Robert Rogowski
Appearances
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
In many... I don't mean to be coy, but the answer to that is always yes and no.
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
So it was successful in taking a geographic area that had been taken over by drug cartels and converting it into an area that is now a much more productive supplier of things we should be eating instead of things we should not be consuming. So that was successful.
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
Because now it can grow both products and generate wealth this way. So in terms of just pure wealth generation, it's a plus for Peru.
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
I don't know the specifics except what I saw in the movies.
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
That's Robert Rogowski. And he knows more than he's letting on. It was a Columbia thing. It was the Colombian drug cartels.
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
Oh, yeah. We gave them technology to identify where these crops were being grown. They would send troops in, and then they would just go in and burn it up or destroy it, pull it out of the ground. That is so wild. Yeah, it was going to the source.
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
I'm not shocked at all. I'd be shocked if they didn't. If they saw this cocaine growing and they said, well, that's that, you know, tough luck for us.
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
We're asking you to get rid of your main foreign income operation and replace it with something else. And it's the something else that became the important carrot in this mechanism.
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
A good war policy is destroy the enemy, but create something that incentivizes that enemy to to do something else that makes them an ally.
Planet Money
How the War on Drugs got us... blueberries
And that is fairly tricky diplomacy and expensive because you're investing heavily into getting them to be able to change how their economy operates. When you say fairly expensive, what kind of number are we talking about? In those days, in those dollars... I'm thinking hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh, okay. That's a lot of money.