By Mauricio Ríos García
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – This column has been written in Bogotá, Colombia, while the news reports how the drug gangs in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, are on the front page once again.
And so it is difficult not to establish a link between what someone like Pablo Escobar was capable of doing in the 1980s and the way in which his crime has transcended time and space.
Read also: Check out our coverage on Bolivia
But let’s see first. What has happened this Tuesday and the following days while the investigations continue, is that three policemen were gunned down by the gang of a well-known drug trafficker from Santa Cruz, and now the citizens are experiencing moments of anguish and fear, which are reflected daily in all media.
The alarms have gone off among the people because, in one way or another, the most violent acts of drug trafficking in Bolivia used to be recorded in the 1980s -the time of the greatest cocaine boom- far away, in the tropical jungle.
However, now shootings and chases occur with increasing frequency in cities, and now also in important residential areas considered to have the highest security benefits.
This time the shooting was in Urubó, in the municipality of Porongo, just 30 minutes from the zero point of the Santa Cruz capital. It is one of the fastest-growing and most developed residential areas in the country, characterized by having attracted a significant migratory flow from all over the country to the point of being considered one of the regions with the greatest real estate surplus value since a private initiative shaped its vision more than 25 years ago.
In other words, it seems that control of drug trafficking has been completely lost in Bolivia. The previous week, the media recorded the escape of a dozen drug inmates from the Palmasola prison, one of the highest security prisons in the country. They simply jumped over the perimeter wall like in the Charlie Chaplin movies, using a bundle of sheets.
Some were quickly re-captured, but not before offering resistance by opening a shootout with the police in a university area, but the news ended up generating more mockery and ridicule against the police, that alert, reject and socially condemn criminals considered highly dangerous.
In the case of Urubó, Misael Nallar was arrested, who was identified as the son of Lima Lobo, considered a “big fish” of drug trafficking, but he was not captured, but detained because after escaping in his own plane to Beni, he decided to return to Santa Cruz to surrender voluntarily.
Also curiously, a judge decided this week to release one of the two most dangerous detainees in the Las Londras case, where businessmen, police officers, and journalists were kidnapped and tortured just a few months ago, a case about which there is a complaint, evidence, and witnesses in plenty.
But despite the fact that the Urubó massacre is a series of news items still in development, it will not be surprising that in a few days they will be forgotten both by the media and by the citizenry as a whole, as has happened with countless other similar events, simply because the citizens so decide because drug traffickers have been allowed to be part of their environment as long as there is financing for their degenerate parties.
THE SIMILE WITH THE COLOMBIA OF THE 80s
The cocalero power in Bolivia had not gone as far as Pablo Escobar in Colombia, planting bombs on commercial airliners or car bombs in the main cities of the country. Their scope of action was always developed in rural areas of the Cochabamba Chapare with the continuous blockade of the country’s main highways in the 1990s.
But already in the 2000s, together with organizations from the rest of the country and especially from the highlands, they moved to the cities to install authentic urban guerrillas such as those of the Water War or Black February and Black October of 2003, which caused the overthrow of then Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.
That is to say, the power of drug trafficking has unsuspected scope, but at the same time, and contrary to what was said about the Chapare a few days ago, which seemed like a “small Mexico”, the similarities between what happens in the cities seem to be greater with Pablo Escobar’s Colombia in the 1980s.
Of course, Escobar did not manage to take all the state institutions of the country under his command as the cocalero power of the MAS has done in Bolivia, which has in its hands the Executive, Legislative, and undoubtedly also the Judicial powers.
THESE ARE NOT JUST ISOLATED EVENTS
Well, if perhaps in Bolivia certain values have not yet been lost to socially condemn drug trafficking, to combat it is necessary to understand its true dimension, which goes far beyond the borders of this country.
To begin with, how curious that all this happens after Evo Morales, coca grower chief of the Chapare, was accusing the government of Arce Catacora for months of covering up drug trafficking after publishing some police audios as alleged evidence, and that he has also been whipping to his Minister of Government, Eduardo del Castillo, for being an “accomplice of the right and the empire” and for being “working for the DEA”, and that, at the same time, there is no ex officio investigation in this regard by the Ministry Public.
In short, it is not necessary to insist that it is becoming increasingly difficult for acts of violence to be carried out even by the police themselves, and as little proof of this are the cases of former government officials René Sanabria a few years ago or Maximiliano Dávila (noted for links with drug traffickers) at the beginning of the year, but nothing has been heard about the latter.
