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Grandmas of Weed in Swaziland

By Jeralyn, Section Foreign Affairs
Posted on Wed Aug 15, 2012 at 07:59:46 AM EST
Tags: DEA, Swaziland (all tags)
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The New York Times had an article yesterday about impoverished grandmothers in Swaziland who are growing Swazi Gold to support themselves and the orphaned grandchildren they are raising, many of whose mothers died of Aids. They are high up in the hills near a place called Piggs Peak. They fear the police.

Maybe they ought to fear the DEA who could decide to make Piggs Peak the next stop on their excellent African Adventures tour.

If you don't think the DEA is in Swaziland, you'd be wrong. The DEA has an office in South Africa, where is where the Times says the grandmothers' pot ends up, which covers:

Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Central African Republic, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Lesotho, Mada-gascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe

[More..]

The Times includes this odd sentence about one of the grandmothers:

She does not think of herself as part of a vast global chain of drug cultivation that includes poppy farmers in Afghanistan or coca growers in Latin America.

That implies to me someone else does think of the grandmothers as part of a vast global chain.

Will the grandmothers be the next Africans to be busted, flown to the U.S. and made to stand trial? Will the grandchildren get to come too? I bet children like Grandma Khathazile's 11 orphaned grandkids get left behind with no one.

What does the DEA have to say about Africa lately?
Just one month ago, Jeffrey P. Breeden, the chief of the D.E.A.’s Europe, Asia and Africa section said:

We see Africa as the new frontier in terms of counterterrorism and counternarcotics issues,” said Jeffrey P. Breeden, the chief of the D.E.A.’s Europe, Asia and Africa section. “It’s a place that we need to get ahead of — we’re already behind the curve in some ways, and we need to catch up.”

William R. Brownfield, the assistant secretary of state for inter