Legal problems in the Piedad Cordoba case

A few weeks ago I wrote about Piedad Cordoba, the Colombian senator who is being ousted from office by the Inspector General. I am linking here to a follow-up article, pointing out the technical grounds on which the evidence used to charge Cordoba, namely a computer obtained during a hot-pursuit raid into Ecuador, is invalid. First off, the Inspector General's authority only extends to Colombian territory, except in cases where agreements with other countries allow him to operate there. Hence he is not authorized to use evidence obtained abroad in a military raid. Furthermore, the computer was obtained during a military operation in foreign territory, with no judicial orders to collect it as evidence. Colombian law demands an intact chain of custody, whereby evidence is obtained only through judicial order and protected by authorities so it can't be tampered with. Thus the chain of custody is not at all reliable, so the computer has no validity as evidence in Colombia.

Anyway, I thought this was a valuable legal insight into the Piedad Cordoba case

Ray LaHood, Transportation Secretary of the US

Thanks to my cousin for this interview with Ray LaHood. He talks about improving the livability of communities through more walking and bike paths and better mass transit options. I like his harking back to the US of the 1950s, when cars existed but didn't dominate the way people lived, worked, thought, built, etc. The Peoria of his childhood was a place where you could live without a car.

Haiti construction guide

Here is an article announcing the release of a new, Kreyol guide for earthquake-resistant construction.

French vegetable farmers

I am linking to the website of Adrien and Fanny, two ex-classmates of mine from France. After finishing their degree in sustainable agricultural development, they decided to become farmers. They will grow organic vegetables for the local market of a small town. They have graciously been documenting their farming progress on their blog.

A Colombian Homestead Act

Resettlement of internally displaced people on the Eastern Plains of Colombia

Thomas Jefferson firmly believed in the importance of small farms and independent farmers. He knew that the survival of political democracy would be strengthened by the sense of belonging and the economic growth favored by a landscape of careful, hardworking people who are as concerned with their land as they are with their country. And conversely, Jefferson denounced the folly of poverty in the cities so long as land was available and idle, waiting for people to farm.

A landscape of productive small farms spread evenly across a territory is a landscape of prosperity, peace, and democracy. Most countries that are wealthy today are so in large part because at some point in their history they realized the importance of supporting small farmers. To this end, many of these now-wealthy countries enacted some type of land reform, to ensure that every rural family would have enough land to prosper, and that no one family would have so much land as to be unproductive, or so as to have a dominant influence in local politics or economies.

In Colombia today, much of the agricultural land is unevenly distributed, with some people controlling a disproportionate share, and other people relegated to parcels too small to support a family, or without any land at all.

Land reform usually implies taking land from some owners (ideally with compensation) and giving it to others. This is never easy, because it implies making hard decisions that impact people's private property. In Colombia, the situation of drastic land inequality, and attempts to address this problem by government, citizens, and illegal armed groups, have led to much conflict, most recently the civil war that has plagued the country for over 40 years. This war and prior conflicts have left millions of displaced people (IDPs, or internally displaced persons) in their wake. These people are both victims of the conflict, and a risk for future conflict, because many illegal armed groups recruit soldiers from these displaced populations, and much urban poverty and crime is concentrated in these groups.

The ideal solution for the problems of conflict and IDPs in Colombia would be a return of displaced people to their home regions, accompanied by a land reform to give them land and support so they can become independent, prosperous farm owners. Such return and support efforts are currently being carried out, and they should continue to be the central point of any program intending to address the root causes of the conflict and its victims.

However, given the tenacity of the Colombian conflict and the contentious nature of agrarian reform, return of IDPs to their homelands and land redistribution is not feasible in all cases.

Another trend underway in Colombia today is the colonization of the Eastern Plains that drain into the Orinoco river. What were open plains inhabited if at all by a low density of cowboys and indigenous groups, are now being opened up to new enterprises. Often these activities generate relatively low profit per person and per hectare. Examples are palm oil plantations and cattle ranches. Sometimes unscrupulous businesspeople even take hold of the land with hired guns, which ends up creating even more displaced people!

This is truly shameful, because the settling of the Eastern Plains is a golden opportunity to give displaced people from other regions the means to become independent, prosperous farmers. Just as the Homestead Act in the USA allowed poor people from other regions and even other countries to create a new life in the newly-opened West, Colombia's Plains could be a place where victims of the internal conflict rebuild their lives and strengthen the country as a whole, both politically and economically. A program to settle virgin lands on the Eastern Plains would make land and resources available to displaced people while avoiding the conflict and tension intrinsic to the redistribution of land in already-settled areas. That said, it must be stressed again that such a program should be a complement to, and not a replacement for, the return of IDPs to their home regions and an attendant redistribution of land there, wherever this is feasible. To solely promote resettlement of displaced people is to ignore the primary moral obligation of every country to protect its people and allow them to live in their own homes. Resettlement should be an option mainly for displaced people who have decided it would be better to start a new life away from their region of origin.

A program for colonization of the Eastern Plains, like any type of land reform, must be done in a holistic, sincere fashion. There exist too many examples in the world of land reform or colonization programs that have failed because they were poorly thought-out or cynically sabotaged. As an example we can point to some of Brazil's programs to give poor people land in different areas of the Amazon rainforest. On the poor soils of the Amazon, if granting land to the poor is not accompanied by a genuine technical and logistical support network (teaching of appropriate farming methods, building of roads, establishment of cooperative marketing channels, etc.), people that settle the land will soon exhaust the soil's resources. They then must move on to new patches of virgin forest, and the parcels that they leave are often bought up by the very large ranchers and farmers whose monopoly on land the State was trying to counterbalance with the land colonization program! The effect of such a situation is an advancing front of environmental destruction by poor farmers, followed by a wave of land consolidation by larger farmers.