Simultaneously, and also while the entire International Community as a whole echoes the merciless execution that former President Jeanine Áñez receives, they released one of those from Las Londras.
But what should draw the most attention from all this is that drug trafficking is not only treated and considered the most common practice in the daily life of all citizens, but it is increasingly difficult to stay away from it.
It is not that each one of the country’s inhabitants is dedicated to drug trafficking, although there are more and more who seem to be willing to give in to this dangerous temptation, but rather that, among other aspects, drug trafficking is also an entire money laundering industry of assets throughout the country, and especially in Santa Cruz, according to those most knowledgeable in the matter.
All scruple has been lost. It is increasingly common to find people who boast of fortunes built overnight without being able to justify their origin, but also without having to give further explanations.
UNDERSTAND THE DRUG TRAFFICKING SCHEME IN ITS ENTIRE DIMENSION
The figure of drug traffickers has even ended up being admired and revered throughout Latin America through one or another documentary without great importance on cable channels such as the Discovery Channel, even dozens of movies and Netflix series that without any subtlety exalt the figure of drug traffickers like Escobar and his lifestyle.
None of this would be a problem -it is part of freedom of expression after all- if there were awareness of the extent of crime in all spheres, but the especially explosive combination of drug trafficking and the promises of creating heaven on earth that socialism offers -conveniently called “populism” by those who like euphemisms to wash their faces- in politics have ended up destroying the fundamental values of life, liberty and private property that used to be respected at least more frequently before Morales was in power.
Morales did not dare to plant bombs on commercial planes or car bombs in cities, nor did Escobar become president of Colombia, and who knows which one did more damage from his own field of action, but there is no doubt that the challenge of combating crime in the region has taken on a special character recently with the election of Gustavo Petro to the presidency.
Petro, the communist and guerrilla of the M-19, a friend and adviser to Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, who has a share in indoctrinating him, is a friend of Morales. He has spoken in favor of him on numerous occasions, and for him there was a coup against the coca grower chief in 2019, not a monumental fraud, as the entire International Community affirms. So it will not be strange that the rise of transnational drug trafficking stops soon, so the least that is expected to contain the rise of socialist drug trafficking, even if it is in small proportions, is social repudiation in every place where they operate.
THE VENEZUELAN-IRANIAN PLANE DETAINED IN ARGENTINA THAT BOLIVIA HAD TO RESCUE
It is incredible that in Bolivia this news has not generated any repercussion, but it has to do with something very serious that has been happening in the region for many years, but fortunately the Argentine press has taken care of it in the best way.
A couple of weeks ago, a Venezuelan-Iranian Emtrasur plane was detained in Buenos Aires after an alert sent by the United States Treasury authorities, about the entry of a plane with observed registration and with sanctions.
The alert was received by Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina, but it was not until the flight with a crew from the Iranian Quds Force terrorist organization turned off the transponder to go unnoticed on the radars and turned at the last minute towards Córdoba “due to to bad weather conditions.”
To begin with, the cargo plane claimed to be carrying cigarette packs to Aruba, but for Joseph Humire, a specialist in security, defense and counterterrorism, director of the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS) in the United States, the fact that it was actually carrying auto parts and not cigarettes, and that the landing was in Córdoba, is to carry out a secret military operation linked to Venezuela’s drone program in which Iran collaborates directly, since an important Argentine military weapons factory is located there.
The investigations in Argentina continue to be carried out while the crew of that plane is detained, but what has been discovered so far is the confirmation that the commander of the plane is a member of an Iranian terrorist force, who also kept material in this regard that betrays him.
But even more interesting is the fact that not long after this arrest in Argentina, a flight from Conviasa, a commercial line linked to Emtrasur and also sanctioned, landed in Viru Viru, Santa Cruz, to pick up this crew. Later it was also learned that instead of Conviasa picking up this crew, it was actually a Boliviana de Aviación (BoA) plane that should have done so, but said plane was later denied permission to flight.
When will citizens not only in Bolivia, but in the entire Latin American region once and for all realize the true dimension of the problem that the one who has really ended up taking power is narco-socialist terrorism?
What happened to Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 is what happened to Mauricio Macri, Sebastián Piñera, Iván Duque and now Guillermo Lasso gives an account of all this. There is nothing left but to continue abounding in the matter to continue noticing it, until things fall of their own weight.
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