Turnover of Global Organized Crime: $870 Billion… a Year

August 28, 2013, 1:10 pm

≫ Next: Is The War On Drugs A War On Race?

≪ Previous: Money Laundering and The Drug Trade

$

0

0

“Transnational organized crime reaches into every region, and every country across the world. Stopping this transnational threat represents one of the international community’s greatest global challenges,” said UNODC’s Executive Director, Yury Fedotov, in a news release.
.
“Crucial to our success is our ability to raise public awareness and generate understanding among key decision and policy-makers.”The $870 billion turnover from transnational organized crime is six times the amount of official development assistance, and is comparable to 1.5 per cent of the global domestic product, or seven per cent of the world’s exports of merchandise, according to UNODC. Drug trafficking is the most lucrative form of business for criminals, with an estimated value of $320 billion a year.

The Huge Impact of Drug Abuse
“Heroin, cocaine and other drugs continue to kill around 200,000 people a year, shattering 
families and bringing misery to thousands of other people, insecurity and the spread of HIV,” Fedotov told the UN General Assembly, during a special thematic debate on drugs and 
crime as a threat to development.

“At present, only around one quarter of all farmers involved in illicit drug crop cultivation
worldwide have access to development assistance – if we are to offer new opportunities and genuine alternatives, this needs to change,” Fedotov said.
.
The Assembly’s debate coincided with the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit 
Trafficking, observed on 26 June, and was also the forum for Fedotov’s launch of UNODC’s 
flagship study, the 2012 World Drug Report.

The UNODC chief said that drug-producing and drug-consuming countries alike have a stake 
in fighting the illicit drug trade, adding that Governments should not forget that illicit drugs also affect health and security globally.

Drug use appears to be spilling over into countries lying on trafficking routes, such as in West and Central Africa, which are witnessing rising numbers of cocaine users, and Afghanistan and Iran, which are grappling with the highest rates of opium and heroin use.

Mr. Fedotov noted that as developing countries emulate the lifestyles of industrialized nations, drug consumption will probably increase, placing a heavier burden on countries ill equipped to deal with burgeoning drug demand. International support should therefore aim at strengthening the capacity of vulnerable nations to confront that challenge, he said.

The 2012 World Drug Report finds that although global patterns of illicit drug use, production and health consequences largely remained stable in 2012, opium production had rebounded to previous high levels in Afghanistan, the world’s biggest opium producer. In addition, lower overall levels of cultivation and production of opium and coca have been offset by rising levels of synthetic drug production.

230 Million People Use Illicit Drugs
Around 230 million people, or five per cent of the world’s adult population, aged 15 to 64, are estimated to have used an illicit drug at least once in 2010, according to the Report. Problem drug users, mainly heroin- and cocaine-dependent persons, number about 27 million, roughly 0.6 per cent of the world adult population, or 1 in every 200 people.

On opium, the Report says that Afghanistan has returned to high levels of opium production.
Global opium production amounted to 7,000 tons in 2011, up from 2010, when plant diseases 
wiped out almost half the crop yields and triggered steep price rises in Afghanistan. Myanmar remained the world’s second largest poppy-crop grower and opium producer after Afghanistan, with cultivation up by 14 per cent in 2011 and a nine per cent share of global opium production.

On cocaine, the Report finds that the number of estimated annual cocaine users in 2010 
ranged from 13.3 million to 19.7 million– or around 0.3 to 0.4 of the global adult population.

North America, Europe, Australia, Major Markets for Cocaine
The major markets for cocaine continue to be North America, Europe and Australia. The 
United States saw cocaine use decrease from 3.0 per cent in 2006 to 2.2 per cent in 2010 
among adults, and in Europe cocaine use remains stable but continues to rival use in the 
United States. However, cocaine use is up in Australia and South America, and it is also 
spreading to parts of Africa and Asia.

The 2012 World Drug Report finds that the use and global seizures of amphetamine-type 
stimulants, the second most widely used drugs worldwide, remained largely stable.

However, in 2010, methamphetamine seizures, of around 45 tons, more than doubled those of  2008, due to significant seizures in Central America and East and South-East Asia. In Europe, ‘ecstasy’ pill seizures more than doubled, from 595 kilograms in 2009 to 1.3 tons in 2010, indicating a stronger market on that continent.

---

Is The War On Drugs A War On Race?

August 29, 2013, 5:27 am

≫ Next: LatAm Drug Cartels Set Up in Africa

≪ Previous: Turnover of Global Organized Crime: $870 Billion… a Year

$

0

0

Attorney General Eric Holder called for sweeping changes to America's 40-year war on drugs. Holder is the first African-American in the nation's top law enforcement post. He's also part of a growing movement of black leaders who have pushed for major reforms to the War on Drugs. Four years ago, New York's then-Gov. David Paterson stood in a drug treatment centre in Queens and made history. "And finally today, on this sunny day, with the stroke of a pen, we will end the regime of the Rockefeller drug laws."New York's first black governor rolled back the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, first passed in 1973, that disproportionately locked up African-American men."The war on drugs is now 30, 40 years old. There have been a lot of unintended consequences. There's been a decimation of certain communities, in particular communities of colour," says Holder.

Attorney General Eric Holder

Ron Daniels, of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century, said that the War on Drugs is a war on us. Blacks make up 12% of the total population of drug users, but 34% of those arrested for drug offences,and 45% of those in state prison for a drug offence. Whites accounted for less than 29% of state prisoners incarcerated for drug offences.  Black activists marked the 42nd anniversary of the War on  Drugs with a protest in front of the White House aimed at ending a
targeted  action that has led to disproportionate arrest, conviction and incarceration of Blacks for decades. “The Waron Drugs was started by a president and it needs to end with the president,” said Courtney Stewart, chairman of The R.N.R.C a  group that helps ex-offenders find jobs, housing and access to social services. “Everything starts with leadership. President Obama is the leader of this great  nation. He needs to end the War on Drugs.” Jesse Jackson said it best during the recent forum on the drug war.

"This is a crime against humanity. War on drugs is a war on Black and Brown and must be challenged by the highest levels of our government in the war for justice," said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.

"This is government-sponsored terrorism," Jackson said. "It raised the price on Black  existence; it is an attack on the Black family; it has destroyed a generation. Those who are the least users have paid the most price because of race; those with money and attorneys have paid the least price. Those without attorneys remain behind bars today."

After 40 years, a trillion dollars and 45 million arrests,America's War On Drugs has achieved basically nothing, besides the incarceration of a hugely disproportionate number of black people . What it has done, however is create a huge industry that allows big business to profit from the imprisonment of low-level criminals and vulnerable addicts.

Higher arrest and incarceration rates for African Americans and Latinos are not reflective of increased prevalence of drug use or sales in these communities, but rather of a law enforcement focus on urban areas, on lower-income communities and on communities of colour as well as inequitable treatment by the criminal justice system.

Winning the War on Drugs? 
Isn’t that “War” just a construct designed to achieve political and economic aims, while 
oppressing with it one particular sector of the population? How can it be “won?”

The “War on Drugs” has never been such a thing. From its inauguration by Richard Nixon 
it has always been a War on Drug Users, for the most part minority drug users at that, 
although some non-minorities have occasionally been caught up in its tentacles. The correctly labelled “War on Drug Users” has primarily been a racist enterprise. It has
been aimed at the users of one minor class of the Recreational Mood Altering Drugs (RMADs), those that are currently “illicit” (as alcohol was nationally between 1920 and 1933 and cigarettes were in 15 states at various times during the 19th century. Although the ratios have declined a bit in the last few years, for most of its duration under the War on Drug Users, while approximately 75% of those in prison for drug-related offences are non-white approximately 75% of illicit-drug users are white. Further, the War on Drug Users has been race-based in terms of the neighbourhoods in which it has been waged. There was one major previous true War on Drugs, Prohibition. It was for the most part actually aimed at the drug, ethyl alcohol, not at the users.

The commonly used RMADs are alcohol, nicotine in tobacco, the non-prescription use of prescription drugs, and the illicit s, primarily marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and fairly recently,
meth amphetamine  In terms of negative outcomes of RMAD use, for example, tobacco kills about 430,000 people per year, alcohol between 60,000 and 100,000, depending upon how one counts, and the illicits kill about 20,000, half that number as a result of drug-trade violence that would not exist absent the War on Drug Users and some of the other half due to forced unsterilised use of the drugs. Tobacco and alcohol are not only the major drug killers but they are the “starter drugs,” most often in childhood, for almost every problem-user of them in adult life and almost every user of the illicits, regardless of age.Logic has not ended the War on Drug Users. Neither has the mainstream drug policy reform movement which views RMAD use as the same false duality the Drug Warriors do. Logic did not end Prohibition either. Over-riding policy concerns did: rampant crime on the one hand and a major need for new tax revenues to deal with the Depression on the other.

There is a major series of problems that could be addressed by ending the War on Drug Users.
Legalizing the currently illicit would create a major new source of tax revenues. Doing so would significantly reduce the prison population resulting in major reductions in Federal, state and
local spending on incarceration. Doing so would significantly unclog the courts, especially at the Federal level where they are so over-burdened with drug cases that the waits for trials on much more important matters, especially in the civil realm, can become interminable. Obviously, there would be a significant reduction in the demands on the law enforcement sector of government, which could either save money or enable the diversion of resources to other important areas, such as financial fraud, that do not always receive the attention they deserve.The Corrections Corporation of America opened its first immigration detention centre in a renovated motel in Houston, Texas nearly 30 years ago and now leads the nation’s for-profit prison industry, generating billions of dollars in revenue for housing prisoners, most of whom are Black and Hispanic. Over the last 30 years, CCA has benefited from the dramatic rise in incarceration and detention in the United States,” the report stated. 

Since the company’s founding in 1983, the incarcerated population has risen by more than 500 percent to more than 2.2 million people. Blacks account for nearly 1 million of the total prison 
population and are incarcerated at roughly six times the rate of Whites.Now a multi-billion dollar corporation, CCA manages more than 65 correctional and detention facilities with a capacity of more than 90,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia,” stated the report. CCA's revenue in 2012 exceeded more than $1.7 billion.The drug war has been, for the most part, a racially-tinged fabrication that gives easy excuses to those who once felt that black empowerment had become a threat to national security.  Not only has it been proven that the government consistently looked the other way as drugs flowed into black neighbourhoods, but there was the double-whammy of giving black men long prison sentences as a result of possessing those very same drugs.

Decades later, the black family is decimated unlike anything we've ever seen before:  Over 70% of black homes are fatherless and black males are the leading victims of gun violence in America, with many of those weapons arriving into our community as a direct function of the drug trade.  Black men going to prison is the norm for most families, as a recent survey showed that over 75% of African Americans have a relative who has spent time in the penitentiary.

LatAm Drug Cartels Set Up in Africa

August 30, 2013, 7:06 am

≫ Next: West African Cocaine Routes To Europe

≪ Previous: Is The War On Drugs A War On Race?

$

0

0

A recent study has shed light on the links between Latin Am organized crime and  West Africa,showing how drug trafficking has corrupted the stateof Guinea-Bissau and spreading through the region.The report from the African Centre for Strategic Studies primarily focuses on the situation in Guinea-Bissau, outlining how Latin Am  (DTOs) have established themselves in the tiny coastal nation.However, it also highlights how the influence of drug trafficking is spreading in to other African countries, as  traffickers seek new drug routes  to Europe.

To illustrate the methods commonly employed by DTOs in Guinea-Bissau, the report highlights the case of Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, a Venezuelan pilot apparently linked to Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel. Vasquez was detained in Guinea-Bissau in 2008 after allegedly flying more than half a ton of cocaine into the country. He was released days later by a local judge, but arrested in Venezuela in 2011.

According to the ACSS study, the case of Vasquez sheds light on how the complex web aircraft purchases and registries, front companies, fake business deals, and complicit individuals needed to execute a drug flight extends not only to West Africa & Latin America, but also to Europe and the United States. The plane Vasquez flew into Bissau was registered in Delaware and had been kept at Fort Lauderdale airport in Florida prior to the drug run.

The drug pilot flying the DC-9, Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, for example, had been arrested and released in three separate countries—Mexico, Guinea Bissau, and Mali—before Venezuela finally stepped in and put him (at least temporarily) behind bars. Vasquez-Guerra first gained notoriety when he piloted the DC9 from St. Petersburg Florida. The plane was on its way back to the U.S.  from Caracas when it was busted in April 2006 in the state of Campeche, Mexico. While Mexican soldiers were seizing his airplane, arresting the four other members of the crew, and setting up a perimeter ringing the out-of-the-way airport in Ciudad del Carmen, Vasquez Guerra somehow managed to... just slip away. And of course there were the numerous unexplained 'anomalies' in Vasquez Guerra’s ‘escape’ that left unanswered questions, take the DC9's appearance, for example: the DC-9 was curious for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that “one of the chief shareholders” of a dodgy outfit called SkyWay Aircraft “is a private investment bank in Dallas which also raised funds for a Mexican industrialist with reported ties to a Cali and Juarez Cartels”

More curious still, the airline kitted-out its fleet with distinctive colours and a seal “designed to impersonate planes from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.” And when he learned that “SkyWay’s genesis can be traced to In-Q-Tel Inc., a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group owned, operated, and financed out of the black box budget of the Central Intelligence Agency.

