Cocaine Documentary Pack 1

Cocaine Documentary Pack 1

Channel 4-Unreported World - Guinea Bissau: Cocaine Country (2007)

Unreported World reports from Guinea Bissau in West Africa, and reveals the astonishing extent to which Colombian drugs traffickers have taken advantage of one of the world's poorest countries and turned it into the main transit point for hundreds of tons of cocaine smuggled into Europe every year.

With chronic poverty, rampant corruption and almost no police or customs, the Colombians have virtually 'bought' the country, flooding it with drugs money and creating Africa's first 'narco-state'.

Reporter Kate Seelye and producer Edward Watts begin their journey in the country's run-down capital, Bissau. Traveling at night and trying to avoid the ubiquitous armed security guards, the team is shown several mansions owned by Colombian drug dealers who are using Guinea Bissau as a warehouse - storing the drugs until they are distributed to various destinations in Europe.

Much of the cocaine is flown into the Bijagos islands - just off the coast - and the team travel to one island in particular, Bubaque, which has an old, Portuguese-built airfield that they've been told regularly receives flights from Colombia carrying massive amounts of cocaine.

The last journalist who tried to film the airfield was arrested and beaten, so Seelye and Watts have to stay undercover, posing as game fishers. They find the runway, which is several kilometers long. One local tells them that many villagers are involved in the operations, helping to unload the drugs to earn money. He also claims that the police are protecting the operation and that government officials often turn up to collect crates of cocaine.

Back in Bissau, the team meets a local human rights activist, in hiding after he received death threats when he accused the authorities of cooperating with the traffickers. Mario claims that he has information proving that the authorities are cooperating with the traffickers and tells Seelye that for foreigners to come in with hundreds of kilos of cocaine, buy large mansions and move freely around the city they must be receiving some kind of official protection.

To check out his claims, the team makes contact with someone inside the secret services. He tells Unreported World that because of the poverty of the country, everyone is involved in drug trafficking - from businessmen through to government ministers, the military and the police. He says that with so much money at stake, different branches of the military are likely to fight over the spoils and an already failed state could fracture even further.

The team arranges an interview with Prime Minister Martinho Ndafa Cabi who tells them that fighting drugs is priority, but, that as a fragile country with no resources, Guinea Bissau needs help from the international community to fight this growing problem. However, Unreported World shows that while the anti-drugs chief struggles to work without any usable vehicles, many government officials are traveling around in the latest Mercedes limousines.

As the team leaves West Africa, it's clear that without intervention Guinea Bissau faces a future as a state effectively run by the narco-traffickers, and that Europe will be flooded with ever more cocaine.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-world/episode-guide/series...

Channel 4-Unreported World - Colombia: Cocaine City (2007)

Reporter Hamida Ghafour and producer James Brabazon travel to one of the strangest, wildest cities on earth - Buenaventura, on Colombia's Pacific coast.

There is little running water or electricity in Buenaventura and housing is so scarce that people have constructed whole neighbourhoods of shacks built on stilts. Yet, over the last two years violent, death has become an everyday fact in this city of around 300,000 people. Everyone is affected - almost everyone has lost someone.
Initially, people are too frightened to talk to the team, but with the help of Father Ricardo, a local Catholic priest, Ghafour begins to uncover what's behind the violence and the rules by which people in the city must live.

The team is told that this rundown backwater is at the centre of the Colombian cocaine trade, controlled with private armies by the cartels who make millions of dollars shipping their drugs to America.

Each neighbourhood is controlled either by Colombia's rightwing paramilitaries or groups associated with the left wing guerrilla organisation FARC. Each demands total obedience and any transgression is punished with death.
Father Ricardo's church is a sanctuary and frightened women tell Ghafour how in the FARC areas they must even leave their doors open at night so that guerrilla fighters can move through their homes at will. Many have lost sons. One woman, whose son helps Father Ricardo run the church, takes Ghafour to meet his family. But within minutes the local FARC commanders arrive, angry that filming was taking place without their permission.

