Real victims of the drug trade
HEARTBREAKING as it all is, there is barely an element to the Cassandra Sainsbury drug-smuggling case that passes the front bar test.
Cassie, like Lindy, like Schapelle, has become the latest female protagonist in that occasional national game of Did She Do It?
I do not know anyone who thinks the answer is no.
Aside from her loyal and shattered family, even those of us who would love to give this 22-year-old the benefit of the doubt struggle to do so.
No one should wish ill on this poor girl. Perhaps there is an innocent explanation, but I am really struggling to find it.
Whenever these cases arise, three things mitigate against public sympathy.
The first is the valid question as to how many lives could have been destroyed if the drugs intended for smuggling had made it to our shores.
The second is the naivety of swanning into a country with a proven record of applying the harshest penalties against drug dealers and taking the risks regardless.
The third is the audacity of following up that mistake by demanding our federal government extract you from a position of your own making.
It was for those reasons the Bali Nine struggled to win too much public support in Australia.
Setting aside the specifics of Cassie’s situation, there is a broader point to be made in the context of Latin America about the West’s moral ambivalence over its role in the creation of an illicit drug industry.
Big countries such as Colombia and Mexico and tiny Central American nations such as El Salvador and Honduras, have almost become failed states, purely as a result of the drug trade and the related drug wars between the cartels.
Mexico ploughs on in a vaguely viable fashion on account of its natural wealth, principally oil and agriculture, and its proximity to the US that makes it one of the world’s leading manufacturing hubs.
But on several occasions in the past few decades this great country almost ceased to function, with drugrelated political corruption destroying public faith in governments, the police and the military.
To get a sense of the scale of this corruption, one of the most violent of the cartels, The Zetas, bribed roughly one-third of the soldiers in the Mexican equivalent of our SAS by quadrupling their pay.
The scale of all this violence between the rival cartels spilt into the civilian sphere, with more lives lost in Mexico in the past 15 years than in the war in Afghanistan.
Colombia has fared worse, with the power struggles between the Cali and Medellin cartels overlapping and intertwining with a civil war between a Marxist guerilla army and Right-wing death squads, both sides of which have at times formed allegiances with the drug dealers.
The tragedy of all this is that countries such as Mexico and Colombia are sophisticated and cultured places that have pound for pound produced more greater writers and directors and architects than most nations, yet they have become almost exclusively associated with an ultra-violent drug trade.
What has happened to these countries is a case of supply and demand economics.
There are not enough drug users within Mexico and Colombia to sustain these mega-industries. That’s where the West comes in. We are largely responsible for underwriting this misery.
Some years ago Naomi Klein wrote a right-on book called No Logo on ethical consumerism.
From T-shirts made in Bangladeshi sweatshops to slave-harvested Guatemalan bananas and African blood diamonds, from Big Tobacco to Big Pharma to Big Sugar, the argument goes that the planet is so globalised that Western consumers keep nations subjugated and people poor.
I don’t buy all of Klein’s argument, but it seems to be true of the drug trade; yet few Westerners make the connection.
It’s something people might think about next time they’re contemplating a line on a Friday night in the dunny of a bar, or worse, contemplating becoming an active player in the drug trade itself, which I sincerely hope, despite all the evidence, that Cassie Sainsbury didn’t do.
ONE OF THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CARTELS, THE ZETAS, BRIBED ROUGHLY ONE-THIRD OF THE SOLDIERS IN THE MEXICAN EQUIVALENT OF OUR SAS BY QUADRUPLING THEIR PAY