The Guardian: Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America

 It has taken decades to fully expose this system, which enabled governments to send death squads on to each other’s territory to kidnap, murder and torture enemies – real or suspected – among their emigrant and exile communities. Condor effectively integrated and expanded the state terror unleashed across South America during the cold war, after successive rightwing military coups, often encouraged by the US, erased democracy across the continent. Condor was the most complex and sophisticated element of a broad phenomenon in which tens of thousands of people across South America were murdered or disappeared by military governments in the 1970s and 80s. [...]

Although Condor operatives hunted down targets in all member states, their work focused on Argentina in particular, which was a refuge for exiles escaping military dictatorships across the continent before it, too, fell under military control. Condor squads dispatched to Argentina from Uruguay and Chile used a series of makeshift jails and torture centres provided by their hosts. The first was the abandoned car repair garage, Automotores Orletti, where Anatole Larrabeiti was held and his mother Victoria was last seen alive. Larrabeiti still recalls seeing a jar of glittering metal in the garage, in which victims’ wedding rings were kept. [...]

The new information about the rigged cryptography machines follows the revelations, from a declassified document handed to Argentina by the US last year, that West German, British and French intelligence services even explored the possibility of copying at least part of the Condor method in Europe. A heavily redacted CIA cable from September 1977 is headed: “Visit of representatives of West German, French and British intelligence services to Argentina to discuss methods for establishment of an anti-subversive organization similar to Condor”. The visit coincided with cross-frontier terror campaigns by Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army. According to the cable, the visitors explained that “the terrorist/subversive threat had reached such dangerous levels in Europe that they believed it best if they pooled their intelligence resources in a cooperative organization such as Condor”.

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OCCRP: What Lockdown? World’s Cocaine Traffickers Sniff at Movement Restrictions

But OCCRP reporters have found that the world’s cocaine industry — which produces close to 2,000 metric tons a year and makes tens of billions of dollars — has adapted better than many other legitimate businesses. The industry has benefited from huge stores of drugs warehoused before the pandemic and its wide variety of smuggling methods. Street prices around Europe have risen by up to 30 percent, but it is not clear how much of this is due to distribution problems, and how much to drug gangs taking advantage of homebound customers. [...]

As many countries begin partially reopening their economies, traffickers may now be in a position to become more powerful than ever. With economies in distress and many businesses facing ruin, cash-rich narcos may be able to cheaply buy their way into an even bigger share of the legitimate economy. [...]

Exports to the world’s other biggest cocaine market, Europe, have suffered even less disruption. Unlike exports to the United States, cocaine bound for Europe is typically moved in legal air and sea cargoes, especially fast-moving fresh goods such as flowers and fruit. The latter, as food, has continued to move unimpeded during the pandemic, helping feed Europe’s 9.1 billion euro-a-year cocaine habit. [...]

Perhaps as a response to increased seizures, the street price of cocaine has risen by 20 to 30 percent during the lockdown period from mid-February until the end of April compared to the same period last year, according to Sciuto of the DCSA. Six months, criminal groups in Europe paid 25,000 to 27,000 euros for a kilogram of cocaine; they now fork out 35,000 to 37,000 euros, he said, adding that Spanish police have noticed the same trend.

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The Guardian: What Noma did next: how the ‘New Nordic’ is reshaping the food world

The New Nordic movement is bound by a set of 10 principles that stress sustainability, locality and respect for the natural world. Those ideals may sound familiar, but the scale of what its adherents are accomplishing makes New Nordic potentially far more transformative than any previous food movement. It is reaching beyond farms and fine-dining restaurants, and into halls of power, supermarket aisles, canteens and classrooms. [...]

The New Nordic movement heralded another shift in the world of fine dining. In our current era of climate emergency and brutal inequality, celebrity chefs have transformed again, from ruthless kitchen dictators such as Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White, or mad scientists such as Ferran Adrià, into crusaders for a better world. Where once the dream was to cook for presidents, now the aim is to work with them. Massimo Bottura, the ebullient owner of the three-Michelin-star Osteria Francescana in Modena, was celebrated in the 2019 Time 100 for his work feeding the homeless. José Andrés, the Spanish chef once credited with bringing tapas to the US, now has an accolade far exceeding a Michelin star: a nomination for the Nobel peace prize, for his disaster relief efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. The pursuit of Michelin stars and coffee-table cookbooks has been superseded by pursuing a role in public life. [...]