Another important point to keep in mind for a program to colonize the Eastern Plains is that it must be centered on the displaced people who will be its primary beneficiaries. This means that they should as much as possible also be the planners and implementers of the program, as it is they who will have to live with its results. This not only makes practical sense, but also psychological sense. The defining characteristic of displacement is a lack of control. Displaced people have no control over the conflict that victimizes them, the myriad social programs that attempt to serve them, or the new economies that they must try to survive in in their new urban refuges. The program of colonization must favor the rebuilding of autonomy and confidence for displaced people.

What follows are the technical details of a proposed agrarian reform to settle displaced people on the Eastern Plains of Colombia.

An area of 10 km by 10 km would be chosen for resettlement of IDPs. This would be split into one-square-kilometer sections with roads running between each section (hence leaving a checkerboard of roads at one kilometer intervals). Each section would be further split into nine square plots of ten hectares each. Eight families would be settled on the section, one on each ten hectare plot. The ten hectares in the center would be split into eight pasture plots of 1.25 ha each, and each family given one of these to use for animal grazing.

For each square kilometer plot, the beneficiary families, a social worker, an architect, and engineers would work together to design and build houses and install infrastructure. Green building practices would be valued throughout, such as house-level renewable energy sources, hand wells, composting toilets, construction with local materials, and wood-burning stoves where natural wood resources allow for sustainable harvesting. As the houses and farms are being assembled, the group would live in a group house with a garden, in the center of the square kilometer plot. They would learn about harmonious living and agriculture. Once families are settled on their individual plots, this group house would become a community meeting-place in the middle of the pasture area.

There would be a prior agrarian diagnostic in the area to determine viable crops, water management needs, soil amendments, etc. Each family of displaced people would make a production plan with neighbors and agronomists, designed to earn the family 2M pesos yearly agricultural profit/ha. Other, non-agricultural activities are welcome but would not count towards the family's per-hectare profit. This is in order to promote agricultural productivity and avoid idle land. A credit union created for the resettlement program would extend the family credit (in the name of the female head of the family) based on the agricultural production plan, which would include a repayment schedule.

A close following by experts and the community itself would prevent fraud and maximize land productivity. There would be agricultural experts to assess and follow the project ideas, plus social experts to ease the transition, encourage group cohesion, solve psychosocial problems, and organize cooperative action and collective marketing. In the farming plans, emphasis would be placed on ecologically-friendly and labor-intensive practices, high value products, and animal traction. Communities would also get input and collaboration from other farmer groups, especially those working to recuperate and market traditional, high-value crops. Possible allies would be the Las Gaviotas community in Colombia, the MST of Brazil, and Amish farmers from the US. Such outside farmers could even be ceded plots to live among the resettled populace, teaching and learning from them.

Each family's production plan would be monitored by agricultural experts and neighbors to ensure economic and ecological viability. Those families that fall below a yearly profit of 1 M pesos/ha would receive extra extension help to bring their productivity back up, and if productivity is below 500k/ha for 5 straight years, the family forfeits the land (with compensation given them for capital improvements). If the family achieves 5 years above 1M/ha, the land is theirs, though if a family plants a certain density of trees on its land, each forested hectare only needs to achieve 500k/ha to count toward the five years to ownership. For the following five years there is a conditionality that if they fall below 500k/ha for three years, they must sell back to the State. Likewise, during these first five years after achieving ownership, landowners desiring to sell may only sell to the State at a pre-determined price, and the State would then repurpose the land for new beneficiaries. Also, during the probationary period as well as after families become outright owners, there would be regular ecological assessments by neighbors and experts to assure that soil organic matter is increasing, there is no agricultural runoff, not more than 1 hectare is planted in a given crop any year, etc.

A 10 km x 10 km settlement area would be surrounded by a 1 km wide border of grazing land, and 1.5 km of nature area, hence each settlement area would actually comprise 15 km x 15 km. The grazing land could be managed communally among the families of the resettlement area, or divided into 20 hectare parcels for families to settle and raise livestock (families with 20 ha plots in the grazing fringe need only net 500000 pesos/ha on their land for five years to attain ownership). These buffer areas would preserve the traditional cattle ranching vocation of the Plains, as well as minimizing wildlife incursion into human settlements, and absorbing runoff and pollution from human activities. There would ideally be fences at the interface of the grazing and farming lands, and the grazing and wilderness lands, and these fences could be studded with windmill electric generators to supplement the local electricity supply.

There would be a town at the center of the resettlement area. This urban site would have land for a grain silo, supply and equipment depots, fire and police departments, garbage disposal, school, communal vehicles to serve as ambulance, fire truck, and bulk freight and transport, a radio station, a town square and town hall, internet access, sports fields, clinic, with other enterprises created as needed (cocoa-dryer, milk pasteurizer, etc.). Most of these services would be cooperatively run by local volunteers. There would also be some lots in the central town allocated to private businesses, owned and run also by displaced families and assessed yearly based on economic and social viability (in a manner similar to the farm plots). Any professional positions (doctors, etc.) that the community can't provide on a volunteer basis would be hired with local money, and from the ranks of local people whenever possible. The funds for this would be collected through an agreed-upon local tax on agricultural production. The school could follow the Escuela Nueva or EFA models, which are appropriate for high-quality education in resource-poor agrarian communities.

Resources for the resettlement program would come from a mix of local, departmental, national, and even international sources. Interested municipalities would give the land to be settled (any existing landowners would be allowed to maintain ten hectares in the area, with compensation for the remaining land paid at a standard assessed rate, in municipal, departmental, or national government bonds). The departmental and national governments would build roads, provide phone and radio towers, electric supply, and some services like the police department. Money to fund the credit union making farm loans would come from international donors. For the plan to work, we would need a hands-off agreement from all armed groups. Oil or mineral rights for the subsoil would be conceded only conditionally to outside firms, with strict environmental clauses.

Operative plan to implement this project:

• Start with NGO or municipality with 1 x 1km plot as a demonstration, and expand if successful.

