cannabisnews.com: St. Vincent Worries Its Future's Going to Pot 





St. Vincent Worries Its Future's Going to Pot 
Posted by FoM on January 16, 2000 at 08:05:43 PT
By Mark Fineman, Times Staff Writer
Source: Los Angeles Times
 As they tended their little plots in the marijuana fields that blanket the mountainside in full view of this nation's capital, Tornado, Moon and Stump-i lamented their miserable Christmas.   First came the Colombians, dumping huge quantities of marijuana at deflated prices throughout the region in a bid to take control of the Caribbean ganja market.   Then the U.S. Marines landed. 
   Three Marine combat helicopters packed with Caribbean troops, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and St. Vincentian police descended on marijuana fields in this remote southeastern corner of the Caribbean just before Christmas.   During a weeklong operation dubbed Weedeater, they slashed and burned more than 5 million marijuana plants, 7 tons of cured pot and 250 drying huts, arresting 13 farmers and killing one. All this on a small island that per capita is one of the world's largest producers of the drug.   "This thing is way overbearing, man," said Stump-i, a Rastafarian fisherman-turned-farmer whose 300-pound harvest went up in smoke. As he spoke, he tended a new crop that will be market-ready in three months.   Added Tornado, whose adjacent plot overlooking Kingstown, the capital, survived: "If the Americans destroy all the marijuana in St. Vincent, they'll destroy St. Vincent. It's the backbone of the economy. It's our livelihood. And now that the Americans have killed us on bananas, we have no other choice."   Welcome to St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a nation of 32 islands and about 120,000 people where, according to anthropologists, sociologists and counter-narcotics agents, ganja quietly rules.   By their estimates, illegal marijuana sales and exports account for close to a fifth of St. Vincent's gross domestic product; as many as a fifth of adults smoke it regularly; and local politicians and business leaders privately concede that the drug is the driving force in the island's economy--even bigger than its traditional banana crop, which has fallen victim to U.S. trade policy.   Most island businesspeople, in fact, attributed slumping Christmas-season sales of all goods to incomes lost due to the U.S.-led eradication operation. The net effect: Weedeater has inflamed anti-American sentiment and rekindled a movement to decriminalize the drug here, even as it failed to destroy the bulk of the crop.   "We didn't touch nearly a tenth of what's up there," said one of the eight DEA agents who joined in the weeklong hacking and burning last month--though the local police commissioner insists that as much as half the crop was destroyed.   "There's just so much of it," said the DEA agent. "To make a significant dent, it's something that would have to be done on a much more regular basis."   What is more, the State Department concedes that little of St. Vincent's marijuana ends up in the United States. Most is sold along a wide swath of the Caribbean, from the U.S. Virgin Islands to Aruba.   So why bother? A U.S. official who asked not to be identified explained that the annual Operation Weedeater is "basically a training mission for the U.S. Marines" and the Barbados-based Regional Security Service, an anti-drug unit staffed by Caribbean nations.   Besides, the official added, they were invited.   Ganja may rule here, but local political leaders assert--and U.S. officials agree--that it does not govern. This nation, in fact, is far better known for the largely ganja-free Grenadines, an island chain of white-sand beaches where Rolling Stones rocker Mick Jagger has a winter retreat, the world's rich and famous berth multimillion-dollar yachts and Prime Minister James F. Mitchell makes his home.   For Mitchell, the "weedeating" exercise, financed each year by U.S. taxpayers, is a show of strength, a reminder that politicians are more powerful than planters and that his is a responsible and peace-loving country.   Indeed, despite marijuana's economic dominance, St. Vincent has seen little of the soaring crime and violence that are mushrooming in the Caribbean largely as a result of the region's role as a conduit for Colombian cocaine bound for the U.S. and Europe.   "The ganja industry here has not been accompanied by much violence," said Ralph Gonsalves, a lawyer and member of Parliament who heads the political opposition. "You've had instances where people will fight over a particular marijuana crop, but you also have violent land disputes over other crops.   "It's simply amazing for an industry that generates so much money to have been so free of violence."   But local police officials and outside analysts worry that the phenomenon may not last.   Rens Lee, a Virginia-based author and consultant on the drug trade who recently studied St. Vincent, called it and other Caribbean islands involved in trafficking "tinderboxes" in which, "for one reason or another, they have the potential of turning in on themselves and popping their cork."   "In St. Vincent, this dependence on marijuana is unhealthy," he added. "As long as this is an illegal drug, it's going to be a source of tension."   National Police Commissioner Osborne Quow said the potential violence justifies eradication efforts. Despite statistics published in local newspapers showing that the country had just 20 killings last year--eight of them by police--Quow said: "Cultivating ganja is one thing. But our biggest worry is that they're killing one another."   The most recent killing was one that infuriated many Vincentians. Junior "Turtle" Harry was gunned down by police officers on the final day of Weedeater--two days after U.S. and Caribbean forces had pulled out. Quow said Harry pointed a shotgun at his men near a ganja field in the hills, although Harry's family said he didn't even own a suit to wear at his own funeral, much less a gun.   The death, which most Vincentians associate with the U.S.