#narco state

After help from Kenyan police is blocked, Haitians ask: What now? January 28, 2024

"Gangs have taken over entire neighborhoods in Haiti’s capital, and killings have more than doubled in the past year, but for the organizers of the Port-au-Prince Jazz Festival, the show simply had to go on.

So while judges an ocean away deliberated on whether to send a contingent of officers to pacify Haiti’s violence-riddled streets, festival organizers made do by shortening the length of the event to four days from eight, moving the acts from a public stage to a restricted hotel venue, and replacing the handful of artists who canceled."

A Kenyan court Friday blocked a plan to deploy 1,000 Kenyan police officers to Haiti, the key element of a multinational force meant to help stabilize a nation besieged by murders, kidnappings, and gang violence.

"While Washington was a strong proponent of the Kenya mission, it did not offer to provide any US personnel."

"If you ask people in Haiti what they need, it’s security,” he said. “They don’t think about food or school. We don’t have food, because of security. People don’t go to school, because of security.”

The shooting of a prominent Dutch crime reporter has prompted a national debate about the country’s reputation as the nexus of the continent’s illegal drugs trade.

Almost from the moment the last bullet tore into the Netherlands’ best-known crime reporter Peter R. de Vries on the evening of July 6, a peculiar debate erupted among politicians, journalists and commentators over how to “frame” the attack.

On one hand, the attempt was condemned as a blow against journalism and the rule of law. Others, often more inclined to the political right, judged it to be a much narrower manifestation of the country becoming a “narco state”.

This might seem like an esoteric and domestic, even parochial, distinction in the face of the outrage that had been perpetrated right in the centre of Amsterdam, the freewheeling and drugs-friendly Dutch capital. But it goes to the heart of the way that the debates over both Dutch drug and crime policy and the safety of journalists have been politicised in sometimes surprising ways.

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If the Netherlands is in danger of becoming a "narco state" it's because it houses Europe's largest port not because of its "liberal views" on drug use which are quite frankly not that liberal and the right wing Dutch government would like to shed that image as much as it would to close all "coffeshops" but pretends otherwise. Czechia has a more liberal drug policy even if their use remains illegal you're unlikely to be arrested for using.