Two decades ago, Denmark might have seemed a rather unconducive place for a revolution in haute cuisine, let alone in food altogether. Being generous, you could have said that it was a country of open-faced sandwiches, hot dogs and overproof alcohol. But you might also have associated it with the cheapest processed pork in the EU, known for being made in a grim factory from a candy-pink slurry of something that once was a pig. “Back then, all you could get in the centre of Copenhagen was bad French food or bad Italian food,” the food writer Andrea Petrini told me. “There was no Danish food culture.” [...]

Around the same time that Redzepi founded Mad, Meyer, who sold his majority stake in Noma in 2013, began testing New Nordic principles far beyond Scandinavia. After mapping the countries of the world on metrics such as economic development, crime rates and biodiversity, Meyer decided to open a restaurant called Gustu in Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, with another talented young Danish chef, Kamilla Seidler, at the helm. Seidler and her team used Bolivia’s fauna and flora to create the restaurant’s idiosyncratic cuisine – llama tartare, alligator escabeche and a lot of quinoa – and brought the restaurant on to the foodie radar. But more importantly, she completed the restaurant’s primary objective: training the restaurant’s Bolivian staff so she could leave Gustu in their hands.

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The New York Review of Books: The Rise and Fall of Evo Morales

Beyond politics and ideology, it was the wild informality and humility of it all that made me love Bolivia that night as much as I ever had in my family’s nineteen years there (from 1998 to 2017). And that is why watching Evo’s resignation on Bolivian television on a Sunday morning three weeks ago was so dreadfully sad. Something that had begun beautifully, Bolivia at its best, had ended in a familiar scene of a leader chased out by the anger of the people, flying off to another country. And then it unleashed a wave of violence that has already claimed more than a dozen lives, and counting.[...]

With his base solid, Evo began to do some very good things. By bringing the nation’s once-privatized natural resources back under state control at the start of the global commodities boom, he built an industrial foundation that produced solid economic growth through the entire global recession following the 2008 financial crash. His government used those funds to build schools and health clinics, to pave roads, and to establish a cash subsidy program to help children stay in schools. Poverty rates fell and indigenous pride was on the rise. In his second election, in 2009, Morales dispatched his opponent by a thumping margin of almost three to one. On the platform of his national popularity, he also thrust himself forward as a potent international symbol, making powerful speeches around the globe on indigenous rights and the protection of Mother Earth.

Back home in Bolivia, however, Evo’s actual commitment to both those causes was increasingly called into question. This tension came to a head in 2011 when Morales declared that he would ignore the vehement objections of local indigenous communities and build a highway through the TIPNIS rainforest in the country’s east. In protest, those communities mounted a long and difficult but high-profile march to the capital. Morales met this demonstration with brutal police repression that was broadcast on national television. When the women marchers yelled their dissent, Morales’s police bound their faces with masking tape to shut their mouths. Dozens of people were injured in the conflict, and a baby died. The shine on Evo’s presidency began to look tarnished.

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Business Insider: Bolivia ended its drug war by kicking out the DEA and legalizing coca

Coca, a mild stimulant, has been used for millennia by people in the Andes in tea and food, though it is most often chewed raw to give energy and treat ailments ranging from altitude sickness to menstruation pain. The plant is also the source material for cocaine and the target of anti-narcotics efforts across South America driven in part by the United States. From 1997 to 2004, a US-funded program seeking to eradicate coca in Bolivia by force plunged the Chapare into traumatic conflict. [...]

Even though his crop has been fully legal since 2004, when the Bolivian government took the unprecedented step of legalizing production for domestic consumption, these dark memories still prompt the farmer to insist his name does not appear in print.

Wherever you go in the Chapare — one of Bolivia's two coca-growing regions — you hear similar stories of life in the 1990s and early 2000s: narco-slayings, police violence and rapes, and coca-grower protests ending in violence and death. [...]

The system — later dubbed by Morales as "coca yes, cocaine no" — allows each family to cultivate up to 1,600 square meters, known as a "cato," of coca plants. Farmers are obliged to sell their leaves at authorized markets, and if they cannot produce a receipt, they must justify why their harvest was lost (for example, because of blight) with a certificate from their local growers' association.

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