i was driving along listening to npr today and heard this hella crazy story. this reporter was talking about his experiences in this one area in columbia. i guess this area is ruled by these militant drug lords, but somehow he was able to get permission to be there. so he was saying that cocaine farming etc was so prevalent there and that it was such a crucial part of the economy etc, that a lot of people in town used it as *money*. i guess people will go to restaurants, and pay their restaurant tab w\/ coke. or they’ll go to the doctor and pay the doctor w\/ coke. or they’ll go to the candy store and buy their children candy… and pay for it with cocaine. this guy would see large groups of people just setting up huge tarps in the street and drying out huge piles of cocaine.<\/p>\n
how crazy is that?? it’s so shocking to think that there could be a place where cocaine is so pervasive. i guess this reporter guy has all sorts of really hardcore photos of his experience in National Geographic.<\/p>\n
after reading up about this a bit, it turns out that the area he was talking about is a section of columbia that was basically conquered by this group called Farc. this group is so violent and deadly that the government of columbia has no way of stopping them. they basically just took this area over, and now force the people who live there to grow cocaine and pay farc a “tax”. they reportedly make about 300 million dollars a year. it’s pretty crazy to think that areas like this exist. areas that are completely lawless and ruled by whoever has the most guns. <\/p>\n
in the year 2000, they announced a new policy: “[The FARC resolves to] collect the TAX FOR PEACE from those persons or corporations whose wealth is greater than $1,000,000 in U.S. dollars\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6Those who do not attend to this requirement, shall be detained. Their liberation shall depend upon the payment of the determined sum. PUBLISH AND COMPLY.” in other words, they will kidnap anyone in columbia who is wealthy and owns more than a million dollars.<\/p>\n
here’s a link to the national geographic article<\/a><\/p>\n some more stuff about the Farc<\/a><\/p>\n *v<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" i was driving along listening to npr today and heard this hella crazy story. this reporter was talking about his experiences in this one area in columbia. i guess this area is ruled by these militant drug lords, but somehow he was able to get permission to be there. so he was saying that cocaine … Continue reading “cocaine”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-san-francisco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}