• The resettlement areas could eventually be planned either in 10km x 10km areas, or in larger 50km x 50km areas (in both cases with the aforementioned strips dedicated to grazing and wilderness areas). With ten hectares per family, and a goal of serving 1M displaced and landless families in Colombia, we would need 10M hectares, or 100000 km2, which is to say a thousand 10km x 10km areas, or forth 50km x 50km areas.

• The resettlement project would not only serve displaced people, but the rural and urban poor and landless. Someday immigrants from other countries could be encouraged to take part in the settlement of the Eastern Plains.

• Most of the details described here apply to resettlement in the Plains, but the project could be implemented as well in sparsely-populated mountainous areas (such as southern Bolivar), seasonally-flooded areas such as the Sinu region, and forest areas on the Pacific coast and Amazonia. In the case of swamp areas, the plan would involve a recuperation of the ancient agricultural raised mounds in the landscape. In rainforest areas, families would be given 50 ha plots (half a square kilometer) adjacent to indigenous reserves. Resettled families would learn from indigenous neighbors how to manage forest land sustainably, and would be allowed to clear only one hectare a year for logging and farming. Annual crops and selective lumber extraction would be supplemented by fruit trees, harvesting of natural forest products, and hunting according to accepted native practice.

Carlos the Jackal

Here is an article about French director Olivier Assayas and his new film, "Carlos". The film sounds really interesting to me, in spite of (or because of?) its 5-hour-plus running time. It makes me think of two years ago around this time, when I was in Chicago for a month and a local art theater was showing Steven Soderbergh's 4.5-hour epic about Che Guevara. It was a really cool setup--with your ticket they gave you a program with all the film credits and a bunch of beautiful stills. As I settled into my seat I looked at my fellow filmgoers, feeling that we were in some sort of a fraternity that was going to embark on this long cinematic journey for the next few hours. There were no credits to open the film (that's what the program booklet was for), just an image of Cuba with an orchestral score played over it, and then the film started. There was an intermission mid-way, with more orchestral scoring.

Anyway, I haven't seen "Carlos", and probably won't for some time, given my geographic limitations. The local cineplex in our town shows mainly drivel like "Alvin and the Chipmunks part 8" or "My Neighbor is a Spy". Yesterday night, my wife and I went to see "The Box" with Cameron Diaz. I initially thought it was decent, much better than our theater's typical fare, but afterward my wife helped me realize that it was rambling, preposterous, and pretentious.

In fact, I didn't even know anything about Carlos the Jackal until recently. I had heard the name before, but I thought it might be a Bond villain or a semi-fictional figure. Only after hearing something about the new film did I do a quick wikipedia research on him. What I learned is that Carlos was an international assassin-for-hire in the employ of different Eastern bloc and Arab countries. He seems like a really interesting figure, because his rhetoric was along the lines of Marxist revolution, but he worked a lot with different Arab movements, many of them (like Saddam Hussein or the Sudanese government) anything but leftist or revolutionary. And it seems that before his capture in 1994, and to the present day, his rhetoric lines up more with Islamic revolutionaries than with Marxists.

This for me is fascinating, because Carlos represents sort of a missing link in my understanding of geopolitics. In the US we always talk about how the Cold War had a logic we could understand, and then one day it was over and we were in a world of just one superpower and a bunch of Islamist terrorists. No one seems to understand how it all happened, or how to deal with today's world. I took a class on the history of the Islamic world once, and even there it wasn't clear to me how the Middle East seemed to go from a bunch of secular movements (Nasserism, pan-Arabism, Baathism, Communism, Palestinian liberation) to sort of a political void with a bunch of Islamist movements bouncing around. There was an essential disconnect. Well now learning a bit about Carlos the Jackal, I feel I understand better how the political discourse of leftist insurgency didn't just dissolve and get replaced by Islamist insurgency, but rather that maybe the one merged into the other. This seems to be supported by the fact that certain Islamist insurgent heavyweights of today were themselves secular insurgents a generation ago.

This new revelation comes at the same time that I've gained a new interest in Afghanistan. In particular, I've become convinced that all the warlords and Talibans and insurgent groups in Afghanistan aren't so alien or hard to understand as I'd thought. Again, I feel like we in the States assume that Islamist insurgents are totally impossible to understand to a Western mind. We ascribe to them an almost superhuman purity and extremism, taking their discourse at face value. If they say they want to ban music and photos, then none of them must listen to music. If they claim complete sexual purity, they must really be more chaste than anyone we've ever met.

But a passage in a book I read recently really surprised me, and flipped some of my assumptions on their head. Apparently in southern and eastern Afghanistan, there is a high incidence of men having sex with men within armed groups. The seclusion of women is even more absolute in these areas than in the rest of the country, and insurgent groups and warlords can spend years on end in the field, fighting. So according to this book, many armed groups have an abundance of teenage boy soldiers that act effeminately, holding hands with their sweetheart companions and adorning themselves with makeup and flowers. There have even been fights and murders among warlords over a coveted young lover. All this in direct contravention of Islamic teaching forbidding homosexuality.

This all makes sense. Ostensibly heterosexual Western men take one another as lovers in certain situations like prison or at sea. This seems to happen regardless of any cultural or religious norms against same-sex relationships. So why wouldn't the same happen in Afghanistan? I guess I had always assumed that Islamic fundamentalists were somehow differently human from the people I know. Pakistan and Afghanistan are a long way away from anywhere I've ever been, so if I'd always heard that people there were somehow fundamentally different from people elsewhere, I guess I took it at face value. This quirky little anecdote about gay warlords somehow made me realize that even people so far away, with such different values, maybe aren't that difficult to understand.

Along the same lines, I've skimmed over some reports recently comparing narcotraffic-financed insurgent groups in Afghanistan with those in Colombia. Again, these would make it seem that armed groups in the Middle East aren't so different from things I'm more familiar with. Just as leftist groups in Colombia compromise their ideological purity by a cynical, nihilistic approach to finance and strategy, Islamist groups in Afghanistan are doing the same.

People aren't that different from one another. I've seen that the baddies in one place act a lot like the baddies elsewhere. And surely the good folk in one place could get along pretty well with good people in another place.

