Desperate Afghan parents are selling their kids to pay off debt as poverty levels deepen following Taliban takeover: report
Excerpt:
Some desperate Afghan parents are forced to sell their children to deal with poverty….
A house cleaner in western Afghanistan named Saleha, for example, sold her 3-year-old daughter to a man to whom she owed a $550 debt. Saleha, 40, receives 70 cents a day from her job, and her husband doesn’t work, the Journal said.
“If life continues to be this awful, I will kill my children and myself,” Saleha told the Journal. “I don’t even know what we will eat tonight.”
“I will try to find money to save my daughter’s life,” husband Abdul Wahab said.
Khalid Ahmad, the lender, told the Journal he had to accept the 3-year-old girl to settle the debt.
“I also don’t have money. They haven’t paid me back,” he said. “So there is no option but taking the daughter.”
…Within a year, the poverty rate in Afghanistan will hover at a whopping 97% or 98%, said Kanni Wignaraja, UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Director.
“Afghanistan pretty much faces universal poverty by the middle of next year,” Wignaraja said. “That’s where we’re heading — it’s 97-98% no matter how you work these projections.”
…Over the past two decades, Afghanistan made significant economic gains that are now in danger of collapsing because of political instability. Afghanistan faces “a crush on local banking” because of the Taliban takeover, Wignaraja said. That instability is only worsened by the pandemic.
The Biden administration, in an effort to limit the Taliban’s resources, froze nearly $10 billion in reserves in the country’s central bank — most of which is reportedly held by the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. The move has been criticized as misdirected and will ultimately hurt Afghans more than the Taliban, Shah Mehrabi, a senior board member of Da Afghanistan Bank, told Bloomberg.
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It is uncivilized that children are treated like chattel and used to pay off debts, but this article again ignores the “poison” in the Afghan land and that is Islam. No economic assistance or sending money to them will change a dang thing. 20 years in Afghanistan and the West has learned nothing.
As illegal immigrants pour over the border, their companion crimes flourish also:
Two arrested in 50,000 fentanyl-laced pill drug deal in El Paso restaurant parking lot
Excerpt:
El Paso County sheriff’s investigators arrested a man and a woman accused of selling 50,000 fentanyl-laced pills in a drug bust in a restaurant parking lot last week.
Deputies seized more than 20 pounds of pills, including hundreds of thousands of pills in other packages found inside the Arizona pair’s car, according to court documents.
Kevin Peña, 20, and Andromeda Sanchez, 22, who are from the Tucson area, were arrested on two counts each of manufacture/delivery of controlled substance, according to El Paso County Jail records and court documents.
The bust took place on the afternoon of Oct. 6 in the parking lot of the Taco Cabana at 1880 Joe Battle Blvd. near Montwood Drive in far East El Paso, criminal complaint affidavits filed by a sheriff’s detective stated.
The Arizona pair showed up for an alleged deal to sell 50,000 counterfeit fentanyl-laced M30 pills for $100,000 to a buyer who was actually an undercover federal agent with U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, according to the affidavits and a prosecutor at a bond hearing for Peña.
A deal was made and when the “bundle” of pills was handed to the undercover agent, a signal was given and teams moved in to arrest the pair, the affidavits stated.
The bundle contained more than 3 pounds of blue M30 pills that tested positive for fentanyl, documents stated.
Six more packages of pills, weighing a total of 17 pounds, were then found on the back seat of the pair’s Nissan Sentra, affidavits stated. The pills tested positive for fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.
…’Mexican oxy’ dangers
Counterfeit pills made to look like oxycodone M30 pills, are also known as “Mexican oxy,” Mexican blues and blues because of the pills’ color, though counterfeits, may come in a variety of colors.
The fentanyl-laced pills are manufactured in Mexican cartel labs and smuggled over the border for sale to drug users across the United States.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has issued warnings in El Paso and nationwide regarding counterfeit pills sold on the streets containing potentially lethal amounts of fentanyl.
The DEA cautioned that two out of every five counterfeit pills with fentanyl it has seized contain a potentially lethal dose.
Counterfeit pills are especially dangerous because buyers may think they are purchasing real prescription medication, the DEA cautioned. The fake pills are made to look identical to opioid medications like Oxycontin, Xanax, Vicodin and Percocet.
The DEA warnings do not apply to legitimate prescription medication authorized by a doctor and sold in pharmacies.
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Another never ending “war” that gives authority unconstitutional powers, like civil asset forfeiture laws, without much progress stopping the proliferation of drugs. Without cooperation by other countries, which are almost all third world hell holes on the take from drug cartels, success in this battle is improbable at the moment.