Colombia and the Illegal Drug Trade

The FARC ant the ELN are two very different groups, but they are fighting for the same reason (http://www.cnn.com/). Interviews with the leaders of these two groups have shown that they do not want war or fighting, they just want the money. The reason for this is, most of the influential people to the leaders are uneducated, so the leaders cannot make good decisions without some branch of the army leaving their army and joining the other (http://www.cnn.com/). The FARC and the ELN are actually nice organizations and do good things and help each other and everyone around them, they just want money a lot more than peace (http://www.cnn.com/). Now, these guerilla armies are taking up 40% of Colombia. But who owns these drugs and their profits? A tiny group of people called the AUC (a small paramilitary force) is caught in the middle of the war with no political power or anything of that sort (http://www.cnn.com/). They cannot launder the money because they are the most primitive, inexperienced, uneducated group in Latin America (http://www.cnn.com/). According to the Latin American government, these armies should not fight each other; instead, they should help the economy and the peasants. However, all the FARC and the ELN want, is the money from the drug market (http://www.cnn.com/).

All this warfare can and is causing some serious problems in Latin America, because people are fighting each other for money (http://www.cnn.com/), the United States has killed a lot of Latin America’s people (http://www.colombiajournal.org/), and the United States is hurting the drug money by trying to take it away. This hurts the Latin American government because their economy needs it (http://www.cfr.org/). Even if this war were over tomorrow, the time taken to rebuild the economy would be enormous because all the resources in Latin America cannot be produced or shipped as fast as they were before Latin America was caught up in this war.

Bibliography

FARC, ELN: Colombia’s Left Wing Guerillas. By Stephanie Hanson. March 11, 2008. Published on the Internet @ http://www.cfr.org/.

Fifty Years of Violence. By Garry Leech. Date unknown. Published on the Internet @ http://www.colombiajournal.org/.

Colombia: A War Without End? By Maria Cristina Caballero. Date unknown. Published on the Internet @ http://www.cnn.com/.