The Most Dangerous Road in the World

On May 16th, an armed gang of men stormed an isolated dairy in northern Guatemala.  After the workers on the farm were unable to tell the gang where the owner was, they were tied up, hacked with machetes, and beheaded.  27 farm laborers were slaughtered; only one worker who feigned death lived to report what happened.

While authorities do not yet know who committed this atrocity, they suspect the violent drug trafficking gang of Los Zetas.  Local police believe that the owner of the farm had ties to or was involved in a rival drug trafficking network that had made a move on the Zetas’ operations.  

Unfortunately, this horrific event is not an isolated incident.  Over the past decade, Central America has become the most murderous region in the world with shockingly high homicide rates throughout the isthmus.  To provide some context, the murder rate in Seattle is 4 while San Pedro Sula (where I lived) has a rate of 92.

This terrible state is a direct result of the wildly lucrative drug (and specifically cocaine) trade.  The UN estimates in this tremendous study that the cocaine market alone in the US is worth $38 billion.  By comparison, Amazon had sales of $34 billion last year.  And because the drug industry has higher barriers to entry than online retailing (refer to new competitor entry leading to a massacre), I imagine that it enjoys healthier profit margins.  One of my friends in Honduras told me that you can buy a line of coke in Honduras for $5 as compared to $50 or $60 in the US.  And Honduras isn’t even a producer of cocaine, it just unhappily happens to lie on the main highway from producer to consumer.  

Up until the 1990’s, the largest flows of cocaine traveled from main producers of Bolivia and Colombia across the Caribbean and into the US via Miami and other southern ports of entry.  But no longer.  As the US Coast Guard beefed up patrols, the drug trade moved from water to land.  Unfortunately, the small, cash-strapped governments of Central America have been unable to cope.  They cannot afford to sink the same amount of resources into combating the trade that the US could.  In fact, according to wikileaks, the Nicaraguan government was using the profits from the drug trade to subsidize its own operations.  As the gangs that transport the drugs become more entrenched, the region becomes ever more dangerous and more under the sway of corruption.

All of this begs the question, what can, or should the US do?  Recent articles in Foreign Affairs and The Economist both argue for behind the scenes leadership and increases in targeted funding to the region.  However, knowing so much better than both of these institutions, I would contend that that is not the answer.  

In my mind, the gangs and those that work for them are merely rational, profit seeking actors, just like everyone else.  If I were a poor Honduran that had little education, no legitimate job prospects, but a chance to make it big selling drugs, who knows what I might do.  Keeping in mind that the industry (again thinking of only cocaine sales in the US) is worth $38 billion, less minor production costs, we can expect that, as a whole, the gangs would be willing to invest up to that amount in “logistics”, weapons, and influence to turn a profit.  In this light, the $80 million a year promised by Obama on a recent trip to Central America is hardly anything.

I think that instead of incremental increases in funding for the war on drugs, taller walls on the US-Mexico border, and more border patrol agents, the US needs to consider a drastically new approach and move the drug trade out of the hands of the gangs.  I’m open to new ideas but legalizing the use and sale of illicit drugs seems like the most promising.  This is of course a highly controversial idea and to be honest, I’m not entirely sure of its merits (I need to research more), but I know that the current approach, unless we are willing to spend $40 billion a year, will not work.  If drugs were legal, the US could regulate the production, the quality, and the sale (to some extent).  It could also better monitor users AND capitalize on significant sin taxes, just as with cigarettes and the lottery.  And for those that argue that legalized drugs in the US would be a catastrophe, how could it possibly be any worse than the daily horrors that happen in Central America?

 

Bubble Charts, hooray

I read an interesting article from Brookings on the change in where the poorest people in the world are living, and how this affects what the development world should focus on. This got me thinking, but I wanted more detail beyond the 2x2 box of low/middle income and stable/fragile states. But aha, here it is: Poverty in numbers, the changing state of poverty from 2005 to 2015.

This second paper is a long, detailed document, but from an initial scan, they do a great job of presenting easy to understand and visually compelling graphics. I'm especially a fan of these bubble graphs, using which the reader can immediately visually understand the relative magnitude of poverty in different regions and countries, instead of having to think about how numbers relate to each other.

This screen grab is rather hard to discern, so if you view the original document the image is on page 8. What's interesting is that China gets considerably smaller (although it would have made better sense to keep it in the same position in the 2015 graph), and in fact almost all of East Asia drops off. 2015 is dominated by South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and some SSA countries even grow in size (DRC). It's also interesting to see how Latin America, while rife with its own set of problems, represents a small slice of the pie population-wise.

TZ in the house (almost)

I guess since GL already put Tanzania into the header, I better go ahead and post.

I'm a first year medical student with some experience in consulting. I'll be heading to Iringa, Tanzania in 15 days to help out with the national government's male circumcision (MC) campaign (the most effective service for HIV prevention, more on this later) and help start a research project looking at how best to scale up MC services. Where GL brought you the latest from the field on potatoes, and BM brings you the latest on maize, I will hopefully be bringing you the latest on...penises.

But let's get to know each other a little better before discussing male genitalia. Like GL and BM, I'm interested in development and how my career, especially as a future MD, can fit into this world. This summer in Iringa will be my first experience working overseas, and I'm hoping it will answer my question of how much field work I want to include in my future.

I'm also excited just to be out in the world. I'm currently in the process of booking a safari trip through the Serengeti, Ngorongoro crater, and Tanrangire. (If you're going to be in East Africa the first week of August and want to join a safari with two intrepid Seattle natives/want to help me lower my costs, please let me know).

I'm spending most of my last days in the US scrolling through flickr pages of Tanzania. I'm also starting Peter Matthiessen's The Tree Where Man Was Born, which is so far a beautiful book about overlanding in East Africa. The book was originally published in 1972, and the map of Ethiopia includes a full northern coastline, with no Eritrea (which won independence from Ethiopia through a bitter war ending in 1993). It's strange to remember how quickly the world changes.

Since I'm still in St. Louis, here's a photo from my most recent trip, albeit to Prague.

Transition Post

News flash: I’m back from Honduras and have been for about a month now.  I haven’t posted anything in a while and was considering letting the blog rest in peace... but I’m deciding not too.  

 

However, I do want to make some changes.  Since I’m now in the boring ol’ US (AKA the greatest country in the world), I’ll be posting less travel related topics and focusing more on issues in international development and current events.  But don’t despair.  I’m actively seeking interesting travel commentary from two others that will be in Mozambique and Tanzania (respectively, of course and respectfully, we hope) to keep things fresh.  From time to time, I might be able to pull in other peeps that are currently based in the developed world.

So, hope this news finds you well and is received well.  Carry on and hopefully I’ll be back soon.

 

Dictators & Dalliances in the Arab World

Good or bad news, depending on your perspective, the CD Times is not dead!  Although, for the time being, it will shift its focus from travel related posts and deal more with internation news and development topics.  In that vein, my good friend Ben has agreed to share a guest post.  Ben is a Brit who has chosen to live in the US after extensive work in both the UK and the Middle East (specifically the UAE).  Hope you find his thoughts provocative (yep, that is the word I wanted to use).  Take it away Ben:

It was with one eyebrow raised that I digested media coverage of recent events in the Middle East: Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, etc.

When it was the turn of Egypt, at first there was jubilation at the imminent collapse of a brutal, unfair dictatorship and a move to a more democratic society.  That’s good, right?  One of the secondary benefits of the ludicrously-named “war on terror” was always supposed to be facilitating regime change.  But, hold on!  That brutal, unfair dictatorship had been helpful to us in maintaining our agenda of protecting Israel.  Then the hand-wringing began – is it better to have a brutal, unfair dictatorship that does what we want, or a lovely democracy that might decide that it won’t do what we want?  Heavens, what a choice!  Time to roll out the (mostly ill-informed) pundits to tell us that there would be a good chance that something called the Muslim Brotherhood might be in charge.  That doesn’t sound good, does it, children!?  Never mind any material facts about the M.B.; the facts have no place on prime-time current affairs shows.

And now we’ve whacked bin Laden.  While he was a ghastly man, I can’t be happy about his killing.

Let’s make no bones: this killing is the death penalty without a trial.  And, more broadly, there should be a level of discomfort with any nation deciding to enter another nation’s territory’s and knock off people it doesn’t like (even for compelling reasons).  What next – an Iraqi is entitled to whack Donald Rumsfeld for the 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq?   The Colombians going to London and taking out an anti-drug campaigner who threatens the profitability of the cocaine trade?  Anyone can go to Nigeria and kill an internet service provider for facilitating the spam that annoys us all?  (GL: Actually...)

The press in the United States have glossed over the fundamental issue of whether the killing was morally right, and legally ...ahem…executed, in order to speculate on Pakistan’s knowledge of bin Laden’s presence.

Let’s examine this in a historical context.  At the end of the second World War, the British were in favor of summary executions for the Nazi leadership.  President Truman – not a man given to weak-will; he ordered the dropping of atomic bombs, after all – responded thus:

“[Summary execution] would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride.  The only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear”

So it brings us back to the conversation about Egypt and democratic rights.  We have fulfilled the mission in Afghanistan; to bring bin Laden to justice.  Now we can come home, one expects?  We’ve toppled the government that gave Al-Qaida a safe haven, and implemented some crude democracy (let’s gloss over the thousands of innocent dead for a moment).  But what if the Afghan people choose a government which advocates anti-U.S. policies?

And how does that square with the intervention previously exerted by the United States in overthrowing democratic regimes to install dictatorships with a direct line to the CIA?

What a conundrum.