FILE: Mark Penn; Win McNamee/Getty Images

I must admit, I'm puzzled as to why it's supposed to be such a big deal that Hillary Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn (right) met with Bogotá's ambassador to Washington about the controversial U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The key point to remember about this and other FTAs in Latin America is that they're much more about politics than they are about economics. Ninety percent of U.S. imports from Colombia have already been entering the United States without any tariff, thanks to prior agreements. Peterson Institute analyst Jeffrey J. Schott estimated in 2006 that any welfare gains (GDP boost) from a U.S.-Colombia FTA would be positive, but "relatively small" -- roughly half a percentage point for the Colombians, and a negligible amount for the United States. If anything, the agreement is about lowering Colombia's tariff barriers to U.S. goods, solidifying trade relations, and lowering the risk that President Álvaro Uribe's successor will have a different economic philosophy. So, claims by U.S. labor activists that the FTA would be bad for U.S. manufacturers are little more than dishonest fearmongering.

That said, I'm not on board with U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab's hyperbole, either. Can it really be that the dangling FTA, not the drug war, is the root of Latin America's problems today?

Leaders in the hemisphere and Latin America have said that the single most destabilizing factor in Latin America today may be the U.S. Congress's failure to ratify the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. That is more destabilizing today than anything that Colombia's neighbor Venezuela is doing or threatening to do— and that is saying a lot.

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After years of championing the cause of former Iraqi employees of the Coalition Provisional Authority and pushing the United States to arrange their evacuation, The New Yorker's George Packer thinks he may have finally found the man for the job: recently arrested international arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Here's a modest proposal [...] why don't the American prosecutors eager to put Bout on trial cut a plea bargain in which he would use his worldwide cargo business to conduct an airlift like Britain's (and Denmark's last year), flying America's Iraqi friends in his fleet of Antonovs and Ilyushins across the world to Guam for processing and eventual resettlement. It would be a kind of community service on Bout’s part, atonement for his large role in worldwide atrocities over the past fifteen years and the beginning of his rehabilitation. It would also give the U.S. government a way to make up for using Bout as an arms trafficker to Iraq. It would save taxpayer dollars. And finally, after a year of delay and failure by American officials, we'd have a man eminently capable of getting the job done.

Packer's tongue is firmly in cheek here, but Bout is actually no stranger to humanitarian work. In Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun's 2006 FP story, "The Merchant of Death," the authors recount how Bout's planes have flown missions for the World Food Program, delivered supplies to tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka, and conveyed peacekeepers to Rwanda and Somalia. Ironically, these missions are what tipped authorities off to his illegal activities.

For more on the Bout arrest, check out our recent Seven Questions interview with Farah.

Russia may have seen a terrific rise in crime since the breakup of the Soviet Union, but a women's prison in Siberia has been making the most of it. For almost 20 years now, prison UF-91/9 has held an annual beauty contest in which inmates compete for a tiara and the title of "Miss Spring."

Maria Yatskova, director of a documentary film about the prison and its pageants, describes the event:

The prison decided to invent its own rules with three categories - "Greek Goddesses", "Flower Gowns", and "Imaginary Uniforms", which lets inmates design their ideal prison uniforms of the future. Many women have never heard of the Greek myths or exotic flowers they portray onstage, but they learn from books provided by the staff… Several guards and unit chiefs judge the contestants on their appearance and creativity, crowning the winner with a tiara "Miss Spring" and two runners-up "Miss Charm" and "Miss Grace." News crews even broadcast the event on local TV."

In her film, aptly entited Miss Gulag, Yatskova tells the story of three inmate-contestants. Through their words, Yatskova explores the hardship and struggles of women from post-Soviet Russia's first generation, who were caught up in the side effects of Russia's market transition.

Miss Gulag premiered last year and has been appearing in festivals from Milan to Maine ever since. Check out the trailer here:

I'll bet you thought Nepal's glory days as a hippie destination were over:

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A Sadhu (Hindu holy man) smokes ganja (marijuana) in a chillum (traditional clay pipe) as a holy offering from lord Shiva, Hindu god of creation and destruction during celebrations of the Maha Shivaratri festival at the Pashupatinath temple area in Kathmandu, on March 4, 2008. Thousands of sages and holy men visit Nepal's biggest hindu temple Pashupatinath during the Maha Shivaratri festival each year.

Since 2002, more than $676 million worth of art has been stolen from European museums. Maybe it's just me, but this account of yesterday's art heist in Zurich makes it sound too easy:

Three thieves, wearing dark clothes and ski masks, walked into the Emile Bührle Foundation, a private collection housed a couple of miles outside of Zurich's city center on the shore of Lake Zurich, around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday.... While one held a pistol and ordered visitors and staff members to lie on the floor in the main room of the museum, the two other men removed the four paintings from the wall.... Their total worth is estimated at $163 million.... After the theft, the men fled in a white car, with the trunk open and the paintings visible."

