Fentanyl: The new face of the US war on the poor

Al Jazeera English

At an April 14 news conference in Washington, DC, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) chief Anne Milgram sounded the alarm about the country’s latest appointed public enemy number one: four Mexican guys known as “Los Chapitos”, the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Declaring El Chapo’s offspring “responsible for the massive influx” into the United States of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, Milgram insisted: “Let me be clear that the Chapitos pioneered the manufacture and trafficking of the deadliest drug our country has ever faced.”

As if this were not news enough, the DEA chief threw in some additional alleged trivia, according to which the Chapitos had “fed their enemies alive to tigers, electrocuted them, [and] waterboarded them” – activities the likes of which the US has obviously never perpetrated against its own enemies.

There is no debating the deadliness of fentanyl, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin. Drug overdoses, the majority of them fentanyl-related, are now killing more than 100,000 people a year in the US. Entire communities have been devastated.

And yet it is curious that the Chapitos are spontaneously to blame for the whole fentanyl epidemic – although the new narrative certainly comes in handy when justifying the continuing frenzied militarisation of the US-Mexico border. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The forever war on Julian Assange

 Al Jazeera English

Imagine, for a moment, that the government of Cuba was demanding the extradition of an Australian publisher in the United Kingdom for exposing Cuban military crimes. Imagine that these crimes had included a 2007 massacre by helicopter-borne Cuban soldiers of a dozen Iraqi civilians, among them two journalists for the Reuters news agency.

Now imagine that, if extradited from the UK to Cuba, the Australian publisher would face up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison, simply for having done what media professionals are ostensibly supposed to do: report reality.

Finally, imagine the reaction of the United States to such Cuban conduct, which would invariably consist of impassioned squawking about human rights and democracy and a call for the universal vilification of Cuba.

Of course, it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to deduce that the above scenario is a rearranged version of true events, and that the publisher in question is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The antagonising nation is not Cuba but rather the US itself, which is responsible for not only the obliteration of Assange’s individual human rights but also a stunning array of far more macro-level assaults on people across the world. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

It’s psychological warfare season on the US border

 Al Jazeera English

On April 8, three young Venezuelan men were detained in El Paso, Texas, where they had just crossed the border from Ciudad Júarez, Mexico. They were among the 183,000 undocumented people reportedly apprehended by the United States Border Patrol that month, which, according to the Reuters news agency, constituted a 13 percent increase from March.

I had met these three men in February in Panama when they had emerged with their three Colombian travel companions from the traumatic stretch of corpse-ridden jungle known as the Darién Gap. Over the next month and a half, we seven had remained in continuous contact on WhatsApp, and I had undertaken an informal fundraising campaign that consisted of harassing wealthy acquaintances to send me money that I could transfer to my friends to help offset the costs of undocumented movement.

Chief among these costs is the official extortion that currently reigns in Central America and Mexico. Police, immigration personnel and other state agents have wholeheartedly embraced the same sinister logic as criminal outfits that prey on asylum seekers – a logic that is based on extracting cash from people who have none to spare and who are often migrating for that very reason.

Of course, the blame for the whole twisted arrangement lies fundamentally with my own country, the United States, the unilateral sanctity of whose border has spawned a flourishing international anti-migrant industry and rendered the business of seeking refuge a very deadly one. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

It’s raining IMF in Suriname

 Al Jazeera English

On February 17, large demonstrations rocked Paramaribo, the capital of the South American nation and former Dutch colony of Suriname. Thousands of people took to the streets to protest against government corruption, runaway inflation, and the decision by President Chan Santokhi to end state subsidies for electricity, fuel and other essential items.

As one might have guessed, the elimination of subsidies is taking place under the charitable guidance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has long specialised in addressing international economic crises by increasing the misery of the poorest echelons of society.

Suriname’s current IMF loan and debt-restructuring programme is but one of the many dubious achievements of Santokhi, who upon assuming office in 2020 went about having his wife appointed to an assortment of lucrative positions, including to the supervisory board of the state oil company Staatsolie. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.