No Chinese Spoken Here!

Capt. Wu Hong under arrest. (Photo: El Tiempo)

Colombia aspires to be a plugged-in, globalized nation, and arguably its most globalized city should be the port and tourist magnet of Cartagena.

So, why in the world, can't that regional capital of a million people find a Chinese-language translator?

A few days ago, Cartagena port officials discovered that a Chinese ship bound for Cuba carried not only the oil pipes declared on its manifest, but also had hidden 100 tons of gunpowder, ammunition for heavy artillery and more than two million detonators.

The captain, Wu Hong, was duly arrested - but authorities found they could not arraign him because they had no Chinese-Spanish interpreter. A search of Chinese restaurants and shops produced no volunteers, perhaps because the people feared involvement in an illegal enterprise. Finally, a student from China was located and presented himself in court. However, when officials asked him for his cedula, the young man "scratched his head and said that he'd left it at home," El Tiempo reports. The youth departed and has not been heard from since.

Crates of contraband arms. (Photo: El Tiempo) 

Cuba's trafficking of war material is bizarre, unethical and ugly. The island nation has no borders and nor apparent enemies, particularly now that it's making friends with the United States. (And if the U.S. did invade - in violation of treaty commitments - no amount of artillery would save Havana from the planet's only superpower, anyway.) The arms cache is particularly worrisome in light of the discovery in Panama last July of weapons hidden on a Cuban ship bound for North Korea, a totalitarian dictatorship which regularly threatens to attack South Korea.

Ironically, Cuba is hosting the peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas.

But back to Cartagena's embarrassing lack of a Chinese interpreter. I needn't observe that China is the world's most populous nation, the world's second-largest economy and a huge investor in Latin America. It's also a great potential source of tourists.

Are there no students who did semesters in Chinese high schools or universities? No businesspeople who travel to China? No Chinese immigrants who've learned Spanish? No Chinese language scholars?

Cartagena's lack of Chinese interpreters is handicapping prosecution of this ship captain. But it surely throws much more of a wrench into the region's economy.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Fast and Furiously to Colombia II

Made in the USA? Weapons confisticated from the
murderous Oficina de Envigado. (Foto: El Espectador)

A cache of weapons sold to criminals in Texas in order to trace them to Mexican cartels has turned up in Medellin, El Tiempo reports.

It's the second time that weapons from the controversial Fast and Furious weapons tracing program have turned up in Colombia. And, undoubtedly, the news will provide more ammunition for Republican critics of the Obama administration.

But the criticism misses the forest for the trees.

Yes, this project went very wrong when U.S. officials lost control of the weapons. However, the goal was extremely important: to find out how drug cartels and other criminal networks illegal obtain weapons sold in the U.S. and then use them to wreak havoc south of the Rio Grande.

A Colombian policeman, allegedly murdered
by the Oficina de Envigado. (Foto: La Vanguardia)

This April, U.S. authorities reported that more than 68,000 guns recovered in Mexico during the past 5 years came from the United States - which is surely just a fraction of the U.S. guns being used by Mexican criminals. And then there are the guns from the U.S. wreaking violence in the rest of Central and South America, including Colombia and elsewhere. To its credit, the Fast and Furious plan has shown just how far those U.S. guns get smuggled. The weapons in Medellin were reportedly recovered from the 'Office of Envigado', a violent succesor organization to Pablo Escobar's cartel employing ex-paramilitaries killers.

The weapons found a month ago on the property of the Envigado's commander included 13 pistols, 9 submachine guns and 56 rifles, according to El Tiempo, altho the article doesn't make clear how many of those came from the States. But those are probably only a sample of the firepower smuggled here from the U.S.

Guns for sale without background checks
at a US gun show. 

Mexican government officials and common Mexican people whose relatives have been killed in their nation's mindless violence have implored the U.S. to take common sense measures to control gun sales. And it's only common sense that by controlling sales of automatic rifles and huge gun magazines useful only for mass murder (as a start), the U.S. would benefit as well. The recent massacres in a movie theatre and a Sikh temple are plain evidence of that.