Cuban videos on ecological agriculture

Here is a video in three parts on ecological agriculture in Cuba. It's in Spanish, and the footage is sort of grainy and dull. I don't know why whenever Latin American countries are captured in videos or photos, they look about six times more decrepit and shitty than they really are. The other day I saw a photo of a research center here in Colombia. I've been there in person, and while it's no beauty of a construction, it isn't at all run-down. But in the photo it looked like some beat-up community center in 1980s El Salvador that might appear in a newspaper article about the civil war!

Anyway, here's the video on Cuba. Essentially Cuba went from having one of the world's most industrialized, chemical-intensive farming systems to a totally organic system when the USSR stopped providing cheap machinery and industrial inputs for farming. This transformation was out of necessity, because the necessity inputs simply weren't there anymore. Consequently, Cuba suffered a lot of hunger in the early 90s as it transitioned to a new model of farming. Today the country has solidified a food system based on urban gardening, diversification, and low use of agrochemicals. It's partly out of necessity and scarcity of inputs, but it seems that there now exists a more explicit, considered set of environmental and social values supporting the farming system model.

The shady nuances of microlending

I have long been an advocate of increasing the poor's access to credit. Poor people don't have the capital to invest in their ideas, so credit is a way for them to capitalize. But at the same time, I know that credit is dangerous. The poor don't have the liberty of taking on much additional risk, and unpaid loans can spiral out of control if things don't go according to plan. In particular, while the idea of microcredit that has swept the development arena in the past decade or so has intrigued me, I've had a few concerns about it. First off, microcredit institutions usually charge pretty high interest rates to borrowers. They are probably justified when they say that the high rates are necessary to cover their risk, but it still seems counterintuitive to tout high-interest loans as a positive development for the poor. Secondly, it seems to me that microcredit institutions often lend preferentially to small merchants or other quick-turnover businesses. This is understandable given that the lenders want to recuperate their capital as quickly as possible, but I've always believed that those in most need of loans are farmers. This is why when I talk about credit I tend to favor the idea of government-backed, low-interest agrarian loans, which were key to creating economic growth and well-being in the US and Europe.

Anyway, I still haven't decided what I think of all this, but here are two articles on microlending. The first is a rather sunny prognosis on shareholder-held, for-profit microlending banks, by one of the originators of the phenomenon. The second is a report on some of the problems that microlending institutions are running into (and causing) in India.

Finally, here is a video in which a researcher gives an insightful, nuanced treatment of microfinance.

Two new posts

I've been busy in a million things lately, which is why I haven't been posting to this blog at my normal feverish pace. But I wanted to share two articles I recently wrote for other blogs. One is an homage to the culture and food of the Midwestern US, and the other is the first installment in a series I'll be doing about the rehabbing of my new house. I hope you enjoy them.

Drug policy lessons from Prohibition, Colombia, and Mexico

This is my translation of an article entitled "Estados Unidos: se acerca la legalizacion de las drogas?" from the excellent Razon Publica website.

United States: are we close to legalizing drugs?

It is thought that Washington might change drug policy due to the increasing violence on the US-Mexico border. But the obstacles to legalization are different than in Mexico, and the sources of pressure to legalize are also different.

Prohibition in the US

The violence associated with the narcotrafficking that currently plagues the Mexican side of the border has led various analysts to think that a possible expansion of violence into US territory might lead the US government to legalize drugs. For example, in William Ospina's article "When the monster arrives at the door" in the September 19th edition of El Espectador he affirms:

"Everyone knows when drugs will get legalized. Exactly when narco-violence crosses the border and becomes a security nightmare for the US, as happened with the liquor mafias in the 1920s. During Prohibition, gangsters took over the streets, unleashed weeks of terror on New York and Chicago, corrupted the police and the courts, and cast a shadow of insecurity over the United States. Only then did lawmakers understand that this was not merely a police or legal war, but that Prohibition itself was what gave strength to this clandestine business, and in the end they saw that alcohol was less dangerous than the mafias that sold it."

Of course I share Ospina's position regarding the frustrating inefficiency of current Prohibition-style drug laws. Nevertheless, I differ in certain points of his prognosis relating to these policies in the United States.

A gangster a week

Firstly, the violence in Chicago and New York during Prohibition was not comparable to the violence that Colombia lived in the 1980s and 90s, or that which Mexico suffers today. The liquor mafias took over Chicago in the middle of the 1920s. Between 1925 and 1929 the number of gangsters killed in Chicago was enormous, 227, or about 4 and a half per month, just over one a week. And in the famous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, Capone's Italian gang killed the Irish gang of O'Banion, killing seven gangsters. This massacre was a great event in the history of Mob violence, and inspired a huge social reaction that contributing to the repeal of Prohibition.


Murder rate

Secondly, there is no doubt that Prohibition of alcohol and later of other drugs has contributed substantially to the murder rate in the United States. Professor Miron (1999), who has put together long-term econometric studies, concludes that the murder rate is between 25 and 75 percent higher than it would be if Prohibition-style laws didn't exist.

It is interesting to note that murder rates in the United States have decreased substantially, from their maximum of 10 per 100000 inhabitants in 1993, to 6 per 100000 in 2007. Other sources present a rate lower than 5 in 2009. If Miron's estimations are accurate, the repression of alcohol and then of other psychoactive drugs has increased the 2007-2009 murder rate by 1.25 and 2.58 per 100000.

These numbers, compared with the 2009 homicide rate in Colombia (35) and Mexico (14) are very low, and show that structural and institutional factors in these countries bear the chief responsibility. There is no doubt that without illegal drugs, without illegal trafficking of people, without arms smuggling, that is to say that if there were no profitable illegal activities, the rates of violence in Colombia and in Mexico would be much lower. The question is thus why the contributing factors of violence are so much more effective in Colombia and Mexico than in the US and other countries.