A Bloomberg Markets magazine report, “Wachovia’s Drug Habit,” reveals that drug traffickers bought that plane, and  fifty others, “with laundered funds they transferred through two of
the biggest banks in the U.S., ”Wachovia and Bank of America.  The Justice Department charge sheet against the bank tells us  for Mexican currency exchanges, “the largest violation of the bank secrecy act, an anti-money laundering law, in U.S. history.”

Subsequent investigations by Narco News revealed that “another Gulfstream II (tail number N987SA), was used between 2003 and 2005 by the CIA for at least three trips between the U.S. east coast and Guantanamo Bay, home to the infamous ‘terrorist’ prison camp,” Bill Conroy reported.

“In addition,” Conroy wrote, “the two SkyWay companies are associated with individuals who have done highly sensitive work for the Department of Defense or U.S. intelligence agencies, public records show and Narco News sources confirm.”

However in a later report,Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent with ICE's predecessor agency, U.S. Customs, said that the crashed Gulfstream used to transport drugs and prisoners was controlled by the CIA and “that the CIA, not ICE … [was] actually the U.S. agency controlling the … operation. If this were the case, then “any individuals or companies involved in a CIA-backed operation, even ones that are complicit in drug trafficking, would be off limits to U.S. law enforcers due to the cloak of national security the CIA can invoke.”

In other words, a jet purchased by drug traffickers with funds laundered through an American bank and used in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program may have been part of a protected drug operation by U.S. intelligence agencies. An operation furthermore, whose purpose is still unknown.

Guinea Bissau has the perfect conditions for such drug trafficking to flourish. The study identifies the reasons why this is: the combination of a corrupt and centralized leadership and an inadequate & underfunded  justice system in a country ridden by upheaval and abject poverty However, the report stresses that while turmoil and corruption in Guinea-Bissau laid the foundations for the arrival of Latin Am DTOs, since their arrival, it is arguably the cocaine trade that has stoked the turbulence witnessed  in recent years According to the study, the 2009 assassination of the country's military chief Batista Tagme Na Wai and subsequent killing of President Joao Bernardo Vieira by troops loyal to Na Wai stemmed from a dispute between the two over drug trafficking. In the years that followed, two officials who played instrumental roles in coups in 2010 and 2012 ,the country's chief of staff, Antonio Indjai, and Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, were later implicated in drug trafficking. According to the ACSS report, in the four months following the 2012 coup, up to 25 tons of cocaine entered Guinea-Bissau from Latin America.

The report also raises the question of whether Guinea-Bissau is just the first of many African countries to fall under the corrosive influence of drug trafficking. "Guinea-Bissau may be Africa’s first narco-state, but worrying signs in Mali, The Gambia, Ghana,Nigeria,Mozambique,Kenya, and elsewhere indicate that this is not the only country struggling against the hollowing effects of drug trafficking on security, development, and governance," it states.

Americo Bubo Na Tchuto

The spreading influence of Latin American DTOs has also contributed to the development of African organized crime networks, according to the report, which are now keen to step up their involvement in drug trafficking. "What was initially a transshipment problem has turned into something larger, more complex, home grown, and destabilizing,"

The presence of Latin American DTOs in Africa is irrefutable; according to a UN report, up to 50 Colombian drug lords are in Guinea-Bissau, where they coordinate drugs moving in and out of the country. According to UNODC estimates, cocaine trafficked through West Africa has a street value of approximately $2 billion per year, roughly equal to Guinea-Bissau's GDP, so Latin American DTOs are capable of offering head turning sums to  
already corrupt officials.

The extent of this corruption was revealed by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sting operation in April, which resulted in the arrest of several Guinea-Bissau military officials in international waters. The officials involved believed they were brokering a weapons and drugs deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Among them were coup plotters Bubo Na Tchuto and Indjai, and the latter has now been charged in the United States, but remains at large in his homeland.

As part of the deal negotiated with the DEA, Bubo Na Tchuto believed he would be paid $1 million for every ton of cocaine brought into the country -- an astronomical sum in Guinea-Bissau, which has a per capita GDP of about $551.

Antonio Indjai

The LatAm expansion into Africa has been driven by the search for access to the growing coke
market in Europe. According to the UNODC, in 1998 the value of the European cocaine market was a quarter of the US market; a decade later it was almost on 
par.The exponential growth in Euro cocaine consumption has pushed Latin American DTOs to seek out new trafficking routes to exploit the market. With a poorly monitored transport  corridor linking Guinea-Bissau to two of Latin America’s largest drug departure countries for cocaine headed to Europe, Brazil and Venezuela, it is an ideal layover for drug shipments heading north.The invasion of Guinea-Bissau has allowed Latin American DTOs to get a foothold in Africa,but it is not the limit of their ambitions. 

The presence of Sinaloa Cartel elements in N. Africa has been well documented in recent years,while the 2009 recovery in Mali of a crashed drug plane that set off from Venezuela suggests that air routes are expanding throughout the region.The political instability caused by the presence of DTOs is not reserved to Guinea-Bissau,either. The empowerment of groups with access to drug money and the impact this can have was demonstrated last year when Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) -- which earns millions of dollars from trafficking drugs through North Africa -- capitalized on a coup to take control of the northern half of Mali. Meanwhile, in West Africa, a recent study from the US Strategic Studies Institute reported the presence of Colombian drug lords in Guinea, opening up the possibility that Guinea-Bissau's closest neighbour could be the next domino to fall.

Night after night, members of Conte's own family in Guinea, along with senior figures in the police, army and customs, have gone on the show to confess their involvement in what amounted to the world's first-ever "cocaine coup".

A special airstrip was built for cartel planes to land in the north of the country, complete with a hotel for smugglers to stay in. When visiting cartel members from Colombia and Venezuela stayed in the capital, Conakry, they were entertained in a house belonging to the former first lady and escorted by presidential guards. Cocaine packages were even sent to Europe using diplomatic pouches.

At the heart of it all, meanwhile, was no less a figure than the late president's own 
eldest son, Ousmane, who would personally clear shipments as they arrived at Conakry 
airport in a plane marked with "Red Cross" symbols.
"I acknowledge that I was in the drug business, and I regret it," he told the nation in a 
taped confession, in which he begged for forgiveness. Along with two of his brothers and 
the former chiefs of the army and counter-narcotics police, he is now among more than 20 
once-feared figures from the old regime who are facing trial.

Diplomats say there is no doubt that tons of the drug really were being given safe passage 
through Guinea, passing on across the Sahara to Europe in the cocaine equivalent of the 
Paris-Dakar rally. What has been exposed was long an open secret in Conakry, as shown by 
the large numbers of Hummers, BMWs and other luxury cars that cruise what are otherwise 
some of the poorest streets in the world. Until recently, many were to be found in the car 
park of the counter-narcotics squad, where the scope for backhanders used to be so great 
that it was inundated with transfer requests from other $100-a-month police departments.
When one foreign diplomat attended an official burning ceremony of a police "seizure" of 
a ton of cocaine, the packets turned out to have substituted with a fake white powder.

"Cocaine smuggling in Guinea has become a major concern, both in terms of the supply to 
Europe and the corrupting impact it has one Guinea's governance and law enforcement 
agencies," said one Western official.

The growth of trafficking in Guinea and neighbouring west African states such as Guinea 
Bissau, Liberia and Sierra Leone began around four years ago, when smuggling direct to 
Europe across the Atlantic became harder in the wake of increased maritime security. 
Latino cartels, facing an already saturated market in the US, used Nigerian middlemen to 
scout for contacts region-wide, and found perfect business partners in the politicians, police and generals of West Africa's bankrupt, war-ravaged coastal capitals.

West African Cocaine Routes To Europe

August 31, 2013, 11:08 am

≫ Next: Marijuana Now Legal In 18 States And Washington DC

≪ Previous: LatAm Drug Cartels Set Up in Africa

$

0

0

The lucrative cocaine trade from Latin America to Europe has furthered the globalization organized crime, causing an increase in violence and a deterioration of the rule of law in countries throughout the Caribbean and West Africa.

While reports on drug trafficking from Latin America to North America are common, the increasingly important routes to Europe are seldom mentioned in the media. In reality, Europe has become the world’s second largest market for cocaine, valued at $36 billion and only $4 billion smaller than the US market.

In Peru and Bolivia, chewing coca leaves is a daily occurrence. For the people in the Andean region, chewing the leaves is the European cultural equivalent of smoking cigarettes. Additionally, coca leaves are said to help alleviate “Soroche” or altitude sickness, a power causing many to declare the plant God-given. The humility of the coca leaf makes it hard to believe that they form the base of a drug capable of destabilizing several countries and endangering the bodies and minds of millions of consumers.

New Routes, New Markets

Just over one decade ago, the vast majority of cocaine was shipped exclusively to the US. But, as the US market for cocaine continues to shrink and enforcement efforts intensify in Mexico and Central America, European maritime routes have become a profitable alternative to the once exclusively areal passage to Europe. In 1982, 10.5 million US citizens consumed cocaine.  Today, the number has been cut in half, with 5.3 million reported in 2008. In Europe, on the other hand, cocaine usage doubled from 2 million in 1998, to 4.1 million users by 2008. 

Countries such as the UK and Spain now show higher annual prevalence than the US.

The exclusive cultivation of the coca bush in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, means that drug traffickers have to take a long journey across the Atlantic Ocean to reach European markets, where the drug enjoys great popularity amongst night owls from Moscow to Madrid.

Besides the more direct areal route, two maritime routes serve as the primary trafficking corridors.  One route stops in the Caribbean islands and along the coast of Venezuela – a country gripped by a surge in criminal violence. The continuing discord between President Maduro and the US government prevents trans-governmental cooperation efforts to crackdown on the route. By contrast, over the last decade, Colombia, Peru, Central America, and Mexico, have received tens of billions of dollars in US counter-narcotics assistance.  

Departing from Venezuela and the Caribbean – especially the European territories of Martinique and the Dutch Antilles – small jets, speedboats and fishing vessels carry the product to European cities.  Direct flights and reduced import barriers facilitate the shipment of cocaine in these island nations belonging to France and Netherlands respectively. Their territorial status gives them greater access to the European financial system, making them good centres to hold and launder money from illicit transactions. The presence of traffickers in these small island nations has caused crime to soar and has undermined political integrity. A whopping 75% of all crime in the Dutch Antilles is drug-related. The situation appears reminiscent of the rising tide of trafficking throughout once peaceful Central American countries.

Stop-Over: West Africa

Many of the direct maritime routes from South America to Europe have been uncovered by law enforcement, causing traffickers to seek routes through West Africa, as a stop-over to the final destination in Europe.

The journey from Colombia to West Africa is a minor obstacle compared to the direct transit into Europe. Colombian drug cartels buy old planes and depart from Venezuela to West Africa. According to the UN, at least 50 tons of South American cocaine arrive along the West African coast every year. 

Drugs are then shipped across the Sahara to the Northern tip of Morocco, from where they traverse the straits of Gibraltar into Spain. The West African route is particularly profitable for Colombian drug cartels, since the small countries along the West African coast are vulnerable to corruption and existing law enforcement is weak. Just as the small countries of Central America have become a haven for Mexican drug traffickers, West African nations have fallen into the hands of Colombian cartels.

While heightened security has made it difficult for Latin American drug traffickers to transport narcotics into the US, drug interdiction efforts across the Atlantic Ocean are comparatively weak.  Moreover, political instability and limited government resources in West Africa help facilitate drug trafficking. Additionally, the profitability of the trade entices the services of local West African smugglers. 

The most important ‘transit countries’ in West Africa are Nigeria, Ghana and Guinea-Bissau. Nigeria and Ghana serve as hubs for money laundering, while Guinea-Bissau, handles shipments from South America. Corrupt government officials help regulate the passage of narcotics through the country. The arrival of the drug trade has further exacerbated the existing problems of widespread corruption, which causes further neglect for crime and a lack of proficient security.

According to a UN report, Guinea-Bissau’s economy for illicit drug smuggling dwarfs the country’s GDP of $900mn. Drug smuggling employs a significant portion of the workforce and poor enforcement largely reduces the risk of involvement.

Drug Trade in Europe

Drugs arrive in Europe in trucks, planes, fishing boats, speedboats or via drug mules. The majority enters Europe along the Spanish coast: Europe’s gateway for illicit nacrotics.   Other points of entry (POEs) in Europe include the Netherlands, the UK and the Mediterranean coasts of Italy and Southern France.

Once the drugs reach Europe, smugglers operate without much difficulty, since border controls are sparse within Western Europe. With the expectation of the UK and Ireland, the Schengen agreement has eliminated border checks and allows EU citizens to move freely within the European Union. The lack of regulation facilitates the transportation of drugs from the Spain via couriers to other consumer countries throughout the EU.

The UK is the largest consumer of cocaine in Europe, followed by Spain, Denmark and Italy. In the UK, 6.2% of young adults between 15 and 34 years have consumed the drug at least once. Spain ranks shortly behind with 5.5%.

Unlike in Latin America, European traffickers do not operate aggressively.  Drug mafias act cautiously and stay hidden. The ‘Ndrangheta, a powerful Italian criminal organization located along the peninsula adjacent Sicily, has become deeply involved the in drug business with Latin American cartels. In the 1990s, a price drop in the heroin market caused the group to shift their operations towards the rising cocaine trade. The organization is supported by many Italian emigrants based in South America, also works closely with Nigerian drug traders, revealing the deep interconnections that exist among drug trafficking organizations worldwide.

Winner Takes All

European drug users pay between $80 and $150 for one gram of the drug and total revenue from the trade reaches $36bn annually.  However, Coca farmers receive only about 1.5% of cocaine’s street value and many cultivators remain in abject poverty.  The majority of profits accrue among cartels and smaller crime syndicates responsible for the retail of cocaine in developed countries.  Additionally, the FARC and other Colombian insurgents, take in around $300mn each year through coordinating the transfer of coca leaves to cartels, which process the plant into cocaine.  The continued existence of these violent political and criminal organizations is directly tied to the prolonged consumption and profitability cocaine throughout the world.

Marijuana Now Legal In 18 States And Washington DC

September 1, 2013, 8:20 am

≫ Next: The OG American Narcos

≪ Previous: West African Cocaine Routes To Europe

$

0

0

These are heady times for supporters of legalized marijuana as well as those looking to cash in on pot’s growing national acceptance. This month, voters in Washington state and Colorado agreed to legalize the recreational use of marijuana for adults. And medical marijuana is currently legal in 18 states and Washington D.C.

Changes in state pot laws are encouraging some cannabis-related companies to go public.
And according to an investor fact sheet for Medical Marijuana Inc. (MJNA), the current U.S. medical marijuana industry is estimated at $17 billion, with expectations it could grow up to about $29 billion by 2016.

If you are an expert on marijuana, and are out of a job, Washington state may be looking for you.

As the state begins to explore regulating their new law legalizing pot, officials are hiring an adviser on all things weed: how it’s best grown, dried, tested, labeled, packaged and cooked into brownies.

Last fall, Washington and Colorado became the first states to pass laws legalizing the recreational use of marijuana and setting up systems of state-licensed growers, processors and retail stores where adults over 21 can walk in and buy up to an ounce of heavily taxed cannabis. Sales are due to begin in Washington state in December.

The National Marijuana Business Conference began on Thursday in Denver, taking advantage of the new legal status of pot in the state. Under Amendment 64, people over 21 can legally posses up to an ounce of recreational marijuana in Colorado and grow six plants in a closed facility, three of which can be flowering at once. 

The one ounce rule applies to anything a person has on them outside their facility, so technically they can have whatever they buy plus whatever they can grow. A similar measure was passed in Washington state as well.

The good news for advocates of Amendment 64, namely that the Department of Justice under U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (at least for now), is not going to stand against it.

The DOJ, in a memo sent to federal prosecutors across the state, effectively declares that they will leave the regulation of marijuana, both medical and recreational, to state and local governments. 

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime’s “World Drug Report” states that between 119 million 
to 224 million of people 18 and older used marijuana in 2010, making it the most consumed 
illicit drug in the world. The simple fact is that prohibition doesn’t work.

America is largely responsible for the worlds’ archaic views on cannabis. It all started 
with one man, Harry J Anslinger. After prohibition of alcohol had ended, Anslinger was 
appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

“Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.”

“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”

By using mass media as his weapon, Anslinger propelled his anti-marijuana sentiment to a national  movement by spreading false truths, fear, racism and propaganda. By 1937 cannabis became illegal in an act drafted by Anslinger himself.


Legal In Africa?
Looking towards Africa, South Africa maybe the next country after Uruguay to legalize marijuana?

South Africa’s National Drug Master Plan has called for an in-depth study on the need for decriminalizing or legalizing the substance.

Implemented in late June by the Central Drug Authority – South Africa’s drug advisory 
board – the CDA describes the Master Plan as the “country’s blueprint for preventing and 
reducing alcohol and substance abuse and its associated social and economic consequences 

on South African society.

The OG American Narcos

September 3, 2013, 6:53 am

≫ Next: Top Narco Movies

≪ Previous: Marijuana Now Legal In 18 States And Washington DC

$

0

0

As the body count climbs across Mexico, the drugs continue flowing across the border by the ton. Despite the evident disconnect–a “war” on drugs that increases the supply while lowering the price, in the best tradition of our reigning “free market” ideology the American media regales the public with fairy tales of heroic “warriors” doing battle with murderous gangsters named “Joaquín,” “Jorge” and “Amado.” The fact is, more likely than not, the real narcos taking the biggest cut from deep inside the reeking abattoir of the grisly trade have far less prosaic names like “Brett,” “Ethan” or “Jason.”

The Only Liquid Investment Capital
Earlier this month, The Observer reported that “The vast profits made from drug production 
and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich ‘consuming’ countries–principally across 
Europe and in the US–rather than war-torn ‘producing’ nations such as Colombia and Mexico, 
new research has revealed.”

The authors of that report provide compelling evidence that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems. Indeed, at the height of the global financial crisis Antonio Maria Costa, then the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer “he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse during the financial crisis. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

“Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.” While Costa “declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.”

Brent Kovar

Selective Prosecutions
In stark contrast to the impunity enjoyed by our capitalist overlords, the wall street journal reported that the U.S. Treasury Department “slapped sanctions on two more key operatives of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

The Journal informed us that “Kingpin Act sanctions were placed on Maria Alajandrina Salazar Hernandez and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, the wife and son of Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán, the fugitive drug lord who heads the Sinaloa Cartel.”

In announcing sanctions against the Guzmán clan, Adam Szubin, the director of Treasury’s 
Office of Foreign Assets Control, said in a statement: “This action builds on Treasury’s 
aggressive efforts, alongside its law enforcement partners, to target individuals who facilitate Chapo Guzmán’s drug trafficking operations and to pursue the eventual dismantlement of his organization, which is culpable in untold violence.”

While Chapo, Inc. earned honourable mention at No. 1153 on Forbes “World’s Billionaires 
List,” and may very well be responsible for the estimated 25% of illegal drugs trafficked into the United States as the DEA alleges, his place at No. 55 on Forbes list of “The World’Most Powerful People,” sandwiched between PIMCO founder and “Bond King” Bill Gross and Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Director-General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, speak volumes about the rather interesting juxtapositions between the worlds of finance, crime and covert operations.

Pedro Alatorre Damy

Citing findings by two Colombian academics,  Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía in their study, Anti-Drugs Policies In Colombia: Successes, Failures And Wrong Turns, Ed Vulliamy disclosed “that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering  97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.”

Gaviria told The Observer, “Colombian society has suffered to almost no economic advantage from the drugs trade, while huge profits are made by criminal distribution networks in consuming countries, and recycled by banks which operate with nothing like the restrictions that Colombia’s own banking system is subject to.”

Where, inquiring minds can’t help but wonder, are Treasury’s “aggressive efforts” when it  comes to those simple, yet readily demonstrable facts?

A case in point. Back in 2000 when Narco News publisher Al Giordano and Mario Menéndez, a reporter for the Mexican newspaper Por Esto! were sued in a New York court for libel by 
Banamex-Citigroup, Giordano wrote that “The true bosses of the illegal drug trade do not 
appear on the FBI ‘Most Wanted’ list.”

No, Giordano averred, “The Chief Operating Officers of drug trafficking are not Mexicans, 
nor Colombians: they are US and European bankers, those who launder the illicit proceeds 
of drug trafficking. Institutions like Citibank of New York–as this report documents–are the true beneficiaries of the prohibition on drugs and its illegal profits.”

Urrego Cardenas

While Chapo Guzmán’s family are now targets of Treasury Department sanctions, what can we learn from recent reporting on Justice Department inaction when it came to prosecuting officers of America’s fourth largest bank, Wachovia, bought by Wells Fargo & Co. in 2008 at the height of the capitalist financial meltdown?

Bloomberg Markets Magazine and The Observer revealed in 2010 and 2011 respectively, that Wachovia was up to its eyeballs in laundering hot money for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. One customer that Wachovia took on in 2004 was Casa de Cambio Puebla SA,” Bloomberg Markets reported. The Puebla, Mexico currency exchange was the brainchild of Pedro Alatorre Damy, a “businessman” who “had created front companies for cartelsAlatorre, and 70 others connected to his network were arrested in 2007 by Mexican law enforcement officials. Authorities discovered that the accused money launderer and airline broker for the Sinaloa Cartel controlled 23 accounts at the Wachovia Bank branch in Miami and that it held some $11 million, subsequently frozen by U.S. regulators. Although investigators from DEA and the IRS uncovered evidence that Wachovia had laundered as much as $378.4 billion, “a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico’s gross national product–into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico,” and later paid federal authorities $110 million in forfeiture, including a $50 million fine “for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine,” no criminal proceedings were ever brought against bank officers.

Following extensive  research into the origins of two aircraft seized in Mexico with some 
ten tons of cocaine on board, we learned that as many as 100 planes had been purchased 
with hot money laundered through Wachovia Bank.Bloomberg’s Michael Smith reported, “a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. On board army marines found 128 identical black suitcases “packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100 million. The stash was supposed to have been delivered from Caracas to drug traffickers in Toluca, near Mexico City. One of the two owners of the DC-9 (tail number N900SA) busted at the airport in Ciudad del Carmen that freighted 5.5 tons of cocaine had been appointed in 2003 to the Business Advisory Council of the National Republican Congressional Committee by then-Congressional Majority Leader Tom Delay,

The owner Brent Kovar had cloned a jet flown by the U.S. Transportation Security 
Administration. An official-looking seal read “Sky Way Aircraft, Protection of America’s 
Skies”. When FAA and corporate records were searched revealed evidence indicating that the firm is part of a cluster of related air charter firms being used as dummy front companies 
to provide ‘cover’ for CIA flights.”

The companies involved include Royal Sons, Express One International, Genesis Aviation 
and United Flite Inc. The second plane, a Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) which crash landed on the Yucatán peninsula in 2007 with four tons of coke on board, was registered to a “Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc.” (DBA, or “doing business as”) and was previously employed as a “private charter” that did “terrorist” rendition flights for, who else, the CIA.The “key to the ill-fated Gulfstream II cocaine shipment is a prolific Colombian narco-trafficker and U.S. government informant named Jose Nelson Urrego Cardenas–who was recently arrested by police in Panama. Urrego allegedly played a major role in organizing the cocaine shipment as part of [Immigration and Customs Enforcement's] Mayan Express. 
operation.

This may highlight the CIA’s role in managing, not eliminating, the global drug trade, Narco News disclosed that the Agency had a “quid-pro-quo” arrangement with Chapo Guzmán’s 
Sinaloa Corporation’s “leadership and US government agencies seeking to obtain information on rival narco-trafficking organizations.” Indeed, one of the “private aircraft” used in Chapo Guzmán’s drug importation schemes was none other than that ill-fated Gulfstream II (N987SA) which crash-landed in the Yucatán in 2007. Purchased with funds laundered through Wachovia Bank, the business jet was subsequently linked by Council of Europe investigators to CIA ghost flights.

Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla from the Chapo Guzmans Sinaloa cartel claims “he served as 
the ‘logistical coordinator’ for the ‘cartel,’ helping to oversee an operation that imported into the U.S. ‘multi-ton quantities of cocaine … using various means, including but not limited to, Boeing 747 cargo aircraft, private aircraft … buses, rail cars, tractor trailers, and automobiles’.Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla claimed that a deal exsisted between the U.S and Guzman that “assured protection for the Sinaloa Cartel’s business operations while also undermining its competition–such as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization out of Juárez, Mexico. The information provided by the Sinaloa Cartel to US agencies against its rivals assures a steady flow of drug busts and media victory headlines for US agencies and for the Mexican government.

Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla

This war of minds in the media  is necessary for hoodwinking their citizens into believing that progress is being made in the drug war and thereby assuring the continued funding of bloated drug-war budgets and support for failed policies. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography of Mexico has released startling figures: 27,199 homicides were recorded in 2011; between 2007 and 2011, the total came to 95,632 murders.

The global drug connection is not just a lateral connection between CIA field operatives and their drug-trafficking contacts. It is more significantly a global financial complex of hot money uniting prominent business, financial and government as well as underworld figures. Martin Woods, a former senior detective with London’s Metropolitan police anti-drugs squad joined Wachovia in 2005 as the bank’s chief anti-money laundering investigator and paid a steep price for his diligence. Hounded out of his position when he refused to stop filing suspicious activity reports to headquarters in Charlotte over dubious deposit practices by Wachovia branches in London and Miami, Woods told The Observer: “New York and London have become the world’s two biggest laundries of criminal and drug money, and offshore tax havens. Not the Cayman Islands, not the Isle of Man or Jersey. The big laundering is right through the City of London and Wall Street.

UNODOC estimate that profits derived from narcotics rackets amount to some $600 billion 
annually and that up to $1.5 trillion dollars in drug money is laundered through seemingly 
legitimate enterprises.In U.S. federal court, conviction of possession of crack cocaine with a street value of only $378 results in a minimum sentence of 5-10 years in prison. The majority of the 2.3 million jailed people in the United States are there for small-time drug offenses.

So, the Wachovia executives, who admitted their guilt, must have gotten really long sentences for their $378 billion drug business, right? Not exactly. Not one Wachovia executive spent a night or even an hour in jail, although the value of their crime was 1 billion times greater than the average street dealer. The federal prosecutors, after making strong-sounding speeches for public relations purposes, settled the case by fining Wachovia (which by then had been acquired by Wells Fargo) only $110 million and penalizing them an additional $50 million. That amounts to about .04 percent of the $378 billion they laundered, and a mere 2 percent of Wells Fargo’s profits for 2010. Apparently, if you operate a multi-billion dollar bank, crime does pay. Contemporary capitalism is in no position to renounce the cartels. Because it is not the cartels that has transformed itself into a modern capitalist enterprise, it is capitalism that has transformed itself into a cartel, the rules of drug trafficking are also the rules of capitalism.

Top Narco Movies

October 11, 2013, 11:54 am

≫ Next: Short History Of The War On Drugs

≪ Previous: The OG American Narcos

$

0

0

In no particular order:

How to Make $ Selling Drugs 
Ten easy steps show you how to make money from drugs, featuring a series of interviews with drug dealers, prison employees, and lobbyists arguing for tougher drug laws.

Breaking Bad
What, exactly, does it mean to be a “man”? It’s a question that sits at the dark, warped heart of the entire series and its anti-hero protagonist. A nerdy chemist whose brains haven’t earned him any power or respect from the world at large, the terminally ill Walt decides that he’s finally going to get that power and respect through whatever means necessary.

Money and masculinity are deeply linked by the series. Not only does money signify the value of the person who earns it, but also the control and self-sufficiency that comes along with it. This link between manliness, money, and power is a dangerous one for people who accept it.

Escobar, El Patron del Mal

Though a great number of "narcoseries" have been produced in Colombia, which in some cases have extolled the drug traffickers, in this case the cartel boss is pitilessly represented as a person who started his criminal career smuggling cigarettes and stealing cemetery stones, and who rose to occupy a seat in Congress.

Modern generations don't know who Pablo Escobar was, a person who permeated the life of Colombians for 20 years, the series does not praise the man with the thick moustache and enough money to get practically everything he ever wanted.

Such was his power that at one time he offered to pay off Colombia's foreign debt. He had collections of vintage cars, costly motorcycles, works of art, extravagant homes with golden faucets and even a private zoo.

According to Uribe, the series shows who Escobar really was, a man who spent an incredible amount just on all the rubber bands he needed to bundle up the wads of dollars that came from selling tons of cocaine in the United States and Europe, for which he created routes, bribed authorities and made illegal border crossings an everyday part of his business.

Hell (Spanish: El Infierno) 2010

Hell (Spanish: El Infierno) is a 2010 Mexican action drama comedy western film produced by Bandidos Films, directed by Luis Estrada; it's a political satire about the drug trafficking in Mexico.Benjamín "Benny" García is deported from the United States to his home town in Mexico (a fictional place named San Miguel Arcángel). Back home is a bleak picture, he can't find an honest job and most of the town is held with the business of drug trafficking. Benny gets involved in the narco business, a "spectacular" job where he gets a lot of money, women and fun. But soon he finds out that the violent criminal life is not easy and much less fun.

The Two Escobars

The Two Escobars, by directors Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, looked back at Colombia's World Cup run and the relationship of association football and the country's criminal gangs – notably the Medellín Cartel run by Pablo Escobar. It is suggested in the program that, had Pablo Escobar (no relation to Andrés) still been alive, the Gallon Brothers would not have targeted Andrés Escobar, as it was widely known that Pablo Escobar was a fervent supporter of the Colombian national football team and was a friend of all the players on the national team. Escobar had personally funded the construction of many of the football fields that exist in the poorer regions of Medellín and had indirectly funded many of the costs associated with training the Colombian players and preparing the national team for international play. The players visited him in prison prior to beginning their 1994 World Cup qualifying run.

Miss Bala 2011

Miss Bala is a Mexican drama film written and directed by Gerardo Naranjo. The film premièred a2011 Cannes Film Festival. Stephanie Sigman plays Laura, a 23-year-old daughter of a Tijuana clothing merchant who enters the Miss Baja California beauty pageant, but upon meeting Lino, a drug-trafficker, gets involved in a spiraling narco-drama in which Lino uses her as a decoy for his criminal dealings. The film is based loosely on actual events. in Mexico. The film has been nominated for the 25th Goya Awards for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film. Miss Bala is loosely based on a real incident, in which 2008’s Miss Sinaloa, Laura Zúñiga, was arrested with suspected gang members in a truck filled with munitions outside Guadalajara, Jalisco. The film suggests her pageant victory was blatantly fixed by criminal elements.

Perro Come Perro (Dog Eat Dog) 2008

Perro Come Perro (Dog Eat Dog) is a 2008 Colombian film by director Carlos Moreno. The film depicts the violence among the crime filled life of some criminals in the city of Cali. Several thugs including Victor Peñaranda (Moreno), are found in the house of a man known as "El Mellizo" (The Twin). Peñaranda and another thug, known as Zabala, torture "Mellizo" (the Twin) until accidentally killing him in order to recover the money stolen from "El Orejon" (Big Ears), head of the underworld of Cali. Best Spanish Language Foreign Film.

Scarface 1983

Scarface is an American crime film directed by Brian De Palma, written by Oliver Stone, produced by Martin Bregman and starring Al Pacino. Tony Montana (Al Pacino), a Cuban immigrant, and his friend Manolo "Manny" Ray (Steven Bauer), build a drug empire in Miami in the early 1980s. The story follows Montana's career in the cocaine distribution industry and the events that ultimately lead to his downfall. As Montana's power begins to grow, so too do his ego and paranoia. Scarface portrays how lonely it is at the top, and how nothing can be accomplished alone.

Cocaine Cowboys 2006
Cocaine Cowboys is a  documentary film directed by Billy Corben and produced by Alfred Spellman and Billy Corben through their Miami-based media studio Rakontur. The film explores the rise of cocaine and resulting crime epidemic that swept the American city of Miami, Florida in the 1970s and 1980s.

Gangs of Wasseypur  Part 2
It is the second instalment of the Gangs of Wasseypur series centred around power struggles, politics and vengeance among three crime families.

La Clave 7 (Code 7) 2001
The 2001 movie La Clave 7 (Code 7) is the story of the effort by the Mexican Army to bring down Pedro Avilés Pérez, a drug lord in the Mexican state of Sinaloa in the late 1960s. He is considered to be the first generation of major Mexican drug smugglers of marijuana. He was also the first drug lord to use an aircraft to smuggle drugs to the United States. Directed by Jorge Reynoso. With Horacio Almada, Edna Bolkan, Felipe Castillo, Los Broncos De Reynosa. 

Saving Private Perez 2011

Julian Perez, Mexico's most notorious leader of organized crime, must embark on a mission given to him by the only authority he respects... his mother. Joined by a colorful band of infamous criminals, Julian must risk his life to fulfill his mother's wish & rescue his brother from the war-ridden bowels of the most treacherous land in the world, Iraq. 

The Shield 2002-2008

The Shield is an American drama television series starring Michael Chiklis that premiered on March 12, 2002 on FX in the United States and concluded on November 25, 2008 after seven seasons. Known for its portrayal of corrupt police officers, it was originally advertised as Rampart in reference to the true life Rampart Division police scandal, which the show's Strike Team was loosely based upon. The first season gained the most Emmy nominations for a basic cable drama. 

City of God 2002

City of God (Portuguese: Cidade de Deus) is a  Brazilian crime drama film directed by Fernando Meirelles and co-directed by Kátia Lund, released in its home country in 2002 and worldwide in 2003. It depicts the growth of organized crime in the Cidade de Deus suburb of Rio de Janeiro, between the end of the '60s and the beginning of the '80s, with the closure of the film depicting the war between the drug dealer Li'l Zé and criminal Knockout Ned.

The Wire Season 1

The Wire is an American television drama series set and produced in and around Baltimore, Maryland. The first season introduces two major groups of characters: the Baltimore police department and a drug dealing organization run by the Barksdale family. The season follows the police investigation of the latter over its 13 episodes.

Mr. Untouchable 2007

Mr. Untouchable is an English language documentary film for HDNet Films, directed by Marc Levin and produced by Mary-Jane Robinson. The film is about the rise and fall of Nicky Barnes, a former drug kingpin in New York City.

Traffic 2002
Traffic is an American crime drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Stephen Gaghan. It explores the illegal drug trade from a number of perspectives: a user, an enforcer, a politician and a trafficker. Their stories are edited together throughout the film, although some of the characters do not meet each other. 20th Century Fox, the original financiers of the film, demanded Harrison Ford play a leading role and that significant changes to the screenplay be made. Soderbergh refused and proposed the script to other major Hollywood studios, but it was rejected because of the three-hour running time and the subject matter. USA Films, however, liked the project from the start and offered the film-makers more money than Fox. Soderbergh operated the camera himself and adopted a distinctive cinematography tint for each story so that audiences could tell them apart. Traffic was critically acclaimed and earned numerous awards, including four Oscars for Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Film Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was also a commercial success with a worldwide total of $207.5 million, well above its estimated $46 million budget. 

Maria Full of Grace  2004 
Maria Full of Grace (Spanish title: María llena eres de gracia, lit. "Maria, you are full of grace") is ajoint Colombian-American drama film written and directed by Joshua Marston, who won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. Although the film depicts rural life in Colombia, it was actually filmed in Ecuador. The title is a triple-entendre: a reference to Mary, the Roman Catholic figure; "grace" is a slang name for heroin; and "grace" could also be the name of the baby.

Narc 2002
Narc is a crime film about corrupt police involved in the illegal drug trade. 

One False Move 1992
One False Move is a thriller film co-written by Billy Bob Thornton. The film, also starring Thornton, Bill Paxton and Cynda Williams was directed by Carl Franklin. The film opens with three criminals - Ray (Billy Bob Thornton), an immoral and slightly neurotic thief, Fantasia (Cynda Williams), Ray's less violent girlfriend and Pluto (Michael Beach), an intelligent yet psychopathic killer. After Fantasia sets up several friends, Ray and Pluto commit six brutal murders over the course of one night in Los Angeles, with the intention of finding a cache of money and cocaine. The trio leaves town for Houston to sell the cocaine to a friend of Pluto's.

Jackie Brown 1997 

Jackie Brown is a crime drama film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It is an adaptation of American novelist Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch and pays homage to 1970s blaxploitation films, particularly 1974's Foxy Brown.


A Prophet (Un prophète) (2009)
Condemned to six years in prison, Malik El Djebena cannot read not write. Arriving at the jail entirely alone, he appears younger and more fragile than the other convicts. He is 19 years old. Cornered by the leader of the Corsican gang who rules the prison, he is given a number of “missions” to carry out, toughening him up and gaining the gang leader’s confidence in the process. But Malik is brave and a fast learner, daring to secretly develop his own plans.

Blow (2001)
A boy named George Jung grows up in a struggling family in the 1950's. His mother nags at her husband as he is trying to make a living for the family. It is finally revealed that George's father cannot make a living and the family goes bankrupt. 

George does not want the same thing to happen to him, and his friend Tuna, in the 1960's, suggests that he deal marijuana. He is a big hit in California in the 1960's, yet he goes to jail, where he finds out about the wonders of cocaine. As a result, when released, he gets rich by bringing cocaine to America. However, he soon pays the price.

Deep Cover 1992
Deep Cover is a crime thriller film starring Laurence Fishburne (this being the last film in which Fishburne was credited as 'Larry') and Jeff Goldblum and directed by veteran actor Bill Duke. It is also notable for its theme song of the same name, composed by Dr. Dre and the then-newcomer Snoop Doggy Dogg.

Viva Riva!is a Congolese crime thriller film written & directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga.
The film received 12 nominations and won 6 awards at the 7th African Movie Academy Awards in 2011, including the awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography & Best Production Design.



The Mena Operation

US Government cocaine shipments, money-laundering and gun-running, all in and around the Mena airport in western Arkansas.

Dark Alliance

Freeway Ricky Ross

American.Drug.War.The.Last.White

The War on Drugs has become the longest and most costly war in American history, the question has become, how much more can the country endure?

Short History Of The War On Drugs

October 11, 2013, 11:56 am

≫ Next: Africa, Europe and the Cocaine Business

≪ Previous: Top Narco Movies

$

0

0

In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counter narcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of anti drug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.

Some specialists have expressed scepticism about the approach. Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who focuses on Latin America and counter narcotics  said that what had happened in West Africa over the past few years was the latest example of the "Whac-A-Mole" problem, in which making trafficking more difficult in one place simply shifts it to another.

"As they put on the pressure, they are going to detour routes, but they are not going to stop the flow, because the institutions are incredibly weak -- I don't care how much vetting they do," Professor Bagley said. "And there is always blow-back to this. You start killing people in foreign countries -- whether criminals or not -- and there is going to be fallout."

Yes, it may be possible to push trafficking out of one broken West African nation. But why? What's the point? So we can chase it to the next country? The very fact that Western Africa has become a significant stop on the global trade route is evidence in itself of the failure of the drug war, a failure that won't be straightened out by doubling down on the same strategy. Indeed, drug traffickers are in Africa as a direct result of U.S. pressure on trading routes first in the Caribbean, and then in South and Central America.

Lessons From History
The spraying was part of Operation Condor, a joint Mexican-American venture aimed at eradicating Mexican pot that had been going on since 1975. General José Hernández Toledo, fresh from the 1968 student massacres in Mexico City, led 10,000 soldiers into the hills of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. "Tons of drugs were destroyed, production was reduced, prices rose, but drugs continued to flow into the American market, although in lesser quantity of Mexican origin.

The action had several consequences. One, a rise in the price of pot in the United States, was intended. Others weren't. The growth of domestic marijuana farming might have eased pot shortages slightly during the '70s, but the industry was hardly the high-tech, high-efficiency bud-producing machine it is today. The encouragement of a shift from pot to cocaine importation among drug smugglers was a much more significant development in the short term. Coke, more valuable by weight and with a less detectable odor, was more profitable and much easier to move. A minor player in the coke trade in the '70s, Mexico would a decade later come to rival the Caribbean. By the late '90s, it would dominate the industry.

As domestic pot production began to take off in Northern California, the quality of home-grown marijuana available to Americans was steadily improving and U.S. pot farming was allowed to expand with near impunity .Neither California Gov. Jerry Brown nor the Carter administration was particularly concerned with going after West Coast growers. Brown smoked pot himself, 

The DEA, for its part, had no clue of how much marijuana was being grown in the United States. In 1984, the agency estimated that domestic annual production was 2,100 metric tons and represented only 12 percent of total consumption. Government officials "were still screaming about all these dynamite, super strength strains of Mexican marijuana. The American marijuana market, however, remained dependent on imported and outdoor herb, which are both susceptible to shortfalls. Pot grown outdoors is harvested in the fall--meaning that, by summer, supply would be depleted nationwide. Combined with foreign eradication efforts, these seasonal shortages helped open the door for cocaine, as users substituted an available drug for an unavailable one.

Federal survey data show that coke use among 18- to 25-year-olds doubled from 1977 to 1979. By the end of the decade, 40 percent of Americans in that age bracket admitted to trying the drug. "If present trends go unchecked," prophesied a 1979 DEA report, "a vast new youth market for the substance could be opened. Carter's own top drug-policy official, Bourne, saw little danger in it, writing in a 1976 article that coke "is probably the most benign of illicit drugs currently in widespread use. At least as strong a case could be made for legalizing it as for legalizing marijuana. Short acting--about 15 minutes--not physically addicting, and acutely pleasurable, cocaine has found increasing favour at all socio-economic levels in the last year."

In July 1981, Time magazine illustrated its cover story "High on Cocaine" with a shot of a martini glass filled with coke. "Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-American drug," the piece suggests. Today, in part precisely because it is such an emblem of wealth and status, coke is the drug of choice for perhaps millions of solid, conventional and often upwardly mobile citizens--lawyers, businessmen, students, government bureaucrats, politicians, policemen, secretaries, bankers, mechanics, real estate brokers, waitresses."
A snort in each nostril and you're up and away for 30 minutes or so. Alert, witty and with it. No hangover. No physical addiction. No lung cancer. No holes in the arms or burned-out cells in the brain. Instead, drive, sparkle, energy. If it were not classified (incorrectly) by the Federal Government as a narcotic, and if it were legally distributed throughout the U.S. (as it was until 1906), cocaine might be the biggest advertiser on television."

Reagan redoubled efforts at curbing imports, further militarized drug policy, and brought about mandatory-minimum sentences for minor drug offences.

"Drugs are bad, and we're going after them. As I've said before, we're taking down the surrender flag and running up the battle flag. We're going to win the war on drugs."

In 1980, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report lists fewer than 100,000 arrests for heroin and cocaine, which are tabulated together. By 1989, that figure had jumped to more than 700,000.

But the first battle Reagan would fight in his war was against marijuana, which required laying siege to the once-ignored base of liberal resistance, Northern California. His Campaign Against Marijuana Production began in the harvest season of 1983. U-2 spy planes and military helicopters flew over the Golden State looking for green crops.The DEA reported seizing 64,579 plants at an estimated value of $130 million. Federal-law-enforcement figures marched in the streets chanting, "War on Drugs! War on Drugs!" The 1984 haul was three times larger. Nationally, pot plant seizures rose from about 2.5 million in 1982 to more than 7 million in 1987. Unsurprisingly, such sustained effort drove up the price of marijuana. 

The DEA closely tracks drug prices and purity, although it doesn't often make the data available publicly. It did so most recently in 2004, and the numbers include a startling, if misunderstood, observation. "The marijuana price trends...are not highly correlated with trends in prices of other drugs over time," the report reads. "While the price of powder, heroin, and, to a lesser extent, crack were falling during the 1980s, the average price of marijuana generally rose." An eighth of an ounce of pot in 1981 was going for $25. It stayed roughly the same in 1982. By 1986, it was up to $53, and it hit a high of $62 in 1991, a 150 percent rise over 10 years. Coke, meanwhile, become much more affordable. It cost nearly $600 a gram in 1982. As Reagan directed resources toward the pot battle, coke's price began to tumble. By 1989, it was down to $200 a gram, cheaper in real terms than it had been during the last national coke binge a century earlier. At the same time, average purity nearly doubled.

Clearly, the price trends are highly correlated, but the correlation is a negative one: In the '80s, price increases in marijuana drove demand toward other drugs. The war on drugs hard, soft, or otherwise helped persuade pot smokers to put down the bong and pick up the pipe, the mirror, or the needle. Pot smoking plummeted under Reagan The use of other drugs either stayed the same or increased as people started looking for a different cheap high. Reported use of inhalants nearly doubled, from 4 to 7 percent between 1981 and 1987. Cocaine, heroin, and meth use also rose in the '80s.

The use of other drugs either stayed the same or increased as people started looking for a different cheap high. Reported use of inhalants nearly doubled, from 4 to 7 percent between 1981 and 1987. Cocaine, heroin, and meth use also rose in the '80s. Heroin dropped in price by a third between 1981 and 1988. By 1996, it had dropped by two thirds. The price of crack was falling, as well. The DEA started tracking it only in 1986, around the time the drug's use became widespread. Its price fell by about half over the next five years. In rural areas, the price of meth fell by a quarter from the early '80s to the middle of the decade. The stated goal of U.S. drug policy is to lower demand by increasing price. Reagan's drug war did precisely the opposite.

While the president focused on pot in California, cocaine was exploding in Florida. Miami was the perfect base for large-scale drug smuggling, The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow or assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The move left South Florida with an idle army of well-trained, mostly Cuban-American adepts of dark arts that would become valuable in the coke business: how to acquire and use weapons, how to hide money, how to surreptitiously pilot planes and boats. A speedboat could zip through any one of the Everglades' hundreds of little waterways to find a hidden place to unload or dock elsewhere along Florida's more than 3,000 miles of coastline. That was mostly unnecessary throughout the '70s, however, because smugglers could dock at almost any marina, back up a truck, and drive off. Interdiction was not a major concern.

The banking industry had been banged up by the recession, and it was glad to have the influx of capital brought by the cocaine biz. The Economist reported that 44 Miami banks were given international charters in 1982, compared to 10 in 1978. Another 36 foreign banks opened branches in Miami during that period. At least 40 city banks refused to report cash deposits of more than $10,000, as required by law, throughout the '70s and into the '80s. And at least four banks, authorities estimated, were bought and controlled by drug dealers. As their trade spread across the country, dealers found still other banks eager to deal in cocaine cash.

By the late '80s, a few banks had begun to come under suspicion as their money laundering became too blatant. But the penalties were so laughably small that even when the banks did get caught, they often still benefited from the transaction. A Beverly Hills branch of the American Express Bank was caught laundering $100 million belonging to Juan Garcia Abrego, operator of a notorious cartel with close connections to the then Mexican government. In a 1994 congressional hearing, Chairman Henry Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat, noted that the $950,000 fine--less than 1 percent of the laundered cash--meant that the bank still profited from the exchange. Citibank, which since the 1950s had been the most active U.S. financial institution in Mexico, was in a perfect position when cocaine trafficking moved from the Caribbean westward. Mexican playboy Raul Salinas was discovered to have laundered hundreds of millions through Citibank. His brother, President Carlos Salinas, a prominent ally in the U.S. drug war, was estimated to have made off with some $5 billion himself.

In two and a half years of investigation beginning in 1986, Sen. John Kerry's committee looking into links between the CIA and the Contras also turned up ties between drug cartels and the banking industry. One hearing involved the Medellin cartel's top accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, who'd been busted laundering billions through New York-based bank First Boston. A committee member suggested that he "must be very clever" to have cleaned up so much cash. "Well, First Boston paid a fine of $25,000 and I'm doing 42 years," Rodriguez responded. "Who do you think is cleverer?"

Carter and Reagan, for different reasons, had both ignored cocaine as it grew in popularity in the late '70s and early '80s. The market had become so flooded that the price of a gram of coke plummeted from $600 in 1982 to $400 in 1984. The coke industry pulled itself out of this apparent death spiral through an innovation that helped it reach thousands of new consumers: crack. Cheap and packing a quick punch, crack was the perfect $5, five-minute escape. It began to spread throughout the nation, especially in poor African-American communities.
The introduction of the new drug came, predictably, with violence, as rival organizations struggled to control territory and competition. Miami in the late '70s and early '80s was mirrored by Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York in the mid-'80s. Murders committed by African-Americans surged beginning in 1984, rising from just over 30 per 100,000 people to more than 50 in the early '90s, according to Justice Department statistics. Coke use steadily fell throughout the late '80s and leveled off toward the end of the decade. It's stayed fairly flat since, although the DEA sporadically claims big victories in disrupting supply. 

The most recent chest-pounding began in August 2007. Drug Czar John Walters began making the press rounds, Walters came with a small staff and a stack of glossy pages making the case that the war on drugs was being won. Prices for cocaine, he said according to a person in the meeting, were rising fast. That can only mean a decline in supply, he explained.

Congress was in the midst of a debate over a controversial $1.4 billion aid package intended to help Mexico wage its own drug war. The drug czar, however, had a credibility problem: In the past, he'd pointed to several other price increases and supply drops that quickly reversed themselves and left him and the media looking silly. USA Today finally took the bait, making the price increase its lead story in a September paper. From there, word spread that there was a shortage of coke out there.

The administration gave itself the credit, citing increased Mexican cooperation, Colombian eradication efforts, and a number of high-profile seizures for the alleged supply downturn. "Drug kingpins are having a harder time moving illegal drugs and chemicals and pocketing the illicit proceeds because they are up against the full-court press of sustained, joint initiatives by a historic three-way partnership among Colombia, Mexico, and the United States," said DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy at a press conference staged in Colombia when the numbers were officially released. 

When the DEA was asked for price data for the years 2005 and 2006 the agency declined to provide it. When a request was filed under the Freedom of Information Act we were told in a letter that there was no "public benefit" to releasing the data. So did the DEA really have the cocaine cartels in retreat? Quite the opposite, actually: Coke exporters were simply finding more lucrative markets than the economically stricken United States.

Producers are "not going to see a significant impact [from a decline in American consumption] because they've seen huge increases in demand, and therefore profit, from Europe," André Hollis, who was the senior counternarcotics adviser to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld from 2001 to 2003, told me. Just a few years prior, he explained, Americans were doing about five times more blow than their Old World fellows. Today, coke-consumption levels in the United States and Europe are roughly equal. It's hard to confirm his claim statistically. But United Nations surveys have shown rapid rises in cocaine use in Western European countries during the '00s. And press accounts from across Western Europe have talked about a continental coke binge similar to America's in the '80s

True, the U.S. government can point to a number of high-profile seizures, including one that landed more than 20 metric tons of coke in Mexico. Tighter border enforcement as a result of efforts to curb terrorism and immigration have likely played a small role in shrinking the American coke trade, too. But the biggest factor is probably the rise of the euro and the concomitant decline of the dollar, which has made it less profitable to sell cocaine to Americans. "The euro has replaced the dollar in the Western Hemisphere as the currency of choice among these traffickers, which is an extraordinary shift," said Karen Tandy, head of the DEA, at an anti-narcotics conference in April 2007 in Spain. "As cocaine use has declined in the U.S. dramatically, in the European market it has risen." Officials at the conference said that a kilogram of coke that would fetch $30,000 in the United States was worth $50,000 in Europe--and the dollar has fallen further against the euro since then. On April 1, 2007, a dollar was worth about 0.74 euros; a year later, it was worth only 0.63 euros. Because of this price differential, it's now a theoretically profitable enterprise to smuggle cocaine out of the United States.

