Generals, Guerrillas, Drugs, and Third World War–Making
For much of the past fifty years a sizable share of the world was locked in a geopolitical battle that pitted the United States and its clients against the Soviet Union and its satellites. The most violent events in this political battle often were set in the developing world, where the superpowers spent billions of dollars on aid and armaments to support governments or to back opposing or insurgent forces (Nietschmann and LeBon 1987). Countries in which the superpowers supported opposing groups included but were hardly limited to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Cuba, Korea, and Afghanistan. In many an instance, internal policies of the governments or revolutionary groups relating to such matters as human rights or education and to the welfare of their citizens factored not at all into their receiving or being denied support. The defining factor was alignment: the stance of a movement or government toward the United States or the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the two primary sources of funding and weaponry vanished, leaving many revolutionary groups and governments without a powerful sponsor. As the familiar glow of Soviet influence faded from the international landscape, many a former political proxy was forced to alter strategies and policies, the better to adjust to the "new world order." No longer could a country claim to be anticapitalist and routinely receive Soviet aid, as Cuba learned to its considerable dismay and fiduciary disarray. Nor did claiming to be anticommunist guarantee a deluge of financial, political, and military support from the United States. Numerous civil wars thus came to an end, elections were held in many countries, and former hard-line Soviet allies reached out with grasping hands to the West for recognition and financial support. Nicaragua, Vietnam, and numerous Eastern European states come to mind as examples. However, termination of the cold war did not end all of the military ventures in the developing world. Conflicts continue in countries such as Colombia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and the Congo; and low-intensity, sporadic outbreaks of political violence persist in such sites as Myanmar, Lebanon, and Mexico. Without the support of superpowers, participants in military conflicts have been forced to seek financial aid from alternative sources. In this note I discuss the implications of a particularly insidious funding source: the production and export of illegal narcotics. [1] What are known in Spanish as narcotraficantes have become a new financial "superpower" employed to prop up--or, in some cases, becoming--unsavory governments and revolutionary groups. A raffish relationship has been consummated, and the offspring threatens to be of insalubrious character and demeanor. A SETTING FOR SUBVERSION Current conflicts in Colombia and Myanmar demonstrate the relationship between narcotics production and revolutionary movements or rogue governments. The connection between them is anything but recent: Historical examples include British control of and profit from opium sales in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's covert support of opium production among ethnic-minority hill tribes in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and Nicaraguan Contra leaders profiting from cocaine shipments through their territory in the 1980s (McCoy 1991; Cox 1996). For the most part, the geographical and financial scope is larger than it was in the past. Revolutionary movements and governments control vast amounts of territory and command thousands of combatants, and all derive a majority of their financing--and power--from the production of narcotics (Robinson 1998; McCoy 1999). Unlike past examples, some current political groups and governments are completely dependent on narcotrafficking to further their agendas. Also, with the increasing ease of travel to and from once-remote lands, drug smugglers can send greater quantities of their product almost directly to the streets of the developed world. …
Shining Path and the Marxist Left
For the political left in Peru, the 1980s was a decade of unprecedented expansion in strength and influence, tempered, however, by the tension of ideological definition and the reality of armed conflict. The two main claimants to revolutionary leadership — Shining Path (SL or Sendero) and the United Left (IU) — had a similar intellectual heritage and sought support from the same sectors of society. Their goals and means were diametrically opposed, however. The major difference was that IU opted to participate in the political system and SL wanted to destroy it. The IU’s electoral strategy succeeded to the point of giving the Marxist coalition a real chance to win the 1990 presidential elections.1 Shining Path’s guerrilla war had expanded concomitantly, claiming over 20,000 lives through 1990 and putting a majority of Peru’s population of 22 million under government-imposed states of emergency.
Thermal incompatibility analysis of metal-ceramic systems based on flexural displacement data.
The feasibility of simple tests or analytical methods for prediction of residual stress states in metal-ceramic (MC) prostheses has not been demonstrated. Biomaterial metal-ceramic strips have been proposed to provide sensitive measures of transient and residual stress states through the measurement of midpoint deflection after cooling from the ceramic sintering temperature. The objective of this study was to apply the elastic-viscoelastic analogy to calculate transient and residual midpoint deflections in MC biomaterial strips and to compare these values with deflections measured with a beam-bending viscometer (BBV). Calculations and measurements were made for five MC systems that were found from a clinical study to be "thermally compatible" systems. Metal strips, 64 mm in length, 3 mm wide, and either 0.5 mm, 1.0 mm, or 2.0 mm in thickness, were veneered with four 0.25-mm thick layers of opaque porcelain. Midpoint deflection of the MC strips (ceramic oriented in the posterior position) was measured during cooling from an initial temperature of 700 degrees C. In general, the directions of the measured residual deflections did not agree with the "textbook" convention that negative deflections are associated with positive thermal contraction mismatch (alpha(M) - alpha(c) > 0) regardless of metal thickness. For a metal thickness of 0.5 mm, the residual midpoint deflection for all thermal contraction mismatch cases, except one, was positive (upward deflection) whereas the residual midpoint deflections were all negative when the metal thickness was increased to 1 or 2 mm, independent of the thermal contraction mismatch. The best agreement between calculated and measured values of residual midpoint deflection (+16 microns vs. +14 +/- 2.3 microns, respectively was obtained for MC biomaterial strips with a Ni-Cr alloy (0.5 mm thick) while the largest difference (+346 microns vs. +61 +/- 43.8 microns) was obtained for MC bimaterial strips with a Au-Pd allow (0.5 mm thick). In all but one case, changes in deflection direction as a function of metal thickness were correctly predicted by the viscoelastic analysis. The results of this study indicate that a viscoelastic model is useful for estimating thermal compatibility conditions of MC systems.