Violence and social control

Thirdly, Ospina prognosticates that levels of violence similar to those of Colombia or Mexico will come to the United States. Of course anything is possible. Nevertheless, history suggests that although these levels might rise in the US, they will probably remain far below the violence in the other two countries. Social control in the United States is much stronger, and violence has tended to concentrate itself in minority groups that are not part of the main current in the country. Surely discrimination, injustice, and other reasons might account for the violence in these groups, but the reality is that the United States has much stronger controls imposed by society than exist in Colombia or Mexico.


Prohibition of alcohol

Fourthly, Prohibition of alcohol in the United States was very different from the current prohibition against drugs. The 1920s laws went against consumption in bars, associated with prostitution, than against consumption per se.

In the 19th century the Industrial Revolution increased employment opportunities in urban manufacturing, and attracted a strong migration of Germans, Italians, and Irish to the US, and these groups consumed substantially more alcohol than the typical US peasantry. The population of the large industrial cities grew rapidly, giving rise to overcrowding and problems of public health and violence. In these cities arose bars and saloons where workers consumed liquor and spent important shares of their salaries.

This inspired a massive movement against saloons, led by religious and feminist groups that sought to protect families. It is notable that the feminist movement had two major goals: the Prohibition of alcohol, and women's suffrage. Prohibition was its first achievement in the 18th amendment to the Constitution, and suffrage was the second achievement, with the 19th amendment.

Prohibition of alcohol was not total, like cocaine, heroin, or other drugs. Alcohol has many industrial uses that demanded a continued production. Prohibition allowed alcohol use for ritual, religious, and medical purposes. Furthermore, production and consumption was not prohibited within the home. In other words, people could produce a "personal dose". In effect it was inconceivable in that era that the State would limit what people did within their homes.

What was prohibited was the production of alcoholic beverages for sale. In other words it was perfectly acceptable for the majority of people in the US to drink a glass of wine with their food in the heart of their families. What was not permitted was for men to get drunk in bars and spend their wages on alcohol while their wives and children starved.

Another important difference is the fact that alcohol wasn't forbidden in other countries, including the neighbors of the US, which created an opportunity for smuggling, and problems in the fight against alcohol's distribution and consumption.

The above shows three major points.

One is that the dominant current in US society was divided with respect to alcohol, and social support for Prohibition was much weaker than the generalized support today and in the past for prohibition of drugs. Thus eliminating Prohibition of alcohol was easier politically than ending the current prohibition on drugs.

The second point is that religious, ethical, and moral factors were important in the promotion of Prohibition, and also in the process leading to its repeal.

Third is that the effect of Prohibition on police and political corruption was much more important than violence in repeal of the law.


Morality

In Colombia, moral arguments are considered deceitful. This is to say that an argument based on morality or values is used as a smokescreen to hide the true intentions of whoever makes the argument.

This position is constitent with a society in which amoral individualism is prevalent, in which anything goes, and where people don't care about the consequences of their actions on others. Such people cannot conceive that there exist others motivated by true moral reasons.

Legalization isn't easy

Fifthly, for the US it is not easy to "legalize" drugs. During the past hundred years the country has promoted an International Drug Control Regime that only accepts medical and scientific uses for drugs included on the lists put forth by three UN conventions on the topic. These conventions have clauses that make them bulletproof, difficult to change.

The conventions have created another dilemma for the federal government. On the one hand, in some states there are movements to make these laws more flexible, but on the other hand, the federal government is trapped by the international conventions it has promoted. In the UN, the United States has a very complex agenda in which drugs are not a major issue. If the US pressured the UN to change the drug conventions, it would lose credibility in other areas.

The prison problem

Nevertheless, there exist other factors that would promote a change in repressive anti-drug policies. To start with, the cost of these policies are already too high. For example in the fight against drugs many state legislatures approved laws that stipulate minimum sentencing for drug-related crimes. This, and the policy of arresting drug users and smalltime dealers, have filled the prisons with convicts sentenced for nonviolent crimes.

Currently about 1.6 million people are arrested every year for drug-related crimes, and the prisons hold a bit more than 600000 such prisoners, without counting those who are in jail for crimes committed while under the influence of drugs. The high courts have spoken in favor of human rights for prisoners and have demanded that the states construct comfortable prisons that avoid overcrowding.


It costs between 40 and 50 thousand dollars a year to maintain a prisoner. The result is that these costs have gravely affected state budgets, which are in the red in the current recession.

A dilemma in California

California, for example, is going through an interesting dilemma. On the one hand it has the court order to construct new prisons to house excess convicts. But it can also set free a number of prisoners to eliminate the excess. Because drug laws don't permit an early release for inmates who must complete a minimum sentence, the state is obligated to release more dangerous criminals such as rapists, murderers, armed robbers, etc., that have complete a portion of their sentences. This phenomenon generates more political pressure to change drug laws than does gang violence on the border.

To conclude, the possibility of a change in anti-drug policies in the US is remote, and fiscal costs may play a greater role than a possible increase in violence in the country.

Any process to ease drug laws will create huge dilemmas for the federal government, which is trapped in the international anti-drug regime that it has promoted.

Why is there greater violence in Colombia and in Mexico?

The levels of violence associated with anti-drug policies are much lower in the United States than in Colombia and Mexico. In truth, empirical evidence shows that it isn't "natural" that when there exist high illegal profits people kill each other cruelly. Phrases like, "We front the bodies, and the gringos keep the profits" seem to illustrate that this is true. The question that both Colombians and Mexicans should answer is why illegal drugs have generated more violence in the two countries than in other countries in the narco-trafficking chain. Regardless of whether the US legalizes drugs or not, it is imperative to respond to this question to arrive at the roots of the violence.

Ideology as an obstacle

Lastly, history illustrates the importance of beliefs and moral, non-economic factors in the formulation of Prohibition-style policies in the United States. This goes against the common belief that what really matters in anti-drug policies is the high profitability generated by illegality.

