Dear President Obama,
Please give us lots of money or we will bury you in cocaine.
Yours truly,
Colombia
BOGOTA (Reuters [7]) - Colombia is confident Washington will keep providing multimillion-dollar aid to fight the drug trade in the Andean nation because any cuts would mean more cocaine reaches U.S. cities, the defense minister said on Saturday.
This is what's called an empty threat (although you could also call it extortion). I mean really, how much more cocaine could they possibly produce? Eradication doesn’t work, so nothing bad will happen if we stop doing it. How can you argue about results like this:
Critics say Plan Colombia has failed to stop the spread of coca cultivation in recent years and point to steady cocaine output in the world's No. 1 producer of the drug.
According to U.N. figures, Colombian coca crops covered some 244,600 acres at the end of 2007 -- 27 percent more than the previous year.
But Santos said he expected the strategy to be maintained because it was backed by both Democrats and Republicans. He called it "the most successful bipartisan U.S. foreign policy of recent times."
…If by successful you mean that people keeping funding it. It's hard to imagine how much worse this program would have to perform before its benefactors became embarrassed by it. I swear, Colombian cocaine production could increase tenfold in a year and these guys would look you right in the eye and tell you Plan Colombia has never worked better.
This is nuts and Obama has zero excuses for even thinking about funding this crap. It is the definition of a failed policy and we are in the midst of an unfathomable economic crisis. There has never been a better time to tell our friends in Colombia that this game of make-believe is over.