Payback's A Bitch

I heard Vicky Burnett, a reporter for the International Herald Tribune being interviewed on NPR this morning, and she was talking about a recent trend in cocaine trafficking. Seems there’s a reduction in demand in the US (See, Nancy, those “Just Say No!” buttons are finally paying off…or we’ve discovered other, more fashionable ways to get high) so the goods (because it’s not exactly true that if demand dries up, supplies dry up….supplies are just marketed elsewhere) are now getting smuggled from South America to Europe. Another factor influencing the change in market patterns is the strength of the Euro against the American dollar.

But how, the NPR reporter asked, are cocaine traffickers getting through European restrictions?

Simple, Burnett said. They’re going through Africa. Certain countries with, say, a looser interpretation of the law and greedier warlords, such as Ivory Coast, Nigeria and others, have formed sophisticated syndicates that filter Bolivian marching powder from Latin and South America to the youth of Africa’s former colonial slavemasters. And Africa is rapidly becoming the hub for the American supply, as well.

Like I always say, karma is going to get you sometime. If not right away, in your next life. Or your next. Take that, White Man. It took a while, but I knew they’d find a way.

Meanwhile, in the US, we are funneling millions and millions of dollars to Africa, to help combat AIDS and feed the starving children. Bush promises new initiatives (read, “large sums of money that make him look good but could have helped people here”) for Africa. Even “American Idol” got into the act, showing starving African children crying into the cameras because their lives are so hard, while American kids sit on their ever-spreading rumps IM’ing each other and playing video games.

The warlords were probably watching that show and laughing their asses off.

I wonder how much of that money is actually going to the people who need it. If the children are getting fed, if they’re getting new schools and books, if the ones with HIV are getting medicine. Or if the warlords are just feathering their nests or buying Russian-made rocket launchers and automatic weapons and other armaments to protect their new drug interests.

And how would we ever know if any of the help is getting through? A camera, and the proper spin, can show anything. If the American right-leaning media can take an anti-war protest of, say, a thousand people or so and make it look like a hundred, what’s to say the warlords can’t make their own propaganda, and show a bunch of happy, shod children in a brand new school, show clinics where the HIV-positive are getting medication. Or coerce or pay them, like Sadaam Hussein used to do, to crowd into the streets with signs and raised fists, protesting European interference, when really, if they knew they could get away with it, any one of these men would strangle Hussein with their bare hands.

So how will we ever know the real story?

Perhaps this administration, and succeeding ones, should look more carefully at the goings-on in the countries to which they promise aid. And Sting, Bono, American Idol and the like should do the same.

And why aren’t our pop idols, with their power to draw money, doing their thing where it really counts – like giving the people of Iraq money to rebuild their lives, or helping draw more attention to the genocide in Darfur?

Or better yet, make them honorary Red Cross workers, and send them there. But we’d better be careful whom we send, because we might find some unintended cargo in their private jets.