12-03-2003, 05:18 PM
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♦*♥Moderatrix♥*♦
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Join Date: Nov 2001
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New Anti-Drug Weapon: Bras and Thongs
submitted by gekkogecko
BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - They have tried aerial
assaults and stiff jail sentences. Now Colombian
officials have a new and unlikely weapon to combat the
cocaine trade: push-up bras and thongs.
Some 900 peasant women in Colombia are set to make
racy lingerie and sell it to French supermarket chain
Carrefour under a U.N.-backed program aimed at
encouraging impoverished farmers and their families to
stop growing drug crops.
"We thought it was a very original idea. These are
regions where there are drug crops and people need
legal jobs," said Thierry Rostan of the U.N. Office
for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Bogota.
Despite a fierce U.S.-backed campaign to spray drug
crops with herbicide and impose longer jail terms,
Colombia remains the world's No 1. producer of
cocaine. Poor farmers, many of them coffee growers
gone broke, have turned to drug crops to make a
living.
The lingerie, which includes bras and lacy panties,
will be made at clothing and shoe plants in the
southern coffee-rich province of Cauca, which has seen
a spike of cocaine crops due to the collapse of world
coffee prices.
Colombia's National Federation of Coffee Growers,
which helped build the plants some 30 years ago to
assist coffee growers, is participating in the
lingerie project along with the French Embassy in
Bogota.
Fernando Pomez, general manager of the factories, said
he hoped the Carrefour deal, finalized last week,
would generate up to $141,000 in sales next year.
The lingerie label, named Tex, will be sold at
Carrefour's 12 stores in Colombia. Pomez said the
items may be exported later.
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