These guys didn't crack a 16-digit pin code or jerry-rig a pully system using shoelaces and chewing gum, mind you. They walked into a museum in central Zurich, in broad daylight, took four paintings off the wall, put them in their trunk, and drove away. I've seen stick-ups at my local DC-area 7-Eleven that were more elaborate. Shouldn't it be a tad more difficult to steal several hundred-million dollars worth of Van Goghs and Monets than it is to jack a Twinkie from the Quickie Mart?

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime today released yet another report anticipating a bumper opium crop this year.

But I'm more interested in the report's finding that Afghanistan is also becoming the world's top center for marijuana cultivation. Eighteen percent of villages are planning to grow cannabis this year, a 5 percent jump over 2007.

The news reminded me of a story from awhile back about how Taliban fighters were using 10-foot-high marijuana forests for cover:

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Guess there's going to be a lot more of that from now on. Perhaps it's time to try a different strategy?

The Guardian reports on a proposal by the FBI to setup an international database for "major criminals and terrorists":

The US-initiated programme, "Server in the Sky", would take cooperation between the police forces way beyond the current faxing of fingerprints across the Atlantic. Allies in the "war against terror" - the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - have formed a working group, the International Information Consortium, to plan their strategy.

Here I was naively assuming that we already had a shared computer database for this type of thing. I mean, they really fax fingerprints nowadays?

Do you know what your children are cuddling? 

A Chicago woman was sentenced to six months in prison for her role in an international counterfeit pharmaceutical drug network that federal authorities said had planned to distribute $8 million worth of tablets from Houston.

Amal Alrub, 28, was arrested in Houston in April after meeting with authorities and arranging to buy about 800,000 loose counterfeit Viagra tablets hidden in cardboard boxes filled with stuffed animals that were shipped from China.

It's a problem with global dimensions:

French customs officials yesterday said they intercepted a shipment of 224,000 fake Viagra and Cialis pills, worth $3.5 million, that was en route to Brazil from India.

The boxes were branded Powergra and Erectalis.

Erectalis? That's a dead giveaway. The secret to good pharmaceutical names is to invent a word that sounds vaguely like what the drug does, not one that is too literal.

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Last week, I thought one of the few good things about United Russia's dominance in the Russian parliamentary elections might be that the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party would be shut out of the Duma. Parties needed to win 7 percent of the vote to be represented. Turns out the LDPR snuck in with 8.4 percent of the vote, just enough to win a seat for Andrei Lugovoi, prime suspect in the murder of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in November, 2006. Along with his Duma seat, Lugovoi will now enjoy immunity from prosecution in the Russian Federation. Litvinenko's widow Marina was apoplectic:

Now Mr Putin and Mr Lugovoi stand together as the emblem of Russia — the two people linked by a murder," she said in a written statement. 

For what it's worth, British prosecutors say they have no plans to drop charges against Lugovoi.

Chris Kraul of the Los Angeles Times reports from Bogotá, Colombia, on the U.S. war on drugs:

Interruptions of the flow of cocaine to the United States are causing street prices to rise, a sign that the "war on drugs" is working, the White House anti-drug chief said here Thursday.

John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, told reporters that interdictions in Colombia, in other countries along cocaine transit routes and on the open seas were reducing drug supplies, according to data on price and purity gathered in 37 major U.S. cities.

As a result of reduced supply, street cocaine prices over the first nine months of the year rose to an average $136.93 per pure gram at the end of September, a 44% increase from January, he said. Price and purity data were supported by other measures, including reduced evidence of cocaine use as found in workplace tests, he said.

Kraul pours a heaping does of skepticism on the ONDCP's claims, unusual for a reported news story. But for some seriously heated debate on the drug war, you should watch FPTV's recent segment on Think Again: Drugs featuring David Murray, chief scientist at the ONDCP, and Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group that is highly critical of U.S. policies in this arena. Check it out—it's must-see TV.

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A major victory has been scored in war against opium cultivation in Afghanistan. In the Northern Province of Balkh, once home to 27,000 acres of poppies, opium cultivation has been nearly eradicated. Balkh's achievement can be attributed largely to stepped up enforcement, prosecution of poppy farmers, and the increasing prevalence of an alternative crop. And that crop is... marijuana.

