Letter to the People of the United States

Compártelo

Letter from a Colombian Citizen to the People of the United States -presidential campaigns, mutual interferences, and endless war on drugs-

Alberto Leongómez H. July 14th, 2022

To disqualify as a "guerrillero" a candidate who has believed in the rules of Democracy and worked for Peace for more than thirty years -honoring his word to abandon the use of guns that he pledged when he signed it- as a pretext to support another candidate who currently makes use of weapons to “show his character” and blurts out threats like "I'll shoot you a bullet, you bastard!" (sic), is the most grotesque extreme of hypocrisy and exposes the deep corruption of social values of a part of the Colombian society, I say it with pain. It is the same frame of mind that produced the monstrosity of the so called "false positives" -the murder of impoverished civilians committed by the army to present them as foes killed in combat- and the same way of thinking that tolerates the recurrent massacres committed by paramilitaries and remains determined to close the door to any possibility of ending the armed conflict, since that implies knowing the truth. The truth of what has happened behind the war, because a continued state of war provides the best possible curtain to hide all sorts of criminal organization within a government. Starting with the necessary arms trafficking to feed it, which on the other hand represents huge profits for military industries and contractors’ lobby.

For several decades -too many, although a single day is already an irreparable national misfortune- Colombia has lived under the continued state of war of the so called "War on Drugs", during which nevertheless the production of cocaine has not ceased to grow, up to the point of supplying eighty percent of the world’s market today. So that under the continued state of war of the "War on Drugs" controlled by the DEA, production increases, as the production of Opium increased in Afghanistan during the American occupation up to the point of being today the first producer of heroin in the world, in what I already propose to call the Third Opium War. The fact is that Only after the country had reached that level of production, US military forces have withdrawn, but not before negotiating with the Taliban regime the conditions for giving them back the power and the terms of their future collaboration. Not until the “interests of the United States” had been secured there, on the other side of the world. But all this scenario has become too recurrent in the world, and has lasted too long in Colombia, so that its people have finally understood that they are living in a narco-state, on the one hand, and on the other, that this narco-state has been at least tolerated -when not boosted- by the United States.

That’s why I feel the need of writing to the people of the United States: because I don’t believe those are the interests of the people of the United States. Not of this great people I find in your literature, in John Steinbeck, Faulkner, McCullers, in the paintings of Whistler, Hopper or Andrew Wyeth… Those are not the interests of the people that brought jazz to mankind overseas, while fighting a war for freedom against a criminal menace of global range by the first time, and whose work, endurance, resilience and knowledge, whose science and industry have prepared to lead the world. Because I really believe the people of the United States of America ought to lead not just the world to a better state, but mankind to the next plateau in human evolution. Because for mankind, after having unveiled the code of the Human Genome and built a Satellite Belt communicating a whole living species for the first time in the evolution of life, when we have started to face climate change, pandemics, and global menaces, arriving there is the crucial issue of the 21^st century.

But it requires to face the truth, this is the first step in the path you are to guide humanity, the threshold through which you are to step and lead the way. And it includes -though this is not our matter here- acknowledging the use of nuclear weapons as a Crime against Humanity, and consequently, begging pardon to all our species for having done so. Thus, the people of the United States are facing the same predicament as the people of Colombia: neither can go further ahead without acknowledging the truth.

So, let's say it once and for all: the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States, DEA, is the agency financing -behind the screens- the covert operations carried abroad by the CIA and American intelligence agencies. And let us begin by thinking that the term Covert Operations means hidden -first of all- from the people and the electorate of the United States. It means that their financial funding cannot be detected by federal control entities nor appear before the US Department of the Treasury, so that they must be financed and carried out with non-traceable money. Which means money that has not been laundered, cash of unexplained or unknown origin, so as to keep those operations concealed from the American people.

It is absolutely clear that those Covert Operations are carried out not by the American people, but behind their backs, as they constitute criminal actions such as the destabilization of national economies, coups d’état, and magnicides, actions that are carried out abroad to favor not the interests of the American people -who ignore them or confuse them from afar with the natural barbarism of incipient democracies- but to the corporate interests of the CIA and the so-called hawks, which prove that President Dwight D. Eisenhower's dramatic warning concerning the military industrial complex was absolutely right: In the United States, there are so many military secrets nowadays that the American people no longer know who is governing them. Nor the American youth can guess anymore why they must die -and kill- in a war on the other side of their antipodes.

And this is the reason why in the last presidential elections, as well in the United States as in Colombia, mutual interference has been explicit in both campaigns. This is also the reason why in both countries the people have been split in two, that’s why in both countries have grown a political party which is in fact a lobby for war, for an endless war. Maybe we should start viewing it as a single transnational party cohered by transnational interests, as it is the reason for massacres committed by paramilitaries in Colombia, as well as by kids in the schools of the United States, or even in the streets during the celebration of the Independence Day in Illinois. As a result of technological development, and as an update of the Cold War resuming its legacy of polarization, the world of the 21^st century has been split in two poles of gregarious magnetic force capable of organizing social behavior: Human Rights and Organized Crime. From now on, after having unveiled the code of the Human Genome and built the Satellite Belt, these are the only true political -and transnational, global, transcultural- parties left for mankind.

Regarding Colombia, let us remember the young migrants from our sibling country selling bolivars and giving away Venezuelan currency as souvenirs in the Transmilenio system of Bogotá, four years ago, collaborating without knowing it with an unprecedented sabotage operation against their own country’s economy, during the presidential campaign in Colombia back in 2018. The humongous cost of such an operation was not an issue, since it was financed by drug trafficking and two objectives -at least- were achieved at once. It is also worth recalling the convoy of trucks jam-packed with bolivars and Venezuelan banknotes discovered in Paraguay at the time, when a coup d'état against President Evo Morales was being prepared for the neighboring Bolivia -the next largest producer of coca leaves in the world- who was finally forced to resign just to be immediately replaced by the lawyer Jeanine Áñez, married to Colombian politician Héctor Hernando Hincapié Carvajal. She is in prison today and they are both suspected of links to drug trafficking.

All this dark alliance had already been exposed in the United States in 1996 by the journalist Gary Webb, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the investigation thus titled and died in 2004 in a suicide scene that has accumulated doubts ever since. And today we cannot fail to see that in the age of Information and Communication Technology, counting on tools as powerful as Artificial Intelligence, transnational networks of organized crime are interconnecting, exploring alliances, and sharing methods and tools to seize political power throughout the world. Perhaps the recent assassination of Jovenel Moïse -former president of Haiti- committed by mercenaries trained and issued from the Colombian army, might shed some light on the magnitude of the problem. That’s how a lobby for endless war has grown into a political party as well in the United States as in Colombia, that’s how it is developing as a single transnational party, that’s how Democracy is in the greatest jeopardy all round the world in our days. This is how an assault on the U.S. Capitol has been possible during the last campaign, and why the two campaigns were interfering with each other. This is how the warning of Dwight D. Eisenhower -a general and a president of the United States- has come to be true.

May the People of the United States of America take hold of their own destiny, as well as the People of Colombia, which have struggled for peace for so many years. And may Mankind achieve the conquest of peace, from now on the only possible alternative to extinction, as we are in the global era. This is the next and unavoidable revolution in the history of the Human Being and the evolution of our species, comparable only with the taming of fire or the invention of agriculture: in the 21^st century, we must achieve the victory of Rights over Weapons and secure the triumph of Democracy over Crime.