by Fred Logan
I must confess. My title was “borrowed” from a local two-day 2009 symposium on drug trafficking and violence in Central America and the Caribbean.
As I sat and listen to the various academics and other “experts” discuss the instability behind the Central American drug violence, I cussed to myself, “&*@! That’s Homewood!”
Guatemala is a “failed society,” a “failed state.” The traditional institutions have collapsed. The masses of people are poor. The masses have a deep, historical, adversarial relationship with the state, that is with the police. That’s Homewood! I live in Homewood.
But the experts never did mention that the masses of people in all of these places are non-European, non-White. The United States is ranked Number One for illegal drug abuse on the planet. And by official estimates, at least 70 percent of the illegal drug users in the United States are White people. What does that tell you and me?
The experts also never did address who or what destabilized all of these areas. Of course, the world knows in 1954 a USA coup, titled “PBS-Success”, overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Arbenze Jacobo Guzman, to maximize the profits of the U.S based United Fruit Company. The United States then installed decades of brutal dictatorial regimes that robbed and destabilized Guatemala for the benefit of UFC.
Here in Pittsburgh, majority-Black Homewood has been “destabilized” by historical racism in education, housing, employment, and public health, all aggravated and intensified by the collapse of the region’s heavy manufacturing and retail sectors. All of this fell on the Black community trapped at the bottom of the Pittsburgh-area social pyramid.
In Pittsburgh and all around the USA a whole bunch of people, Black and White, run amok claiming the gun violence now plaguing the Black community is a disease. But they do not clarify what they mean by a “disease.”
The gun violence in Homewood is not a genetic, biological, disease encoded in the DNS of Black people. Up front, that crazy talk must be knocked down and stomped out by Black people.
FRED LOGAN
Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor-Green, Ron DeSantis, all of MAGA-USA will agree loud and long, “Yes, it is a biological, genetic disease.” And that innate disease—they will chat loud, long and with glee—accounts for the gun violence disparity in Pittsburgh’s predominately White and majority Black neighborhoods, for example the disparity in Fox Chapel or Bethel Park and in Homewood.
The current cycle of narco- gun violence in Homewood is a sociological crisis. It is the direct product of illegal drug trafficking. This current crisis is now some 30-odd years old. Its origin can be pinpointed to the latter half of 1988 and the first half of 1989. That is when the free enterprise, illegal crack-cocaine market took off in Pittsburgh. Over the years, the gun-violence has fluctuated, but it has never returned to its pre-crack level. Go check the city homicide records.
Along with the expanded crack market in already destabilized Homewood came much more illegal drug money to gun fight over. And more guns for U.S. gun dealers—staunch, card-carrying NRA members—to sell. Illegal guns are endemic to the illegal drug trafficking free enterprise industry in Central America and the United States.
The U.S. media tells us that in Central America massive narco-violence is fought between organized drug gangs over the production and distribution of illegal drugs. On a lesser, but still tragic scale, narco-violence is waged in the USA retail drug market.
The treatment for the victims of Black gun violence is a “public health” issue. Corporate, foundation, and public funding are for treating the victims and families of narco-gun violence. But the motives behind the narco-gun violence is not a public health issue.
In a small and very important book, American Disease-Origins of Narcotics Control, David F. Musto provides some very important history related to the drug abuse crisis in the United States.