A piece of graffiti in Bogotá plays a
tic tac toe game with rifles and
bulls-eyes and concludes that '
Nobody wins.'

But owners of gun stores in U.S. border states such as Texas, Arizona and New Mexico were so selfish that they sued to overturn an Obama administration rule requiring them to file reports when someone purchased several high-powered rifles within a five-day period. Just to make myself clear: the gunshops were still allowed to sell a person multiple high-powered firearms within a five-day period, but just had to report the sales. But the gun sellers' valued their profits so much more than they did lives of people in Mexico and Colombia that they objected even to that. At gun shows, meanwhile, firearms are bought and sold with virtually no control at all.

Everybody knows where most of these weapons go, and who uses them: vicious criminals like the Oficina de Envigado. But the U.S. political system is too intimidated by fanatical gun rights lobbies such as the National Rifle Association to do anything about it.

It's a continent-wide tragedy which appears to be expanding fast and furiously.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Arms, The Man and Uncle Sam

Bout: Locked up. 

In his United States prison cell, Viktor Bout probably doesn't want to hear anything about Colombia.

Bout, a Russian nicknamed 'The Merchant of Death,' had been the world's most successful smuggler of arms, altho he also traded in drugs and legal products, including even humanitarian supplies.

But Bout tried for one deal too far - an arms sale to Colombia's FARC rebels, for which Bout left the safety of Russia for Thailand to seal the deal. But the supposed FARC representatives were actually informants working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, who got Bout arested and eventually deported to the United States for trial.

And perhaps it was appropriate that Bout was tried and convicted in the U.S., even tho his weapons killed mostly Africans, because it was the U.S. which, in lots of ways, created Bout. 

A Soviet soldier uses a surface-to-
air missile. With the Soviet
Union's collapse, its weapons
flooded the world. 

Bout flourished in the free-wheeling, uncontrolled illicit arms market, shipping mostly small arms to different warring groups, primarily in Africa. Bout cared only about money. In some conflicts, he sold weapons to both dictators and insurgents fighting them, single-handedly creating arms races. But Bout also shipped humanitarian and other supplies, and was even hired by the U.S. government to supply U.S. forces in Iraq.

Bout's planes also reportedly carried Colombian cocaine north.

Bout's business was successful, in part, because of the U.S. government's traditionally strong opposition to an international treaty regulating the trade in small arms. Those are the weapons which kill about 2,000 people every day, including many Colombians, in insurrections, gang battles and street crimes. Colombians, for example, murder each other at a rate more than double that of war-torn Mexico. The U.S.'s position has shifted somewhat during the Obama administration, but not enough.

The Merchant of Death may be locked up, but, like the drug trade, where there's money to be made, other merchants will appear to make it. And, even more than illegal drugs, weapons should be regulated and controlled. 

FARC fighters carry
black-market weapons. 

Bout had offered the supposed FARC representatives an arsenal of weapons including 100 surface-to-air missiles, armor-piercing rockets and even helicopters. The U.S. indictment focuses on harm to the U.S. and its citizens. But, if the FARC had actually gotten ahold of those weapons, they would have caused lots of carnage against both Colombian soldiers and civilians, even downing passenger planes. 

After Bout's conviction, campaigners called for a U.N. treaty controlling the arms trade. But the U.S.'s National Rifle Association, a paranoid gun-rights lobby which seems to have U.S. presidents terrorized, says that "In most cases, agendas for the elimination of private ownership of firearms are disguised as calls for international arms control to stem the flow of illicit military weapons." I'd like to see how a treaty blocking an African dictator or a Colombian terrorist group from buying a surface-to-air missile is going to take away a rifle from a deer hunter in Montana, but the NRA has apparently convinced itself of it.

And that's fundamental, because Bout is a small fish in the pond. The United States is the world's biggest arms merchant. And a recent U.S. sting operation showed that guns smuggled across borders go directly into criminal hands - including Colombian hands.

And while weapons (along with drugs) remain unregulated, terrorist groups will continue arming themselves and conflicts in Africa, Colombia and elsewhere will drag murderously on.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours