Snack in one country. Illegal in another

Some people did not learn the lesson of the pandemic and they are paying the price.

In 2021 a Danish 21 year old woman named Anna Søby Poulsen passed her gymnasium exam with top grade. A year later she was arrested with the possibility of facing 15 years in prison. Her crime. Buying a local snack in Peru which she did not use before she traveled to Panama where she was arrested. She got out in the end but are now facing a life-long debt.

The lesson she should have learned is that the era of turism is over. The new world is about remaing at home and work on how to improve the country you are living in. The war between Russia and Ukraine not to mention the pandemic, displayed our vulnerability in terms of getting food and other resources to Denmark. A lot of Danes cannot afford food, electricity and heating.

The young woman bought Coca-leaves in Peru where they are sold openly on the streets. Coca-leaves were the exact reason that the Spanish people who came to South America were able to transform wilderness into the civilized countries as they enbled the locals to be more motivated. Today coca-leaves are enjoyed as snack in Peru and other countries in South America.

That is not the case in Panama which is a country that has reinvented itself as the banking headquater in that area. Firms and private citizens have moved their money to Panama thanks to the level of transparacy in their banking sector. The people employed in their banks do not need coca leaves to function. Not even when they expanded the channel which the United States basically gifted them. In fact they own their entire independence to the United States. Otherwise they would basically only have been a province in another country none would have looked at.

So Coca leaves are illegal in Panama because they agreed to join the United States war on drugs coming from poor people. In the United States it is only legal to kill people using drugs if the drugs are manifactored by big medical companies. Everything that looks poor and mexican or colored are criminalized.

All this the Danish woman did not know and that is a sign that young Danes are not taught properly to mentally shut them off from the surrounding world. We already forgot how hard it was to get the Danes back home when the Chinese illness spread all over the world.

The young woman by accident left some Coca leaves in her luggage and the police in Panama arrested her. It took a lot of legal aid to escape the 15 years in prison but she managed and returned back to Denmark with a huge debt of 1,2 million DKK. The courts and officials in Panama needed a little sidemoney to make the prison conditions survivable and lawyers are not that cheap in Panama either because they are used to bill banks helping them to hide money from the tax authorities abroad.

Question is: Should we help this young woman who know have put up a side to get help handling her legal debt? Should we not use this oppertunity to warn young Danes from going abroad instead? 

Peru might look fine but it is not a tourist destination when they do not warn people in the airport against buying any kind of souvenir in their country. With this widespead use of coca leaves traces of it would be basically on every item you buy.

Panama is fine for banking business if you want to keep just a little of the money you earn instead of paying it all in taxes which goes to currupt politicians somewhere in the EU or wasted on various projects made by the Danish state. A woman working in the state administration were able to cheat out 120 million DKK from the state because the money were not missed by anyone. A lot of projects are expected failures even when the politicians assign money for them. The politicians just want photos taken when the projects starts up and then they forget everything about achieving successes. Many then transport their hard earned money to Panama. It is their decision. I will not condomn them even if I am not in the position to earn that much.

But both countries should never be regarded as destinations for traveling. You do not need to see them. Just use Google maps and street views instead.

I will put the website of this woman as well as some articles about her below. I will not urge you to use money on her but otherwise I will not discourage you. Everyone are allowed to waste their money. They have earned them. They can spend them. Just remember to stop and sit down. Should you not have learned a bit about the damages caused by tourism? Should you not stay home?

Sources:

• Hjælp Anna og hendes familie (Projekt Anna - In Danish language)
• Fik mors hue på med et 12-tal: - Det har været svært at finde motivationen (Fyens Stiftstidende - in Danish language)
• Ville bare have en souvenir med hjem: 21-årige Anna anholdt for narkosmugling og smidt i fængsel i Panama (Avisen Danmark - in Danish language)

Maybe this blog will not be needed in the future

Right now Denmark is in lockdown. Thanks to the COVID-19 virus we are barred from almost all aspects in our social life.

For many it is time to look why this situation happened so fast and what we can do in the future from allowing this to happen again.

What the crisis did show us, is that is DENMARK FIRST!

We as member of The European Union saw no country speaking about what all countries should do as a Union. Instead we all each country fencing themselves up preventing people from entering their country bringing the virus in even when the country inside was suffering.

The countries who are doing best right now is the countries who were the fastest to block foreigners from entering their country. In Denmark the number of people committed to the hospitals are dropping. Denmark was very fast blocking their borders. The results are clear. The European Union is dead. The countries within the Union are not because they skipped the thoughts of an union and acted selfish.

This the lesson we can provide to our children and it is the very lesson, they can use to survive the next pandemic. Because there will be a new pandemic. I will not make theories about the cause. Was it Mao's final revenge after his approach forced people to eat whatever could be eaten so illness can pass between animals and humans? Is it the new 5G network? Was it an attempt to make people think less about how Hong-Kong should be handled by the government in China that went out of control?

We can only speculate and it is not really important.

What is important is how we live in the future. What will we do to prevent virus from spreading in the future. How can we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world? How can we motive people to travel less and conduct less business with firms abroad?

These are the questions we need to ask ourselves.

I wish you the best and will go back in isolation again.

in France your title matters

In France, your title matters. People who have worked for French firms know that the distance from management to employer on the floor is very long.

In many even big companies, you can run a firm with 4 or perhaps 5 layers between the top management and the people working on the floor. In French firms 7 or 8 such layers are not uncommon.

So when a Danish truck driver - Torben Nielsen - drove on his first job as a truck driver, he stood no chance when the truck was stopped in customs and they found drugs. He had just been hired and ordered to drive a truck to Denmark and had no chance to know what was inside the sealed truck. Now he will suffer 6 years in prison in France.

In fact the local Danish job-center had ordered him to take the job or suffer punishment work without pay as it is common in Denmark.

The Danish job-market

When you are fired and unemployed in Denmark, you have to report to the local job-center. Here the case worker has a long list of personal friends where you can be sent to be "job-tested" working an ordinary job but your salary is in fact the unemployment benefit and you do not earn the right to vacation. Sometime like in the case of Torben Nielsen, they send you to an employer telling you to take the job or lose your benefit.

Normally the employers working close together with the case workers at the job-centers are in the export business where salary levels are important, so by hiring a large number of unemployed people while they "job-train" them for free, they can get an edge in the international business.

The losers are of course the unemployed people who in the long run will be unable to pay rent and move out of the cities to the parts of Denmark called "The Rotten Banana" robbing not only themselves of a future but also their children because out there you find no schools beyond elementary levels.

This situation is a result of labor reforms made in the 1990's. Labor reforms, the French president Macron are pushing for in France too. However unlike the Danish trade unions which are good for nothing, the labor movement in France has been able to stop this degrading treatment of ordinary tax-payers.

Did Torben Nielsen have any chance of preventing being a part of a criminal organization?

No. Once ordered by a job-center he had to report to a job appointed to him by his employer. In such a situation, he was not allowed to ask questions. You might ask yourselves if picking something up in Spain is not being guilty because earlier cases have shown that tourists in Spain has been blackmailed to collect drugs in South America based on photos hacked by the smugglers where the criminals claim that they will kill someone at home if they do participate.

Spain is the center of most criminal activities in the drug traffic, so yes - Torben Nielsen should have been suspicious. No Danish truck driver has any business south of Germany. That is something which should be left to drivers from the eastern part of Europe who are willing to take risk without thinking of the consequences of other people who might be on the road that day. But then again: We do not know what connection the case worker in the job-center had with Torben Nielsen's employer. Could it be that the case worker actually was in on it and wanted to frame Torben Nielsen? Or are Torben Nielsen one of those people who is not aware about the world outside Denmark and believe the best in people?

If you are unemployed in Denmark and do not behave

The case-workers have punishment in mind of those of the unemployed who do not accept everything the case worker says.

They can be force people into training sessions. Often firms are hired to punish people. Some people were ordered to sit with their feet in cold water all day "to improve their stamina". It did not matter if they caught a cold or even got pneumonia. If they quit, they could lose their unemployment benefit.

Is Torben Nielsen victim of xenophobia?

A bit. He is a foreigner in France. But he also just doing an ordinary job with no good job-title. Customer care, shop-assistant and truck driver are not considered something you choose as line of business for other than fun. He is a victim and now he has six years to accept that.

Sources (In Danish)

• Fik nedslående besked i fængslet: Brød sammen (Ekstra Bladet)
• Aktivering fik ældre dame til at græde (Ekstra Bladet)