-led operation, unleashed a vitriolic campaign against Washington.   Vincentians were already irate over continuing U.S. efforts to end Europe's preferential treatment of Caribbean bananas.   The result of that trade conflict has been lower prices and reduced incentives to banana farmers here, some of whom now are growing marijuana in what opposition leader Gonsalves wryly dubbed "our most successful agricultural diversification project."   In Weedeater's aftermath, P. C. Hughes, a prominent businessman and a firebrand columnist in the weekly Vincentian, called the U.S. "an immoral travesty of greed, selfishness and bullying. . . . They rule us for their own ends."   Even American author Lee is critical of U.S. policy here, which includes pressuring St. Vincent's nascent offshore financial sector to adopt tighter regulations on money laundering.   "We're pushing St. Vincent on bananas, pushing on offshore banking, pushing on marijuana, but we're taking actions that are counterproductive," Lee said. "I think we should be going in there with economic assistance, offering alternatives to bananas and marijuana."   U.S. heavy-handedness already seems to be eroding what Gonsalves called "a substantial body of the population that feels it's immoral to cultivate ganja--their number is decreasing."   The chief beneficiary appears to be Junior "Spirit" Cottle and his campaign to decriminalize the drug here.   Cottle, an activist who spent 11 1/2 years in prison for killing the country's attorney general in 1973 and still carries a bullet in his head from a shootout during his arrest, asserted that support is growing for a crop he calls "the key to our economic independence."   Weedeater, he argued, has helped his United Front for Progress--which his supporters call "an alliance of revolutionary community groups"--to recruit members and promote its pro-marijuana agenda through protests. But Cottle conceded that there's little hope the drug will be decriminalized soon--even here.   Gonsalves agrees.   "From a public policy standpoint, it makes no sense for any responsible politician to advocate the legalization of marijuana," said the former Marxist, who was the highest vote getter in 1998 parliamentary elections. "And I think the people who are growing marijuana understand that."   Moon said he understands it all too well, as do Tornado and Stump-i. The Yorke Mountain planters, as a matter of policy, use only their nicknames.   The planters wish the outside world, especially the U.S., better understood their trade and its vital role in a small nation where an estimated 40% of the labor force is unemployed.   "We understand that people out in the world see this as a drug," Tornado said, twirling a marijuana seedling between blistered fingers after a half-hour climb up the steep, muddy trails that lead to their fields. "Here, this isn't a drug. It's a plant--a plant that brings food to the table. And anything that brings food is something from God.   "We're poor people, fed-up people who are just trying to survive," said the 31-year-old Tornado, who turned to ganja growing when he lost a construction job. "And they want to destroy that."   By "they," Tornado explained, he meant more than just the Americans. In the weeks before the Marines ferried in more than 100 Caribbean and U.S. anti-drug personnel last month, Colombian drug traffickers poured tons of their own marijuana into the eastern Caribbean islands that are St. Vincent's principal ganja market, the planters said.   Some of the Colombian marijuana, Tornado and other growers said, was laced with cocaine or heroin--an attempt to build addiction rates for Colombia's far more lucrative illegal exports. But the effect was the same: It drove marijuana prices to record lows in the region.   So now, even after Operation Weedeater, the ganja growers whose profits Police Commissioner Quow conceded "flow right through our national economy" are facing an uncertain future--as is St. Vincent.   In fields where their ancestors once hunted iguana and dug up wild yams--and where even today the ganja growers plow barefoot with rusted machetes--Tornado and Moon, an 18-year-old high school dropout, see more trouble ahead.   "If we can't do this, then we've got nothing to do," Tornado said. "And then, you're going to make us like the people in Africa." Caribbean: Growers, however, say U.S.-led raid razed ganja crop--and livelihoods.   Yorke Mountain, St. VincentPublished: January 16, 2000 Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times 
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Comment #1 posted by kaptinemo on January 16, 2000 at 09:06:11 PT
Voices seldom heard...and need to be
We here in the US tend to forget that there is a world outside of our borders, and that the idiotic actions of our government may be just an irritant to us here, but can have devastating consequences in our poorer neighbors. And we, American citizens, wonder why so many countries hate our guts.The bit about bananas, for example: before the recent WTO fracas in Seattle (in which scores of peaceful people were hurt by goon-squad tactics perpetrated by police who, if they understood how their lives are affected by the WTO, would have turned their weapons on more legitimate targets), a very quiet war was being waged, trade wise. The US was pissed at the Europeans for the fruit concessions they were getting, and set up an embargo, preventing the CB (Carribean Basin) nations from exporting the bananas to Europe.But the bananas that had been planted had been part of a *crop-substitution* plan back in the 80s in an attempt to undermine drug plant production.Ironic, isn't it? They are forced to play ball with the US by first planting a crop which provides little income (bananas) to replace a high profit crop (ganja). And then the US changes the rules, and economically cuts their throat by this fruit-to-Europe embargo. They can't win for losing, down there. Another example of DrugWarrior insanity.
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