited coordination of national, provincial, and regional agencies” also fuel these threats and undermine sustainable economic-development efforts, it said in a concept paper governing the new endeavor, formally known as the Amazon Basin Conservation Initiative (ABCI).