Unfortunately, beliefs and values are important. If only the economic angle were relevant, it would be possible at least to try to negotiate in order to economically compensate those who lose out with a change in the laws. But when beliefs, values, and ideologies are important, they are non-negotiable, for which they become a grand obstacle to change.

Investment banks and the food crisis

This is an interesting, in-depth article about the role of big investment banks like Goldman Sachs in the food bubble of 2008. Apparently their commodity index funds, which create an insatiable demand for futures contract purchases, played a large role in driving food prices far above what real physical demand should have dictated.

House renovation blog

In the next few days, my good buddy Nick is going to post an article of mine on his website. Basically we want to give an account of the process of buying and rehabbing an old house I bought this year. Nick is an excellent architect, and came to Colombia to draw up the plans for our dream house. Anyway, he wrote a very flattering introduction to me and the project for his blog readers, and I wanted to share it.

Art and basketball

I've long loved music, both learning to play and compose on the piano, as well as appreciating pieces of most genres. However, even with music I passed through a long phase in which the message or the content was more important to me than the style. I appreciated explicitly activist plays and operas, like Bertolt Brecht, and in general I preferred vocal music, because the lyrics could transmit a direct message. Even in purely instrumental music, I preferred either pieces that told a story or radical pieces that transmitted strong emotions. I also liked technically complex compositions. Bach, Wagner, Grieg, Mozart were in, Vivaldi and Brahms were out. And in my extreme focus on content over style, I even felt that composers were the real heroes, and musicians were replaceable tools.

But over time I've come to value and enjoy music for its aesthetic qualities too, for the prowess of the interpreter, namely for the sheer beauty of it. I'm not sure what Chopin's preludes mean, what Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is trying to transmit, or the exact message Itzhak Perlman is sending to me when he plays, but they are wonderful.

However, visual art never spoke to me so strongly. Again, I enjoyed paintings that depicted specific scenes, like the Feast at Canna or the birth of Aphrodite. I also liked the sheer antiquity of Renaissance and Medieval paintings. Also paintings with a little "trick", like Picasso's blue guitar player with a happy face outlined in the background, or Dali's visual double-entendres. And as a child I loved going to the Art Institute of Chicago and clandestinely touching ancient Babylonian or Egyptian sculptures. I would marvel that I was touching something a craftsman had worked on thousands of years ago (even as a child, I was sure to touch with the back of my knuckles, to minimize the damaging effects of my little antiquity fetish!). But as for style, technique, etc., I've never had much use or understanding for paintings and sculpture. I was like a child--I liked stories told by paintings, and I liked extreme gimmicks like bright colors or hidden things, but I didn't go beyond these superficial layers of appreciation.

Last month though I took my wife to Chicago's Art Institute, and it seems I've matured a bit regarding art. Obviously I enjoyed sharing with my wife the "Big Ones" of the museum. Seurat,


this guy,


American Gothic, Van Gogh, etc. But I also spent some time looking at Impressionist still lifes. I didn't take any good photos, but Gauguin's Tahitian paintings are sort of like still lifes.



Now if there's an art form that's almost pure technique and no grand meaning, it's the still life. What can a few fruits and a bottle of wine really be saying? I imagine that this subset of painting is specifically created and practiced in order to explore and perfect technique. With this little revelation, I contemplated a few such paintings, and I could appreciate the brush strokes, the depiction of form and color, and above all light.

I also looked at a series of Monet paintings of a pile of hay. He painted the same pile on different days and at different times of day, to capture the play of light, dark, colors, etc. The exact same scene looks totally different, even gives a different mood, depending on the light. This depiction of light has no grand message for humanity's problems. The hay stack has nothing to say about hunger or inequality or poverty. But light, matter, form are certainly no less real, no less central to human existence, than these other big social issues. So Monet, by exploring light and sharing with us his findings, does humankind a service, just as Mohammed Yunus does humankind a service with his investigation of poverty and microcredit, or as Carl Sagan enlightens us on the mysteries and marvels of outer space. They're all helping us to understand certain phenomena that define our world.

I by no means consider my self a grand knower or lover of visual art now, but I think I can appreciate more. Above all, I've come to a revelation: everything counts. It's not just the big social problems that are important in the world, or the production of food, or the study of ecosystems and wild animals. And I've learned that technique is important, just as content is.

It occurs to me that I should have already realized this. I appreciate technique when I'm fixing plumbing, or writing an essay, or rowing a canoe. Technique is especially important in basketball.

For the better part of my life I have loved the game of basketball. Whether I'm shooting hoops alone, or playing a full-court game, I feel like I express myself and arrive at a peace and understanding in a way I don't feel with other pursuits. There's no grand meaning, no social cause I put forth when I play. It's just the joy of technique, doing the right thing at the right time, and you know it's right not by some detailed consideration or calculation, but because of a feeling that goes beyond reason. Practicing basketball alone is like meditation for me, and playing with and against others is like a divine ballet of ten people moving, reacting, working in concert. Even when I used to play music, I never arrived at the level of expression and subtlety that I do with basketball. And I don't imagine I ever would arrive at this feeling with painting. So perhaps that's why it took me so long to appreciate the beauty and importance of technique in the arts--I mainly felt it in a sphere of activity that we consider separate from the arts.

Anyway, now that I've had this revelation, I'm seeing technique and inspiration at work in all sorts of new places. The other day my wife and I watched Carlos Saura's amazing film adaptation of Carmen. The dance, the passion, the guitarwork is all so exquisite. And it's something I probably wouldn't have appreciated a few years ago. Maybe even a few weeks ago, before my striking museum visit. In any case, I feel lucky now to have the world opened up to me in a new way.

Academic Freedom

This article asks to what extent academic freedom favors quality of education, and if the US traditions of tenure and sabbaticals really promote academic freedom and/or quality of education. The article treats a lot of subjects and interrelations within higher education that I'd never even thought about.