As The New York Times reported Sunday, many farmers in Balkh are switching to cannabis, which has been cultivated in the region for over 70 years. Other than poppies, farmers say that cannabis is the only crop they can grow that will feed their families. Farmers can earn almost twice as much for the stuff as they do for an equal amount of legal crops like cotton. Balkh's tough-on-drugs governor, Atta Mohammed Noor, has held back so far, but he has no plans to allow the cultivation to continue:

Mr. Atta says he has a plan to eradicate cannabis next growing season. Farmers have begun to harvest their current crop, and officials say they do not want to destroy the farmers' livelihood without giving them time to plant an alternative.

"Marijuana is not difficult to control, like poppy," the governor said in an interview in October in his vast, opulent office in Mazar-i-Sharif. "It's very easy to eradicate. It's a very simple issue."

Perhaps, but that doesn't answer the question of why he would bother. Is it really worth spending Afghanistan's meager financial resources (and the United States' for that matter) trying to eradicate a profitable and non-harmful alternative to one of the country's greatest social ills? Atta says the province is still waiting for development money to help farmers grow alternative crops. That would be a good step of course, but in the meantime can we really justify punishing farmers for finding their own alternatives?

Balkh's farmers aren't the only ones thinking differently about Afghanistan's poppy problem. Last week the European Parliament endorsed a proposal to license a limited number of Afghan farmers to grow poppies for use in medicines, such as morphine. Similar schemes have worked in the past in Pakistan and Thailand. The idea is not without its problems. It would be hard to justify allowing one village to grow poppies while eradicating them in another. And even under the most optimistic projections, farmers would still earn far less legally then they would by selling to drug traffickers. Still, it's promising that some leaders are looking for creative new ways to, as Ethan Nadelman suggests, limit the harm caused by illegal drugs rather than perpetuating an endless war to eradicate them.

FPTV is back with a new episode, this time a look at the global war on drugs. It seems improbable, but many people are asking if drugs like marijuana, heroin, and cocaine should become legal. Watch the fireworks as Ethan Nadelmann, author of Think Again: Drugs and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance clashes with David Murray, chief scientist at the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy. Here's part 1 of 4 videos, in which Murray argues that "We are making major progress" in the drug war, while Nadelmann counters that the drug war is "a long, slow, devastating failure" that is as bad as Vietnam and Iraq.

Check out parts 2, 3, and 4 here.

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Mike Nizza reports that sea piracy is on the rise again after a brief dip in attacks. Piracy is especially a growing problem off the coasts of Somalia and Nigeria. Here's one thing Nizza misses, however, in citing an otherwise-interesting piece in National Geographic:

The National Geographic article recognizes the sea-crime decline in the Straits of Malacca, but then says “it is unclear how long the cash-strapped Indonesian navy will maintain its current level of vigilance.” Not to mention that navies are built and trained mainly for war, not for policing shipping channels.

We're not exactly talking about a blue-water navy here. Think dinghies, not destroyers. In any case, keeping shipping channels safe and open is definitely within the purview of sovereign navies. Remember Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary pirates?

As for the formerly pirate-infested Straits of Malacca, part of the problem was that the Indonesian navy was likely complicit in many of the pirate attacks in the first place. As an article in Strategic Comment, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, put it in 2004, "anecdotal evidence suggested that elements of these same under-funded security forces (the Indonesian Navy and Marine Police) might also at times have been complicit in maritime crime." That's carefully hedged, but it's worth noting that when Indonesia decided to professionalize its navy, the problem declined dramatically—in part because naval personnel no longer needed to depend on piracy to earn a living.

More here in a first-person account by Indonesian journalist Andreas Harsono. 

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Japan's gangsters, known as the yakuza, have been feeling the financial squeeze of late. During the 1980s, at the height of Japan's publicly-financed construction boom, the yakuza cashed in on public works by demanding kickbacks from building contractors. In return, the gangster promised not to disrupt construction projects. For a while, business was good, and the yakuza were rolling high. But in 2003, the government had to cut back on public works spending—thereby reducing one of the yakuza's most profitable sources of income.

Now, the Guardian reports, the yakuza are desperately trying to diversify their sources of funding by turning to legitimate private businesses to raise money. While still trying to earn kickbacks from the construction industry and getting a cut from illegal businesses including prostitution, drugs and gambling, the yukuza are now targeting the stock market. But that doesn't mean they're "going legit." Police investigators say yakuza gangs are using the threat of violence to gather inside information before making investments.

Embattled police are appealing to businesses to help them in their fight against organized crime. A senior Osaka detective said, "We can't deal with them alone—we need businesses to be on the lookout and help us expose firms that are nothing more than fronts for the yakuza."

But this may not be so easy. According to Robert Whiting, a long-time Japan commentator, the yakuza is pervasive; few businesses in Japan don't have connections to members. Plus, it's not exactly clear that police and politicians are completely committed to destroying the networks. And considering the yakuza's adeptness at adapting to new economic realities, it's unlikely these gangsters will be giving up crime any time soon.