Donald Semesky, the DEA's chief of financial operations, has noted that 90 percent of the 1.7 billion euros that were registered as having entered the United States in 2005 came through Latin America, "where drug cartels launder their European proceeds." As the cocaine market has shifted, use along its new trade routes has grown. A UN report notes increases in use not only in South and Central America but also in Africa, where seizures jumped ten-fold from 2003 to 2006 and then doubled again between 2006 and 2007. 

West African nations, which make Colombia and Mexico look like models of transparent governance, have become important stopping-off points for coke traffickers on the way to Europe. Out of work African youth make cheap foot-soldiers and drug runners with expensive equipment and weaponry have little to fear from airports barely electrified and cops cars. with empty gas tanks. "Africa is under attack," warned the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime executive director Antonio Maria Costa in a Post op-ed in 2008. "States that we seldom hear about, such as Guinea-Bissau and neighbouring Guinea, are at risk of being captured by drug cartels in collusion with corrupt forces in government and the military." From West Africa, the coke heads to Spain and Portugal. Spain, according to the UN, had levels of coke use equivalent to those in the United States for the first time ever in 2006.

From the drug cartels' perspective, the beauty of shifting exports to Europe is that the resulting decline in shipments to the United States does indeed lead to an increased price here. While expanding their business elsewhere, the cartels are getting more money per unit of American product. The ultimate goal of the war on drugs, of course, is to reduce addiction, and there are signs that raising the price of coke hasn't done it among hardcore users. Up-to-date data is tough to come by, but some cities have begun drug-testing folks who get arrested. In D.C., where the practice began in 1984, a little more than 40 percent of arrestees tested positive for cocaine in January 2007. That percentage barely budged as the price rose.

---

Africa, Europe and the Cocaine Business

October 15, 2013, 9:50 am

≫ Next: 334 Legal Weed Shops To Open In Washington State USA

≪ Previous: Short History Of The War On Drugs

$

0

0

Today, drug trafficking is the most lucrative branch of organised crime, and cocaine yields are one of the most profitable. In 2006, in Spain alone, authorities seized 50 tonnes of coke, Twelve million Europeans have consumed cocaine at least once in their lifetime. In 2007, in Europe there were 3.5 million adolescent consumers. .In Spain,  3% of the population regularly consumes cocaine. This group accounts for about 20% of all those in Europe who use the drug.

There is a new dimension to the cocaine trafficking bound for Europe, and this requires more attention. After a significant rise in recent years, it is now estimated that nearly 60-80 tonnes of cocaine pass through West Africa each year before reaching European soil; in other words, two fifths of the cocaine that makes its way into Europe. The fragile States of West Africa are not in a position to take on Latin American organised crime gangs, which are much stronger in terms of resources. The establishment of the illegal drug market in those weak states goes hand in hand with a rise in instability, growing levels of corruption, possible financing of non-governmental armed groups and high incidence of cocaine use.

Drug consumption follows the market laws of supply and demand: the higher the price of the drug, the lower the demand, and consumption drops. Cocaine’s price is high even though its production costs are very low. What keeps prices high are penalisation of trafficking in and consumption of drugs and the control of supply. 

This system poses high risks for those working in this illegal market, who make up for this through charging high prices. At the same time, the control regime involves frequent drug seizures, which makes the product more scarce and that also contributes to raising prices. Therefore, any intervention in the chain of creation of added value must be evaluated in terms of the impact it has on prices. Embracing this logic has imminent implications for drug control policy: all measures to control supply, be they repressive, penal or linked to development policy, must be evaluated in light of the effect they have on the final price of cocaine.

Cocaine’s production and marketing chain follows an exponential price curve: the further the cocaine is from the producing country in the commercial chain, the higher its market price will be. For instance, a kilo of high-purity cocaine has a street value of nearly €80,000 in Spain, and that is a conservative estimate. The same kilo in Colombia is worth about €1,200. However, the coca-growing farmer gets no more than €250 for the coca leaves needed to produce that kilo of the drug. Because of this exponential increase in value, potential situations of a shortage of coca leaves or cocaine in the Andean region would not have visible effects on the final price in Europe or on consumption levels. As far as controlling supply is concerned, it is better to intervene in the chain of creation of cocaine’s added value only when the price of the drug is high enough for the shortage to have an effect on that price –far from the producing countries and close to the final consumer. Right now the main coca producer is Colombia, with nearly 100,000 hectares.

The three main coca-growing countries –Bolivia, Peru and Colombia– produced 994 tonnes of pure cocaine in 2007, according to estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The 181,600 hectares used to grow coca leaves in those countries correspond to a surface area nearly three times the size of the city of Madrid. Total coca crops have been growing non-stop since 2003. In 2007, 27% more crops were planted than in 2003; in Bolivia the increase was 5% and in Peru it was 4%. Even though the amount of land used to grow coca is smaller than the estimate for 2001, cocaine production is higher. This is because growing methods are more efficient, and the processes for extracting the drug and refining cocaine are more powerful.

 In 2007, 121 tonnes of cocaine were seized in Europe in a total of 72,700 raids. Increasingly, the final transit countries for the cocaine before it reaches Europe are Venezuela and Brazil, followed by Argentina, Ecuador, Suriname and the former colonies and overseas territories of France, the UK and the Netherlands. Other countries of the Caribbean, and, more and more, Mexico, are also cited as stopover countries for South American cocaine bound for Europe.

Venezuela has become a relatively safe haven for Colombian traffickers. Compared to Colombia, Venezuela offers big advantages for cocaine traffickers, thanks to corrupt security forces, a highly permeable and practically uncontrollable jungle border spanning more than 2,000 km, and patchy efforts at crime-fighting. Cocaine is shipped from Venezuela in speedboats and ‘semi-submersible’ vessels to the Lesser Antilles and from there to the US and European markets. An ever-growing amount is shipped directly from Venezuela to West Africa.

Brazil shares with the three main coca-producing countries 7,000 km of border in the Amazon basin, which, because of its topography and vegetation, makes effective control of drug trafficking more difficult. Drug-trafficking rings take advantage of the porous nature of the Amazon region and ship cocaine to Brazil along rivers that are traditional routes for contraband. In this way they dodge stricter controls that are in place at ports and airports in the three coca-producing countries.

The wholesale cocaine trade with Europe is dominated mainly by Colombian organisations that generally work with Spanish distribution networks, although lately they do it more often with Nigerian and Moroccan gangs. Colombian traffickers have shown little interest in the retail trade and street-level dealing. Although in Spain Colombians are frequently identified as drug peddlers, one can assume they have little to do with the wholesale networks operating out of South America.

The Iberian Peninsula is an ideal entry and redistribution point because of abundant trade links with the cocaine-producing region and transit countries, an historical affinity with former Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking colonies, large and well-established networks of emigrants, closeness to Africa and extensive coastlines. 

Since 2005 more evidence has emerged that Colombian and Venezuelan gangs were setting up shop in West Africa as a safe haven, turning the region into a beachhead for shipping cocaine to Europe. There are many reasons that explain why the drug business is taking root in the region. In general, a mix of push and pull factors are at play: growing demand for cocaine in EU countries, tighter controls on traditional direct routes between South America and Europe, a declining cocaine market in the US and excellent conditions for setting up markets and undertaking illegal activities in West Africa.

Given the shortfalls in the security forces and rule of law in that region, which is home to some of the world’s poorest countries, the amount of cocaine that is seized is not as representative as in other parts of the globe. One can presume that the real amount of cocaine that is trafficked in the region is a multiple of the volume that is actually seized. The UNODC’s conservative estimate is that every year nearly 60-80 tonnes of the drug move through West Africa; in other words, one-fifth of the cocaine bound for Europe goes through the region. That is more or less a quarter of the wholesale trade, is worth about US$450 million and ends up in the hands of African middlemen and helpers.

There is some evidence that in particular Ghana,Guinea-Bissau (which has earned a reputation as Africa’s first narco-state), Guinea,Cape Verde and Senegal have become staging grounds for the largest flows of cocaine headed for Europe.

There has been a significant increase recently in investments by South Americans in some countries of West Africa, such as purchases of real estate or fish- or wood-processing plants. One might assume that the acquisition of this property, possibly designed to mask illegal activities, points to the establishment of lasting structures in the region. This would allow for expansion of drug trafficking in the future.

Mr Untouchable

Eric ''Mika'' Walter Amegan

In 2007, Nouakchott, Mauritania the police intercepted a minibus. On board a cargo of more than 760 kilograms of cocaine. In the vehicle, two Spanish: Miguel Angel Calderon and his compatriot  Juan Carlos Perro, a Mexican, a Saharawi named Bouya Ahmed, the owner of the bus and Ahmedou Mohamed. All were arrested but quickly released. 

Investigations lead to a search made ​​in a dwelling belonging to Mohamed Ould Haidalla, the son of Mohamed Ould Khouna Haidalla, an austere lieutenant-colonel in the army, who led Mauritania between 1979 and 1984 uncovered seize 20.8 million ouguiyas (about 70,000 euros) in cash. 

Simultaneously, the police managed to get hold of the aircraft used to deliver the cocaine which landed in open country, 125 km north of the city.Two days later police discovered a container at the port of Nouadhibou, inside 820,000 euros and forty satellite phones, which were probably used for earlier deliveries.

Theodore Obiang Nguema and Friend

Mohamed Ould Haidalla ran a network of 4x4 used to transport the cocaine across the to Sahel to Morocco and the port of Nador where its then sent by cigarette speed boat to Spain, France or Italy. Mohamed Ould Haidalla Agadir, who was arrested in Morocco with 18 kg of cocaine. Another player in the logistics chain is a man named Seydou Kane, a former member of the African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (Flam) who handles shipments with islamist groups.

Mauritanian police also launched an international arrest warrant against the mastermind of the network from Latin America to Europe. A French citizen, Eric Walter Amégan. Eric "Mika" Walter, he only 28 years old, and it is he who is in direct contact with a Colombian national Eduardo who has his own cocaine smuggling gang specializing in routes "Latin-America-West Africa-Europe". 

Mohamed Ould Haidalla

The Colombian is, according to the testimony of Walter, assisted by a "Nabil" an Algerian national together with a group of Mauritanians including Yahya, Barikallah, Mini and Kane Seydou shipped huge container shipments to Europe.

Eric "Mika" Walter was born 31 October 1972 in Paris XIV (France), son of Augustine and Benedict Geoffry, real estate agents, residing in the residence Mangrove Saly, Mbour.
"Mika" was arrested in Senegal in June 2009, eighteen months after the mini-bus incident, immediately, the Mauritanian authorities requested his extradition . But "Mika" clearly had high level connections. According to a French police source, Francis Spizner of the Paris Bar and lawyer several African leaders including Theodore Obiang Nguema intervenes with the Senegalese presidency to prevent the extradition, saying "Mika" risks the death penalty in Mauritania.  

Eric Walter Amégan, a Franco-Congolese, actually confessed to Senegalese police his part as the head of an International cocaine network. He gave up names and contacts with which he cooperates, overseas and in Guinea Bissau . In his confession, he participated in the kidnapping and torture of his accomplice Mini Ould Soudani with the help of Sid Ahmed Ould Taya, police officer. He admits that he planned to land in Mauritania, a planeload of drugs from Latin America. 

Seydou Kane

Althrough represented by two top notch lawyers, Eric Dupont-Moretti and Jacques Vergès, it would seem that with a full confession the fate of "Mika" was sealed, on 11th February 2010 he and six Mauritanian colleagues were sentenced to 15 years in prison.However on the 15 February 2011, with a presidential pardon from the new president of Mauritania, "Mika's" sentence was reduced from 15 to 10 years with his co defendants 
including ex Interpol police chief, Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya, reduced to just 5 years. 
More good news for Mika in July 13 2011, Eric Walter and 30 of the 32 defendants were acquitted by the Court of Appeal of Nouakchott, he was released the next day and has not 
been seen since.

Sid Ahmed Ould Taya

African middlemen are paid –similar to the interaction between Colombian drug cartels and Mexican associates in the 1980s and 90s– in small amounts of cocaine for their transport, merchandise-delivery and transfer services. These small amounts of what one might call ‘cocaine currency’ tend to be sent to Europe, either through human couriers travelling on commercial flightsor through the mail. Most of the African ‘mules’ arrested in European airports come from Guinea, Nigeria, Mali andSenegal. More than half of the airborne drug traffickers are of Nigerian origin, even on flights that do not originate in Nigeria.  Nigerian gangs often control street-level drug dealing in Europe. In France, most of the foreigners arrested for offences related to drug trafficking are Nigerian. Compared to other ethnic groups, they stand out because of their flexibility and strong ties among members of their ethnic groups. ‘Mules’ are not normally members of criminal gangs, but rather used by organised traffickers as a ‘means of transport’ in the literal sense: they are loaded up at their point of departure and unloaded when they arrive at their destination.

