Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Scary Groups in the Andes
A cocaine-funded Shining Path (or some version of it) is back in Peru, and Hezbollah is said to be making in-roads in Colombia. The Colombia claim is not implausible, given the group's long history in the Tri-Border Area where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay come together, but I wish the military would offer some sort of corroborating information. If they can't because it would compromise efforts to combat the group, that's fine, but then maybe they shouldn't mention their intelligence to start off with.
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Both of these articles fall into the category of "things that are written up every four months as if for the first time." I agree that it's not inherently implausible that Hezbollah could link up for some limited purpose with narcos, but nor is it inherently implausible that some lazy intel flack is feeding us a load of shit. Until there's better info this will not trouble my sleep at night.
The Shining Path bit is more complex. The part about the split between the Huallaga and VRAE factions has been reported several times in Peru. If it's true, great - the VRAE faction is by far the more dangerous and, sad as it may be, acting like the FARC (i.e. monsters, but with a facade of "community engagement") would be a vast improvement over the way Sendero acted in its heyday. As for an increase in violence, maybe. The 2008death toll was inflated by one very successful ambush; in terms of number of attacks that induced casualties I don't think 2008 was notably higher than 2007.
I'm not a huge Simon Romero fan but kudos to him for reporting on the civilian deaths, which the FFAA have just denied. And even more props for making Defense Minister Antero Flores Araoz look like the total jagoff he is. Actually Flores has had a rough go of it recently: he got very publicly called out, in a different context, by none other than Mario Vargas Llosa, which in Peru is every bit as humiliating as a US basketball player getting called out simultaneously by Michael Jordan and Bill Russell would be.
http://www.elcomercio.com.pe/impresa/notas/peru-no-necesita-museos/20090308/256015
There's a lot of that pretending long-standing trends are new developments in the newspaper coverage of LA, which I think has more to do with the medium and the relative inattention of the readership than anything. The story behind it is typically newsworthy even if not new, and the papers always tries to put a "why you need to be paying attention to this" spin out, whereas were it a domestic piece, they would assume a greater base knowledge from their readers just come out with story.
Yeah that's a brutal opening paragraph in the Vargas Llosa piece, isn't it?
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