Fitting articles on seeds and homes

I am posting two NYT articles that happen to coincide with my major activities right now. This article is about a seed library in rural New York. The library conserves local and national crop varieties, and members can receive a seed pack in exchange for a fee and an agreement to return seeds at year's end. This is a wonderful, small-scale attempt to preserve the heritage of traditional varieties, and dovetails nicely with larger-scale efforts such as that of the Global Crop Diversity Trust or Crops for the Future. The article was very fitting for the moment I find myself in, because I am working with a local museum to write a grant to implement a Muisca garden. The idea is that we'll collect and conserve traditional Andean crops like achira, cubio, or aji, and display them in a garden, sort of a living museum. On top of this, we'll carry out modern agronomic trials with one of these species to establish good practices for higher yields.

The second article is about a guy who makes sculptures and buildings out of twigs, logs, and other natural materials. As I rehab an old house in my town, I'm working with adobe, wild cane, and mud, so this article also overlaps with what I'm working on right now.

Russian lessons on collapse

Here is a link to some archived articles from Dmitry Orlov's interesting blog, Club Orlov. He deals mainly with topics of societal economic collapse, drawing lessons from his native Soviet Union to predict and prepare for what he sees as the US's impending collapse. I think he is well-placed to comment on these themes, though it would also be interesting to see such a blog from a resident of the Third World, because most poor countries live in sort of a constant state of economic collapse, and people learn how to deal with difficult situations.

Swidden agriculture in Wisconsin

Here is another article I wrote recently for Goodeater. In it I detail how many modern US landscapes are really forest regrowth on old-time farmland.

Peanuts, Leaves, Starches, and Sweets

Here is a new article/recipe of mine that just got published on www.Goodeater.org. It's called peanuts, leaves, starches, and sweets.

A new Inquisition?

This article forewarns of a new Inquisition in Colombia, in the form of a witch hunt of supposed collaborators of the FARC. This has already seemed to have happened in the case of Piedad Cordoba.

According to the article, the prosecution of so-called "FARC-politics" (to contrast with "para-politics") has numerous goals:

a) To continue using the terrorist menace to distract the media from issues facing the poor, such as the health system, unemployment, protests about selling natural resources to foreign companies, adjustments in the national budget, etc.

b) To downplay the crimes committed by paramilitaries and agents of the State.

c) To finger opposition leaders as collaborators and accomplices of guerrilla groups.

d) To encourage the feeling that it is unjust to prosecute and condemn those politicians associated with right-wing death squads.

e) To neutralize the elements within the new government that might seek true justice vis a vis returning stolen lands to victims of forced displacement, or vis a vis crimes committed by Colombia's internal investigation service.

f) To revive the idea of a "final law" or a "forgive and forget law" in the war so as to offer permanent impunity to those involved with war crimes.

As I said in a prior post, things seem to be getting ugly again in Colombia.

What we in the US can do about elections in Haiti

Here is a good article about the unfair elections in Haiti, and what we in the US can do to make them fairer. The final recommendation is for everyone to call our House representatives and urge them to sign Rep. Maxine Waters's letter to Hillary Clinton. This letter asks that the US not fund any elections in Haiti unless they include all eligible parties and provide for access to the vote for all Haitians.

A message from Tim Gunn

I'm posting this video for a number of reasons. No, I'm not a tormented LGBT teenager. But my mother works with LGBT young adults who are homeless. It may seem like these kids have it even worse than the typical kid tormented by sexual identity questions. But I'm not so sure. A kid who is struggling with his sexual identity because of pressure from friends and family isn't that different from a kid forced to live on the street and turn tricks to survive. One's struggle is internal, and the other is fighting against his surroundings, but in both cases they're in a difficult situation due to intolerance from others.

I assume Gunn made this video in light of the story of Tyler Clementi, a young musician who committed suicide when his roommate broadcast a romantic encounter of his on the internet. Gunn urges young people in a similar situation to get help at the Trevor Project, an anonymous hotline for LGBT youth. I can't even describe how awful I feel to think about kids like Clementi, or kids thrown out on the street because of their sexual orientation. It's a mix of profound sadness and pathos, with a raging indignation at how unjustly these kids are treated.

The other reason I'm posting this video is that I inexplicably love Tim Gunn. I just think he's really cool. He hosts a TV show called Project Runway, and is apparently quite the fashion authority. I am by no means a regular viewer of Project Runway, but ever since my wife introduced me to the show about a year ago, I enjoy watching it now and again on our cable TV. I am normally not at all interesting in fashion, and I loathe the campy, self-important, queenish caricatures that TV usually feeds us of gays. But I guess that, though he certainly tends toward the self-important and queenish, I like Tim Gunn because he is a genuine guy that excels in what he does. This is probably why I like Project Runway, too. Though I have little use for fashion, I can respect the young designers who compete on the show. They aren't sitting around and talking mediocre bullshit about fashion. They are responding to real design challenges, practicing their craft. And that's always interesting.

An appetizing look at mechanically-separated poultry

Here's an article from the Huffington Post with some tasty photos of the mechanically-separated poultry production process.

Practical project to test and promote my Sahelian agricultural revolution proposal

About a year ago I wrote a paper on promoting an agricultural revolution in the Sahel of Africa, which I later linked to on this blog, with some hindsight comments about the shortcomings or omissions of my original Sahel proposal. Anyway, after writing the original essay, which limited itself for the most part to the realm of grand proposals, I put together a short document detailing practically how one might implement and test some of the general proposals I put forth in the essay. I tried to shop the essay and the practical project document around to different development organizations to see if they might be interested in pursuing the idea beyond the abstract. However, that came to nothing, so I feel comfortable now publishing the practical document on the blog. Here it is:

Project to promote an agricultural revolution in the Sahel

1/III/2010

Pre-project planning and follow-up monitoring

• Compile background library on Sahelian agriculture, agricultural change in the Sahel, land reform, appropriate technology for the Sahel, fertility management in the Sahel, etc.
• Perform agrarian diagnostics in 10 pilot villages, analyzing landscape, historical changes, cropping systems, and general farming systems.
• Based on the agrarian diagnostics, we will identify central agrarian problems in each village to guide us in our portfolio of proposed interventions.
• We will hold village-wide meetings to determine what interventions to implement to respond to identified problems.
• Perform baseline evaluation and long-term follow-up measurements of poverty and family income indicators, as well as soil fertility and organic matter.