In the second procedure, which involves wholesale trafficking, arge cargoes of cocaine from South America are transferred on the high seas to fishing vessels or speedboats, which have an African crew generally accompanied by a South American supervisor. They take the drugs to a temporary storage facility on the African continent. 

Eric Dupont-Moretti Get Me Outa Jail

There, the cocaine is repackaged and sent to Europe aboard yachts, freighters, again fishing vessels or speed boats, mainly to Galicia and the northern coast of Portugal. The Spanish and Portuguese authorities seized 69% of all the cocaine confiscated in Europe in 2006. Whereas Colombian groups have been all but overtaken by Mexican competitors in trafficking to the US, it is Colombians and also Venezuelans that dominate wholesale cocaine trafficking to Africa. 

Red Cross False Flag

Aside from maritime traffic, South American drug traffickers use small planes or light aircraft that are re-fitted to endure transatlantic flights that start in Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela or Suriname and end up in illegal airstrips in West Africa. But the spot where the cocaine-laden planes land in West Africa is not always clear, as it is just a moving point for the transfer of the drugs for later maritime shipment. There is some evidence that smaller amounts of cocaine are moved through the interior of coastal states to neighbouring countries, often those which have direct, regular flights to European capitals. 

There have also been cases, probably rare ones, in which drugs were shipped from the beaches of the Gulf of Guinea over land to Morocco and from there to Europe, following the classic routes for sneaking in marijuana and contraband. For this reason the capital of Mali, Bamako, has been cited as a major transit point for South American cocaine even though the city is 1,000 km from the coast.

Aside from Nigeria,Ghana and Senegal, probably no State in West Africa is capable of confronting successfully and on its own the organised crime gangs that are settling on their territory. One hundred kilos of pure cocaine, dumped on a beach in Guinea-Bissau, would have a market value in Europe that is equivalent to all the development aid that the country receives in a year. Several hundred kilos of cocaine allegedly arrive weekly to Guinea-Bissau. The US$450 million in drug profits that UNODC estimates stay in the hands of African intermediaries each year are equal to all the foreign direct investment made in Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali and Senegal in 2005. The fragile or failed States of West Africa conduct in a very limited fashion the functions of governance in the areas of security, social policy and legitimacy/rule of law.

 In West Africa, cocaine trafficking rings find ideal conditions. It is a perfect geographical prolongation of the coca-producing countries; weak state structures are the norm, with limited territorial control and legal systems with limited scope. Both regions offer certain ‘comparative advantages’ for criminal elements, which encourages the establishment of trans-national black markets and easy creation of illegal added-value. 

Due to growing pressure from government anti-drug agencies along traditional smuggling routes, West Africa attracts people involved in the cocaine trade because of the favourable operating conditions it offers. The result of this is a rise in organised crime activities in the region. As the drug trade takes root, consumption of drugs also increases. 

This has been observed in many transit countries, where higher demand is fuelled by more abundant supply. This happens in Central America and Brazil, but also in Guinea-Bissau. In many cases the rise in consumption stems from the distribution of ‘cocaine currency’. Besides this, along with drug trafficking what is also expanding is a series of secondary effects such as corruption, violence, money laundering, and trafficking in light and small weapons. The most visible example of this effect has been observed in Mexico, where the conflict with and among drug cartels has claimed more than 60,000 lives since 2006, according to official figures.

According to some estimates, more than 80% of drug-related violent acts stem from the resolution of economic conflicts or criminal elements competing for leadership. Contrary to what one might presume, only a small percentage of drug-related violence stems from people being high on drugs or crimes involving people seeking money to buy them. In West Africa, all it takes is a moderate bribe to neutralise the already weak control that authorities have on their territory, or the police. 

The rise in cocaine consumption in Europe
The first anti-drug strategy that the EU adopted for the period 2000-04 was aimed mainly at achieving a ‘considerable reduction’ in consumption and availability of drugs in Europe. This goal has not been met. Consumption of narcotics increased in almost every category of drugs, including cocaine. It is estimated that 12 million Europeans have tried cocaine at least once in their life; in 2007 alone, an estimated 3.5 million adolescents and young adults used the drug. Altogether, nearly 4.5 million Europeans sniff cocaine regularly.

Although the US remains the largest market for cocaine, with an annual import volume of around 450 tonnes, Europe is catching up quickly: whereas the amount of cocaine seized in the US has been on the decline since 1990, at the same time there has been a significant rise in seizures in Europe and West Africa. 

This is a clear indication of the growing volume of cocaine making its way into Europe. In the EU, cocaine-related crimes rose 62% between 2000 and 2005. Meanwhile, the increase in Europe is not distributed evenly among EU countries. In Spain, 16,799 cocaine-related crimes were recorded in 2000; but the number soared to 46,200 in 2006. In Spain, Italy and France, cocaine consumption has trebled in recent years and in the UK it has quadrupled. Britain accounts for 26% of Europe’s cocaine consumers, followed by Spain with 24% and Italy with 22%.

How the price of cocaine is set. For the amount of coca leaves needed to produce a kilo of cocaine, an Andean grower receives about €250. That kilo has a commercial value of nearly €1,200 for a middleman in the producer country. That same kilo, while in transit, has a wholesale price of between €12,000 and €15,000.This kilo of relatively pure cocaine, later mixed with additives, sells on the streets of Madrid for €80,000, depending on the purity and the number of doses. 

Europe’s tools for controlling narcotics are adequate, but it is not clear that they are based on a consistent strategy to block drug trafficking toEurope in a systematic way. Seizures that are just occasional –as opposed to systematic– only contribute to causing drug lords to move their current trafficking routes, and not to cutting them off or decreasing their number over the mid- and long term. 

Narco Sub

Drug trafficking rings learn quickly, and are flexible enough to adjust their strategies in response to those of government authorities. Traffickers’ most common way to rebuff increased government efforts is simply to move geographically. 

They have sufficient resources, means and networks to shift to alternative routes, with different means of transport and new middlemen. The rise in the commercial value of cocaine in the US, which is highly volatile and does not tend to last more than just a few months, shows the ability of drug rings to adapt to the temporary strategies of government authorities.

With the fall off the Cali and Medellin cartels in Colombia in the 1990s, the hierarchical, pyramid-style structure in drug trafficking is now more the exception than the rule, although it seems this model has re-emerged in Mexico in a big way. The common structure in transatlantic drug trafficking is similar to horizontal networks, with smaller groups that interact autonomously and lack a vertical command structure. Each group tends to handle transactions in one or two of the links in the drug’s production and commercial chain.  It is believed that, at most, current drug lords run a coordinating body, as is thought to be the case with the Norte del Valle cartel in Colombia. 

These organisational structures are more like a holding company than the legendary figure of an all-powerful overseer. The advantage of this for organised criminals is that these decentralised structures cannot be wiped out with one definitive blow, as happened with Medellin cartel after the death of Pablo Escobar. The individual components of these organisations tend to interact without actually knowing their counterparts or possible bosses. The organisations can easily replace lower-level links, quickly filling holes left by arrests or violence waged by other groups.

As organised crime gangs are skilled at evasion and at finding alternative transit territories and routes in countries with limited or non-existent governance structures, the model for enhanced control of drug trafficking might soon reach its limit

Cape Verde is usually mentioned as an example of a country which in just a few years has improved its ability to monitor its land and sea borders. The State has recovered a certain ability to fight organised crime and impose a high cost for future illegal dealings. The EU and some of its member states have implemented a set of cooperation projects, facilitating material support and technical consulting for Cape Verde. 

Nor does it seem right to impose sanctions on some countries, such as Guinea-Bissau, for not acting firmly against drug trafficking. Guinea-Bissau and many of its neighbours do not have the resources necessary for controlling their territory. Sanctions cannot change that, and will only make the situation worse Europe’s institutions and member states should reconsider their international anti-drug policy.  Portugal maybe an example of a viable alternative to the current policy.

334 Legal Weed Shops To Open In Washington State USA

October 17, 2013, 4:14 pm

≫ Next: Pharmageddon - Legal Drugs Prescibed By Doctors Cause Over 100,000 deaths A Year

≪ Previous: Africa, Europe and the Cocaine Business

$

0

0

As of last Thursday, it's legal under Washington law for anyone 21 and over to possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana, 16 ounces of "solid marijuana-infused product" (in other words, a pound of pot brownies) or 72 ounces of "marijuana-infused liquid."

The state would license 334 pot stores, total pot production would be capped at 40 metric tons next year in rules approved Wednesday by the state Liquor Control Board. Voters in Washington opted to legalize recreational pot use in March and the first dispensaries, regulated by the state's liquor board, are expected to open in 2014.A gram will retail for roughly US $8 to $10, of which roughly 40 per cent will be tax.

A Seattle police officer hands out Doritos and rolling papers during the city's Hempfest celebration.

For years, NORML, the pro-legalization group, has been arguing that legal pot could produce tax benefits. There’s no question that U.S. drug laws are insane and have been enforced unfairly. The “war on drugs” was lost long ago — ask any police officer. Legalization will cut costs for enforcement, as to tax revenues, the state says estimates around $2 billion. 

John Davis, who runs a medical marijuana dispensary in Seattle, currently sells product only to customers with a doctor’s note — everything from bud to chocolates to marijuana sodas.Retail stores would be allocated by population and accessibility, in a system similar to the one used for defunct state liquor stores. That system sought to have stores within a 15-minute drive for 95 percent of the population.

Pot-friendly U.S. states won't see federal intervention. The U.S. government says it won't challenge Washington and Colorado. President Barack Obama himself has admitted to smoking pot when he was younger.

Entrepreneurs are already planning stores to get more buck for the bhang.

"Part of the mission of our company is to transform marijuana from a back-alley drug being sold by criminals into a premium product being enjoyed by responsible adults," said Jamen Shively, chief executive of Diego Pellicer Inc., a new company that hopes to open a chain of stores in Washington and Colorado

"We're creating the category of premium marijuana," said Shively, who worked as a corporate strategy manager for Microsoft Corp. from 2003 to 2009 before leaving for  a speciality  food start-up   "If you are producing or intending to produce premium-grade product that's in line with our ethos, we're interested in talking to you."

Royght!, based in Southern California, is developed an accessory that turns any Starbucks venti cup into a water bong. The gadget, which the company plans to retail for $19.95, fits snugly atop the standard-issue wax-paper cups used by take out restaurants. 

UpToke, based in California, is developing a portable vaporizer with a sophisticated look and technology under the hood to smoke the competition. The company's signature product is a $300 contraption about twice the size of a cigar. It heats marijuana to a smoking point in 2.7 seconds, a vast improvement over existing pocket vaporizers. The odour emitted by the device is very faint.

 Top Ten Buds

There's considerable effort put into the development of new, interesting, and potent strains of marijuana. The industry is in a major period of innovation following legitimization last November after ballot initiatives in Colorado and Washington made marijuana legal.  In a marijuana strain there are two dominant strains, they are called Indica and Sativa.

Indica
Is known to sedate, relax muscles, decreases nausea, treats pain, increases appetite and increases dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is responsible for heightening a ‘reward-sense’ of being. 
Sativa 
Activates or stimulates the central nervous system as it serves as an anti-depressant. It also increases focus, increases creativity and it even increases serotonin as well as reducing pain. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is responsible for mood and sexual function.

Super Silver Haze 
Super Silver Haze is a pure haze sativa crossed with Skunk #1 and Northern lights. It's one of the most famous strains in cannabis genetics. The buds from Super Silver Haze smell incredibly sharp with a touch of spice and create a creepy high with a very powerful body feeling. Basically this hybrid is the cutting edge in practical Haze hybrids, designed to astound the grower and consumer alike.

AK-47

AK-47
AK-47 has a legendary status,  it's described as a 'one hit wonder', hence the name AK47. 
The high is very complex and provides a heavy, long-lasting stonedness. The taste is spicy-sweet, but not harsh at all.

Royal Caramel 
Royal Caramel by Royal Queen Seeds is an outstanding three-way crossing between BlueBlack, Maple Leaf Indica and White Rhino. Her aroma’s while flowering, but especially when toking up, are exquisite and really and she really does have a sweet caramel flavour.

Opium

Opium is a 50/50 sativa/indica hybrid and is a majestic plant, with intense smoke from liftoff to landing. Opium does not leave you crashing on the ground at the end of the ride. Massive colas feature an amazing amount of trichomes that trigger the senses into a cerebral and graphic encounter that must be experienced to be believed.

Blueberry

Blueberry is an immensely popular cannabis strain, it's a mostly Indica strain, that dates to the late 1970’s. It has a taste of fresh blueberry muffins when burnt and a very subtle juicy fruit aroma with anti-anxiety and pain relief properties. It gives a very good cerebral high with a bit of physical effect to accompany it. 

