I made it to Tingo Maria today in record time only to be told at a police checkpoint that I will be kidnapped and thoroughly double D´d by fake communist revolutionaries if I proceed any further. It seems that every nationality is welcomed by these commies of the jungle except for Americans.
I asked the police why Americans are vilified in these parts and he proceeded to give me a long list of all the shit our great nation has pulled in the San Martin, Huanuco and Loreto provinces for the past thirty years or so. It would seem that the past four administrations (Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush) flooded this region with DEA agents and other "advisors" who--in all their wisdom--decided that burning down coca crops and intimidating all the local coca farmers was the best way to win the War on Drugs. Nevermind the fact that the majority of coca farmers in Perú´s Amazonian basin were cultivating the plant for legal consumption...I guess our wise, all-knowing government in the states prefers summarily torching small villages in South America over vastly cheaper and effective methods of rehabilitation on the home front. Protip: "source control" policies never work and tend to piss a lot of people off.
To distance the US government´s role in the region from the state-sponsored violence that was occuring in the region, the Bush administration outsourced much of these advising roles to Haliburton employees around 2003. Well, it was only a matter of time before a few of these nosey gringos started turning up rather dead in the basin. According to the police, the angry folks in the Peruvian Amazon have basically been snatching any North Americans who decide to wander into the San Martin province. Although the Perúvian government has been rounding up the ring leaders of these abductions while taking a stronger stance in protecting the interests of local coca growers against foreign intrusion in the past year or so, tempers are still raw and it will probably be another ten years before Americans can start setting things on fire again.
Ugh...so now I got to turn around and head back towards the Andes, into the cold once more, all the way to Ecuador...god damn it. A special thanks to our fantastic government for making things so difficult for those of us that want to see the rest of the world. As always, I blame Reagan.
I asked the police why Americans are vilified in these parts and he proceeded to give me a long list of all the shit our great nation has pulled in the San Martin, Huanuco and Loreto provinces for the past thirty years or so. It would seem that the past four administrations (Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush) flooded this region with DEA agents and other "advisors" who--in all their wisdom--decided that burning down coca crops and intimidating all the local coca farmers was the best way to win the War on Drugs. Nevermind the fact that the majority of coca farmers in Perú´s Amazonian basin were cultivating the plant for legal consumption...I guess our wise, all-knowing government in the states prefers summarily torching small villages in South America over vastly cheaper and effective methods of rehabilitation on the home front. Protip: "source control" policies never work and tend to piss a lot of people off.
To distance the US government´s role in the region from the state-sponsored violence that was occuring in the region, the Bush administration outsourced much of these advising roles to Haliburton employees around 2003. Well, it was only a matter of time before a few of these nosey gringos started turning up rather dead in the basin. According to the police, the angry folks in the Peruvian Amazon have basically been snatching any North Americans who decide to wander into the San Martin province. Although the Perúvian government has been rounding up the ring leaders of these abductions while taking a stronger stance in protecting the interests of local coca growers against foreign intrusion in the past year or so, tempers are still raw and it will probably be another ten years before Americans can start setting things on fire again.
Ugh...so now I got to turn around and head back towards the Andes, into the cold once more, all the way to Ecuador...god damn it. A special thanks to our fantastic government for making things so difficult for those of us that want to see the rest of the world. As always, I blame Reagan.
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| Thanks, shitdiot |
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