Narconews: Welcome, Comrade Mary Anastasia O'Grady

Wall Street Journal editorial writer Mary Anastasia O'Grady and the Narco News team - journalists all with Latin America as our beat - have not found much to agree on over the past five years.

From her (still unsubstantiated) claims that Venezuela's government is funding Evo Morales and the coca growers' movements in Bolivia, to her frequent defenses of disgraced Bush advisor on Latin America Otto Reich, to her inferences that Jimmy Carter and Cesar Gaviria covered up what she claimed (without evidence) was an electoral fraud in Caracas last year, it seemed that O'Grady and we were destined to always view the same hemisphere through opposite lenses.

Until now...

In her recent Wall Street Journal column, "Blame U.S. Drug Policy for the Bolivian Uprising," Mary Anastasia O'Grady sings in harmony - an amazing feat coming from a voice that croons only from the right side of the larynx - with the Narco News editorial position that we posted in the April 18, 2000 Opening Statement of the Authentic Journalism renaissance.

Welcome aboard, Comrade O'Grady!

Read from her groundbreaking column, with our own added analysis and fact-checking, via The Narcosphere:

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/6/28/155339/172

In this sixth month of the year 2005, O'Grady, analyzing the same beat as we report here at Narco News, arrived at the same conclusion: Drug prohibition must end for democracy to survive.

Her argument is a mirror image of that of Narco News (after all, mirrors invert left and right): She says, in effect, "They're winning the South! Therefore we have to legalize drugs to stop them!" We've said, for five years, "We're winning the South! Therefore drugs will be legalized!" Poetic, ain't it! We both seem to agree, though: the social movements on the rise in Latin America are the sword by which the United States is going to have to, sooner or later, repeal drug prohibition.

From somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano
Correspondent
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com

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