The gunmen reveal that their job - and the job of the rival paramilitaries - is to keep open security corridors that run from the jungle through Buenaventura's waterways and out into the ocean. Colombia's drug cartels use these routes for the bulk of the cocaine that goes to the USA, bringing the drugs from jungle factories and transferring it to boats and ships.

The cartels pay FARC and the paramilitaries vast sums for this safe passage. With shipments worth tens of millions of dollars regularly moving through the city's waterways the gunmen demand unquestioning cooperation from the city's population. One recently apprehended cartel boss was arrested carrying $80m in cash.

Ghafour travels to the coastguard's headquarters. Amongst an array of recently captured speed boats she discovers two large submarines. In the last two years, the coastguard has captured fifteen submarines, built in workshops deep inside the jungle.

The team investigates the efforts the authorities are making to regain control of the city, but find them to be largely ineffectual. The success of US-backed anti-drug operations elsewhere in Colombia mean the ordinary people of this impoverished city are now being enveloped by a flood of cocaine, with all the violence and corruption it brings, as the cartels entrench themselves around the city.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-world/episode-guide/series...

BBC Two-This World - The 12-Year-Old Drug Smuggler (2007)

In August 2005 a 12-year-old girl was sentenced to one year in a juvenile prison for smuggling cocaine, under the Bolivian anti-narcotics law 1008.

This World follows her story, both in prison and after her release.

But this was not the first time she had been behind bars.

At the age of six, she spent four years living with her mother - also caught for smuggling cocaine - in San Sebastian women's prison in Cochabamba, where it is normal practice for convicts to take their children to live with them.

In the film, their experiences are illustrated through a family living in prison today.

Marcela Choce (or the "laundry woman", as she is also known), currently lives there with her two children, Pablito and Milli.

A poor Indian woman from the coca-growing Chapare jungle, Marcela was caught smuggling cocaine at a checkpoint.

And in San Sebastian, where nothing is free, she must wash clothes all day long to pay for a small cell for herself and her family.

Coca politics

During filming, Evo Morales took power in Bolivia.

The first indigenous president in Bolivia's history, he is a former trade union leader for coca growers, and a close ally of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

He spent years fighting for the rights of poor coca growers and has always opposed "1008" - the law drafted by the US as part of their "war against drugs."

Many Bolivians see it as an oppressive colonial law, targeting Bolivia's poor.

President Morales has claimed the law is inhumane and has promised to industrialise coca, while maintaining he will also fight cocaine traffic.

This documentary, filmed over seven months, shows to what extent the Bolivian leader has managed to fulfil his promises and change the lives of his people.

It questions law 1008 and asks whether it would be better if the US paid more attention to the problem of cocaine consumption in the US instead.

And it asks whether, even for children as young as 12 years old, many of the country's poor are simply destined to become cocaine smugglers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/6251693.stm

BBC-Our World - The Cocaine Trail (2010)

Gary Duffy reports on the women being used by international traffickers to carry drugs through Brazil's airports - and what happens to these so-called drug mules when they get caught.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r3z7p

Related Downloads:

BBC-This World: Mexico's Drug War (2010) - http://tracker.concen.org/torrents-details.php?id=14382

Bill Moyers - The Secret Government (1987) - http://tracker.concen.org/torrents-details.php?id=12768

The Secret Heartbeat of America - American Drug Running - An Unaired Documentary - http://tracker.concen.org/torrents-details.php?id=2212

Cover Up-Iran Contra Scandel - http://tracker.concen.org/torrents-details.php?id=1384

Empire in the Andes - http://tracker.concen.org/torrents-details.php?id=9881

Plan Colombia: Cashing In On The Drug War Failure - http://tracker.concen.org/torrents-details.php?id=10243

BONUS PDF - Cocaine Synthesis