Soil fertility interventions

• Fencing of unplanted land to exclude cattle (with communal ownership maintained over the resource)
• Fencing of planted fields to enable pasturing of cattle on fields
• Incorporation of fodder and forage crops into crop rotations, including catch crops at the end of the growing season to prevent nitrogen loss from fields
• Promotion of tree planting or natural regeneration, especially of leguminous trees such as Faidherbia alba
• Promotion of underutilized indigenous African crops as a way of diversifying land use (and also diversifying income)

Equipment interventions

• Competitive grants and contests to fund farmer invention of new technologies
• Collaboration with local engineering schools in which students work with farming communities to design new technologies
• Competitive grants, contests, and subsidies to small- and medium-size manufacturers of new tools and equipment

Institutional changes

• Credit for tools, inputs, irrigation, and “hungry season” loans, from government lenders and government-backed private lenders
• Creation of farmer-run buying and marketing cooperatives
• Crop insurance, offered by government agencies and government-backed private insurers
• Promotion of local and national marketing channels
• Promotion of food crops versus export crops
• Promotion of farm-scale well irrigation (preceded by a study of aquifers)
• Agricultural extension to help farmers calculate production costs
• Land redistribution to grant land to landless workers
• Implementation and enforcement of food sales tax to replace government revenue lost by doing away with verticalized export crop systems
• Preferential government purchasing from local farmers

Education ideas

I'm linking to a few articles on education that have intrigued me in the past few months.

The first points out the problems generated by the US system of local control of schools. I agree with the author's frustration. For instance, school boards in Texas or Kansas shouldn't be able to make up things to teach and force kids to swallow them. But I always cringe at any prospect for de-federalizing things in the US. Federalism is a good thing, and I wouldn't want to lose it. In the case of schools, this plays out in a number of ways. Some schools and school districts have been able to do fascinating, positive things precisely because of parental and community involvement. A case in point is Nettelhorst school in Chicago. It would be stupid to stifle such examples with heavy federal control of schools, further separating schools from their local communities. That said, the author of the NYT article proposes three things I can agree with: a national curriculum, national teacher training standards, and [uniform] federal support for schools. After all, federalism shouldn't mean that richer states and towns are better off and poorer places are screwed. And these three policy moves wouldn't stifle community involvement in schools. Parents and neighbors could still plan activities, help out at the school, offer input and make demands of teachers, etc. But what's taught wouldn't be up to the whimsy of every little town or city. For that matter, I think private and charter schools should be subject to the same standards and curriculum requirements as public schools are. Parents and children in private schools are after all our neighbors and compatriots, even if they don't want to acknowledge their belonging to the collective!

The next article complements the first by dispelling a few education myths, namely that charter schools are a silver bullet for education, and that teachers' unions hold back progress. The first point is especially important for me, because the charter school craze fits into a trend I detest in the US. Charter schools are basically another iteration of the "this is hard, let's abandon it and try a whole new thing" mentality that has plagued the US for decades now and made us mediocre. Why would any sensible human being think that throwing together a bunch of novice teachers with little outside oversight will result in good schools?

The last article discusses a seeming epidemic of college student cheating, and the efforts of some schools to fight it. I think it's a damn shame that cheating is so rampant and accepted by students. It shows a lack of character on their part and on the part of the parents and teachers that raised them. But the heavy surveillance measures described in the article seem just as repugnant to me. The cheating and the surveillance are part of the same trend, a seeming breakdown of values or trust or something. On the other hand, I like the approach of other colleges profiled in the article that make it clear that cheating is unacceptable, but in a constructive way, through tutorials about plagiarism, or explicit honor codes. Now that I think of it, this debate around cheating has a lot to do with how colleges view themselves, and indeed how our society operates. Are they places for people to get trained for high-end, frivolous jobs, with the consequent feel of a "degree factory"? Or do schools live up to the original ideal of a university, a place for learning, exchange of ideas, creation of new knowledge? The first type of school will churn out people who thrive in the mendacious, sham economy of advertising or Wall Street, the model that has recently driven US society to the point of collapse. The latter type of school might yet salvage our best traditions of honesty, integrity, creative and critical thought, and hard work.

Many faces of Catholicism

Here is an old article from Nicholas Kristof. He starts by criticizing the Catholic Church's misdeeds and cover-ups in the recent past, and contrasts it with the earnest work of religious and laypeople on the ground. I find his quoting of heterodox Gospels and the setting-apart of the Vatican and the rest of the Church to be a bit tiresome. But Kristof's point is well-taken. The Catholic Church has an old-boys' club aspect, but also a progressive, grassroots side. This diversity within Catholicism is very clear in Colombia, where there exist paramilitary warlords that are devoutly Catholic, while one of the major guerrilla groups (the ELN) was founded in large part by liberation theology priests and nuns. Likewise, the State often espouses religious speech in its anti-insurgent war, but the Church is also the go-to peacemaker and advocate of human rights.

Listening to Cat Stevens in a monastery

Amidst vaulted ceilings and perfect gardens and warm showers and holy hermits' caves,

After a grueling, dusty journey through the desert,

I imbibe peace and solitude, wishing only for you to share this lovely aloneness.

“All the times that I've cried

Keeping all the things I knew inside,

And it's hard,

But it's harder to ignore it.”

I recall a tortured life,

Searching for truth, love, and comfort

From false idols and dead ideas.

“Morning has broken

Like the first morning...”

You are the bright blessed morning

That has blinded me to all else,

As Allah before Bedouins

Who knew only grey, graven statues.

“If you want to sing out, sing out.

And if you want to be free, be free...”

Here without you I want

To seek you and dance together in circles,

Like innocent hippy children

Brimming with sun and life.