George Bush’S Great America [EN]: Chapter 340

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In Brazil, countless people were dying every day. Oppressive crackdowns were bound to cause bloodshed, and no one seemed to care if some innocent blood was spilled in the process.

Isn’t that how wars usually are? The meddling foreign press might make a fuss, but if you look closely, it’s mostly about ‘the conflict between rebels and government forces grinding the people like a millstone!’

The rebels were just drug-dealing organizations anyway, and no matter how well-armed and resistant they were, they couldn’t compare to real tanks and attack helicopters. So, as time went on, they were gradually pushed back.

Most of the retreating rebels hid in the shelters provided by Brazil’s natural environment. The Amazon, the world’s largest jungle, was the perfect refuge to avoid prying eyes.

Originally, the jungles of the Southern Hemisphere were terrible places known as Green Hells, but if you had the ability to befriend nature, it was the best place to achieve self-sufficiency and remain hidden from everyone.

The problem started here.

It was fortunate that the rebels had fled to the Amazon. However, as mentioned above, the Amazon was not only the world’s largest jungle but also Brazil’s largest vested interest zone. It was the Amazon that sustained Brazil’s economy.

Therefore, Brazil’s economy was heavily dependent on the Amazon, and most of the influential people in Brazil had a stake in the Amazon in some way. This meant that the military was under ‘pressure’.

It was almost sophistry, but any area slightly damaged by military operations was not restored but turned into an industrial zone. This was partly because Brazil’s financial situation made it difficult to restore everything, and partly because there was no time to worry about nature during the operations. But above all, many Brazilians saw the Amazon as a resource to be developed.

The most powerful landowners in Brazil wanted more land, and the next most powerful entrepreneurs wanted more raw materials to make more consumer goods. So, they joined forces and started to pressure the government to secure more industrial zones.

Even as they pressured, they didn’t try to sway public opinion through the media. Instead, they offered bribes to government officials as usual. Some of these bribes were delivered to the president as reliably as spawning salmon return to their spawning grounds, and the president didn’t particularly stop this phenomenon. He was even relieved to take this opportunity to see how and where the bribes were coming from.

In any case, the bribery offensives by landowners and corporations, or ‘illegal logging’ or ‘illegal reclamation,’ were commonplace. If they were helping to make it legal, such bribes could be overlooked.

The only reason Brazil, so eager to exploit the Amazon, had been passively developing it was that…

The world was pressuring them to preserve the Amazon. Brazil had been subjected to a kind of ‘kicking away the ladder’ [a situation where a country is prevented from developing in the same way that developed countries did], and Brazil could only retort, ‘You guys destroyed nature and now you’re giving us grief?’ But that was from a civilian perspective, and the government had no choice but to be mindful of international opinions.

The image of the world’s largest jungle that developed countries had imposed on them was both Brazil’s pride and the constraints that defined Brazil’s limits.

While Brazil was struggling, the world was subtly ignoring the problem that its neighbor, Colombia, was on fire. This was because, thanks to the United States poking around everywhere, world wars were breaking out in China and the Middle East, and Europe was at war with terrorism, both East and West.

So, there was no time to pay attention to South America, which was only fighting a war on drugs. Even those living in South America, except for those who could directly feel the effects of living in areas fighting the war on drugs, were trying to guess how the world was turning.

Anyway, if you asked which country was the world’s largest drug producer, it was naturally East Iraq. There used to be things like the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle, but in the case of the Golden Crescent, Afghanistan, which was originally supposed to be one of the axes, was missing, making it ambiguous.

In the case of the Golden Triangle, Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand were temporarily faltering because the United States was turning its eyes on them. The triple natural disasters that plunged Southeast Asia into hell completely destroyed the drug production areas, leading to their demise.

Of course, the political situation was chaotic, and they had become poor countries with a shortage of money. Moreover, since there were major drug-consuming countries nearby, they would naturally start cultivating drugs again over time, but that was then, not now.

Brazil was in the middle of its war on drugs, and North Korea was thoroughly suppressed as soon as it was annexed by South Korea. From the beginning, it was a drug systematically produced under the guidance of the Party. Now that the owner had changed, the land would not be used according to the new owner’s wishes? Moreover, the military was stationed or used as a training ground in almost every remote area.

Mexico faltered after ‘that incident’ in the United States. To be precise, instead of declaring a war on drugs, the United States established a plan to stabilize the producing countries and ultimately reduce domestic drug consumption, citing the fact that the security of drug-producing countries was consistently terrible.

The war on drugs is like the war on terror. Since the entity is unclear and the opponent is created by the basic human desire for pleasure, there was no solution other than a defensive method of trying to create a society that does not create such an opponent.

And the very first target of that ‘defense’ that the United States put forward was none other than Mexico. The method itself was not so different from what happened in the original history.

With the help of the United States, Mexico disarmed the local police, who had become corrupt due to budget shortages, using the federal police and the military to the fullest extent, changed the local police to suit the government’s taste, and strengthened the federal police.

Doesn’t it seem familiar? That’s right. It was the method that George W. Bush had already used in the United States to overhaul the police once.

The United States became a great textbook and a negative example for Mexico, which was trying to normalize its police force in any way possible. As a result of repeating efficient administrative processing within a range that the Mexican government considered reasonable, it was able to reduce drug exports to some extent externally.

Because the drugs stayed in the country instead of going abroad, the inside was more damaged than before, but overall, drug production could be drastically reduced. Moreover, the drugs circulating domestically were also gradually declining over time.

In addition, they were announcing even lower figures externally, thanks to which Bush praised the Mexican government. Of course, he roughly understood how things were actually going, but isn’t that how diplomacy works?

The United States and Mexico had to maintain a friendly relationship, whether they liked it or not, due to mutual needs. The United States had to reduce drug outflows, and Mexico had to somehow fix its police budget, which was insufficient to the point of being strained.

In addition, whatever the reality of the situation, it was true that drug production and exports were gradually decreasing, so it was worth praising.

In fact, both the United States and Mexico wanted to reduce it drastically if they could, but that was truly a distant matter unless they treated the people as parts and managed everything perfectly.

Thus, ironically, the current largest drug producer, surpassing all the major countries, became Colombia. The current situation in Colombia was heading for the worst ever. Instead of being eradicated, drug cartels were becoming more rampant.

The reason for this was that drug cartels had completely changed their methods. The old method was to carry out relief activities in slums, form deep ties with the political world, and expand the organization, or to kill police officers who did not receive money and throw bombs at police stations, completely relying on terror rule.

In summary, internally, they received absolute support from the poor and showed the end of criminal-political collusion from the government, while externally, they responded strongly through armed resistance. In reality, there was no way to deal with them by force.

That changed in 2001, when Colombia began to receive external pressure from the United States again after the Medellin Cartel. To be precise, it was after the 9/11 attacks, but even then, it was just receiving diplomatic pressure.

Pressure made with empty words. However, the ‘drug book incident’ that turned the entire United States upside down reminded them of those days. The days when they smuggled drugs into the United States by modifying submarines or giant passenger planes.

Naturally, Brazil started expanding its war on drugs, which had been going on for a long time, and Colombia, which had been hesitant, also protested against Bush’s direct and strong remarks, which threw away diplomatic rhetoric, saying, ‘If you don’t stop drug exports right now, we can even wage war! If it’s hard for you, we’ll go and burn it all down!’ but they couldn’t do anything about it inside and were groaning.

If they could solve the drug problem, they would have done it long ago. Isn’t that why they’re doing this?

Thus, just as the Colombian government was trying to destroy the drug cartels against its will, the drug cartels struck first.

They sold all the drugs they had and put the cash in people’s sleeves one by one, buying people’s hearts. They made all ten million people living in Bogota accomplices without exception. There were no businessmen who didn’t take the money, and neither were there politicians. In return, they were promised to provide convenience to the cartels.

So, what has changed is that, in return, they disarmed. They sold off their bases in order to stop drug production and completely enter the political world, where they were already half-advanced.

In addition, they requested the United States to cooperate in their entry into the political world, saying that they would actively cooperate in drug eradication in the United States. If the United States decided to stop them, they would deploy the U.S. military, and since Colombia was like the front yard of the United States, there was a high probability that it would become the second Afghanistan.

The current Afghanistan was a drug-free country. Of course, in the case of Afghanistan, the positive effects were combined due to President Bush’s high understanding of Afghanistan, the voters who longed for the monarchy, and the people who were living below imagination under the Taliban, but the cartel, who had no way of knowing that, was looking for a way to survive in its own way.

And this cartel’s request for cooperation came as a greater ordeal than George W. Bush had expected, who was troubled by China.