OG Kush

The pinot noir of pot - OG Kush is arguably the hottest strain in the world thanks to its sharp, sour lemon, pine and fuel smell - which instantly lifts mood. This dense, resinous strain harbours a potent hybrid effect that patients report eases stress and brings on sleep.

Kosher Kush by DNA Genetics
It is a stinky over the top strain with an average yield making all who smoke it feel "blessed".
Great for insomnia leaving you feeling sleepy, pain relief, uplifting effects good for stress or depression, Uplifted Euphoric.

Girl Scout Cookies

Girl Scout Cookies
Girl Scout Cookies is bred between OG Kush, Durbain Poison and Cherry Kush. This grouping mixes a kick of flavours in layers that combine, cherry, lemon grassy, chocolatey, minty, cotton candy, fruit and spice. 

Amnesia Haze
Amnesia Haze is a very complicated genetic cross between the magnificent Southeast Asian genetics, (Thai sticks, Cambodian, Laotian) and the fine Jamaican Haze varieties with their high THC percentage and sharp flavour  It also has an Afghani-Hawaiian genetic crossed in, speeding up the flowering time and further enhancing the taste.

Kali Mist 
Kali Mist was developed in the early 1990s, when many primo sativas from mysterious origins were gathered and selectively bred.  A popular choice among women and couples, it is known to most as the aphrodisiac strain. With a sweet scent and flavour that spans both the sweet and spicy, this variety offers a cerebral high that leaves the mind clear and focused. Kali Mist’s effects have proven beneficial for medical users with multiple sclerosis, fatigue, and chronic pain. 

Pharmageddon - Legal Drugs Prescibed By Doctors Cause Over 100,000 deaths A Year

October 25, 2013, 9:31 am

≫ Next: Guinea-Conakry Cocaine Trade

≪ Previous: 334 Legal Weed Shops To Open In Washington State USA

$

0

0

Illegal drugs, including cocaine and heroin, are responsible for an estimated 10,000-20,000 American deaths per year. Prescription drugs taken as prescribed in hospitals are the fourth leading cause of death in the US and Canada, after cancer, heart disease and strokes.They cause about 10,000 deaths a year in Canada and about 106,000 deaths a year and over two million serious injuries in the US. All drugs cause adverse effects. The only difference between a drug and a poison is dosage.Sixteen major drugs have been pulled off the North American market since 1997 for injuring or killing patients.Before  Merck's Vioxx was pulled from the market, scientists at the FDA estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, probably 30%-40% of them fatal for an estimated 55,000 deaths.  

Over-the-counter drugs also cause many deaths. Merck, paid billions of dollars in damages, but how many people went to prison over this mass-murder conviction? That would be NONE.Every year, more than 15,000 patients die in North America from ordinary aspirin and Ibuprofen. Tylenol is the cause of thousands of hospital admissions and hundreds of deaths annually in North America.

Big pharma spends upwards of $20,000 per doctor a year to create debts of gratitude,
through  their drug information at Continuing Medical Education conferences or meetings
held at expensive restaurants, resorts or on exotic trips sponsored by the drug companies.
Doctors in North America accept $ 4 billion per year in free samples of the newest and most
expensive drugs and use them to create debts of gratitude in their patients. Big Pharma companies are not required to report adverse reactions to their drugs using worldwide totals and only report the injuries and deaths that occur in each jurisdiction,a much smaller number. Safety information is viewed as “commercial secrets.” This makes it impossible for regulators to determine how dangerous the drugs truly are.

Pharmageddon
Death by medicine is a 21st-century epidemic, and America's "war on drugs" is clearly directed at the wrong enemy. Pharmageddon is the prospect of a world in which medicines and medicine produce more ill-health than health, and when medical progress does more harm than good and it is no longer a prospect but fully upon us. Those most at risk from dying from this new drug crisis are people you would least expect; the analysis revealed the death toll is highest among people in their 40s, but all ages, from teenagers to the elderly, and all walks of life are being affected. In fact, prescription drugs are now the preferred "high" for many, especially teens, as they are typically used legally, which eliminates the stigma of being a "junkie."

Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used prescription drugs for non-medicinal reasons, three-quarters of whom may be abusing them. Legal prescription drug abuse is a silent epidemic, and is part of the reason why the modern American medical system has become the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.

In 2009, there were nearly 4.6 million drug-related visits to U.S. emergency rooms nationwide,8 with more than half due to adverse reactions to prescription medications – most of which were being taken exactly as prescribed

The "war on drugs" has focused nearly exclusively on the illegal trafficking of drugs like cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, while the most powerful drug dealers of all -- the pharmaceutical companies -- are allowed to grow their businesses with the U.S. government's gold seal of approval.

Guinea-Conakry Cocaine Trade

October 30, 2013, 12:40 pm

≫ Next: Narco Technology In West Africa

≪ Previous: Pharmageddon - Legal Drugs Prescibed By Doctors Cause Over 100,000 deaths A Year

$

0

0

Ousmane Conte

The report is a chilling indictment of political and military elites in West Africa who are making common cause with drug traffickers and money launderers in order to advance or protect their power and influence.

In regard to Guinea-Conakry - as opposed to Guinea-Bissau which already holds the dubious title of the world's first 'narco-state',  since the coup in 2008 there have been reports of Latin American cocaine traders moving in significant numbers to Conakry, where some relatives of the late President Lansana Conte have an established interest in the cocaine trade. 

In 2010 the US government designated Ousmane Conte, the son of Guinea's late President, as a Tier 1 kingpin. He was arrested but subsequently released in 2010. This may appear a shocking development to some, but close observers of the situation are convinced that drugs and politics in West Africa have become intertwined to such an extent that the emergence of three or four more narco states in the region, with ties to Latin American Drug trafficking organisations, is not out of the question.

International drug traffickers from Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria and Spain, among other countries, have moved their trade up the coast from Guinea-Bissau to Guinea after being driven out of Bissau because of increased government scrutiny, according to an official from the government’s anti-narcotics bureau (OCAD) in the capital Conakry. A senior official in the Guinean Ministry of Security who also asked to remain anonymous, said because of corruption, traffickers are often released hours after their arrest and many drug caches disappear. The official said this occurred in the case of Venezuelan and Colombian drug traffickers in May 2008, after they were arrested for storing large quantities of cocaine in Kipé, a Conakry suburb.

 According to the unnamed OCAD official, drugs leave Colombia aboard a small Cessna airplane flying at an altitude of 2,000 metres, making them undetectable by radar. The planes land, often at night, in towns like Faranah in central Guinea, 455km from Conakry, and from here they are conveyed under heavy escort to the capital for storage, he said. 

During August and September, small Cessna aircraft landed “repeatedly” in Faranah, and the town of Boke, 268km north of the capital, transporting drugs, the official said. 

Locals tipped off OCAD on 4 September when a small aircraft carrying drugs landed in Boke during the night. The move led to the arrest of the governor, the mayor, a military commander, central commissioner, and the air traffic controller, according to the Security Ministry official. All are currently being held in Conakry for questioning. 

While most of the profits from this business never touch down in Africa, a fair amount is laundered in construction and legitimate businesses in such numbers that some observers cynically reflect that drug money is a net plus for the treasuries of these most impoverished nations.This kind of thinking fails to take into account the long term effects of corruption and the social costs when drug dealing and drug using become endemic to the transit countries themselves.Already in relatively well off Nigeria and Ghana, drug kingpins have become cultural icons with the result that young people see the drug trade as a legitimate career path out of poverty. In the last few years dozens of Nigerian nationals have been arrested for dealing drugs in such far-flung locales as Malaysia, Thailand and India.For all its counter-cultural panache, the romanticising of the drug trade obscures the deleterious effects of civic corruption and fails to address the underlying socio-economic rot which invades poor neighbourhoods when drug kingpins and corrupt politicians get together.

These days drugs produced in South America and South Asia are being transshipped to Europe or sold into West African neighbourhoods through a wide variety of sources, some with connections to non-state political actors such as Hezbollah who use profits from drug sales to finance operations throughout the world. AQIM, Ansar Dine and the various Taureg elements involved in the civil conflict in Mali have also been accused of using drug profits to buy weapons and political allies.There is evidence that Lebanese business people in West Africa and South America are using family and commercial ties to launder money for groups such as Hezbollah, which uses the funds for operations in their traditional battle ground of south Lebanon (and now also in Syria as well as in North and West Africa).

In Nigeria three Lebanese businessmen are on trial for terrorism related charges after security forces discovered weapons caches that prosecutors are trying to link to a Hezbollah backed plot to attack Israeli and American targets in Nigeria. In this case drugs are not implicated. Two of the suspects own, respectively, an amusement park and a supermarket.One of the ironies of the situation is that in West Africa, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda operatives have also been doing deals with Israeli diamond merchants. If there is a buck to be made in the region, the enmities of elsewhere fly out the window. This sorry spectacle was reported on by former Washington Post West African Bureau Chief Douglas Farah in his 2004 book Blood from Stones:

An Israeli diamond dealer, who regularly did business with buyers he knew were Hezbollah and some he suspected were Al Qaeda, agreed. "Here it is business," he said."The wars are over there. Here we do business, there they do war."Levantine traders have been operating throughout West Africa for over a century. During this era they have built substantial fortunes and bases of political influence which they wield locally (even in places like Liberia which has made it virtually impossible for Lebanese to become citizens without marrying locals) but also back home in Lebanon. It is not surprising that since the Lebanese civil war of the '70s and 80's the fractious politics of the Levant have also washed ashore along the Gulf of Guinea. If ever there was a community that practices the code of omerta it is the Lebanese of West Africa. Even though there is a symbiotic relationship between Lebanese money and African political power, there is nevertheless a stone wall dividing the communities in ways that have led to mutual distrust if not outright rancor. For the most part, the last thing that Lebanese business people in West Africa want is the US Drug Enforcement Agency or Interpol showing up at their store-fronts searching for money laundering receipts or pictures of Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah. To a large extent the success of Levantine business in West Africa is due to its historically low profile.

Now that it is becoming clear that non-state political actors have infiltrated Levantine commercial networks, their preferred level of obscurity is about to be blown open by local prosecutors looking to audit books and warehouses and international security agencies looking to disrupt illicit transnational flows.It is essential that security and law enforcement personnel looking into these networks not tar the whole community with criminal intent. In some countries Lebanese/African relations can be easily frayed and the Lebanese could easily become targets of demagoguery and victims of violence.This might make them more likely to turn to criminal gangs or organizations like Hezbollah for protection rather than local police.There also needs to be an effort made to educate and fully support West African journalists - those courageous enough to take on the task - on how to investigate these types of criminal activities and to draw the lines, as in Guinea, between local politicians and international drug traffickers.Due to capacity issues, the media in West Africa is generally unable to carry out investigative reporting on the major links between corruption, drug trafficking and international terrorism. It's not an easy task, but it's one that is essential in order to maintain any hope of resistance against the combined power of money, guns and corrupt politics.

As the situation in Mali continues to boil and the conflicts in Nigeria continue to escalate more and more international attention will be drawn to the region. International drug cartels and transnational political actors will find common cause and first-mover advantage in countries like Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, etc. due to their weak legal structures, corrupt politicians, toothless journalism and unprotected borders.

Separatists in Senegal's Casamance Region are already using the drug trade to finance their rebellion and while they have historically used the sale of cannabis to do so, it is logical to assume that cocaine revenues will eventually contribute to this on-going instability, if they have not already."The first task, however, for security agencies looking into ties between drugs and terror in West Africa is to find out who is who, what are they doing, who they are connected to and what they are capable of.The complexity of the networks just described requires a level of sophisticated investigation and human intelligence that has heretofore been absent, hence the shock and dismay when Mali began to unravel.Another issue is that local authorities will try to link any threat to their power to 'outside agitators or criminal conspiracies' when in fact they may be referring to domestic groups with legitimate political grievances and
interests .Aggressive tactics will only exacerbate already complex enmities and might push the currently blameless into the arms of the bad guys. In that scenario nobody wins.

Narco Technology In West Africa

October 30, 2013, 12:41 pm

≫ Next: Venezuela Connection

≪ Previous: Guinea-Conakry Cocaine Trade

$

0

0

International global drug cartels have ploughed millions of dollars into a secret system letting key players keep in touch.

Last night one insider with knowledge of the network claimed underworld bosses running a $40 billion criminal empire recruited experts to design a special hi-tech kit that can’t be bugged, tracked or decoded. The secret system is being used in Colombia, West Africa, Spain, the Middle East and Britain to seal drugs and arms deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The ground breaking devices are disguised to look like everyday household items. Faced with the threat of PRISM, a clandestine mass electronic surveillance data mining program known to have been operated by the United States National Security Agency and GCHQ.  DTOs at the very highest level of the criminal underworld are playing spies at their own game. 

The narcos new technology will make it “almost impossible” to track major drug deals around the world. The confidential source said: “Imagine having a piece of equipment that is bug-proof and completely secure through which numbers, dates, times and places are detailed. It’s a piece of equipment so cleverly disguised you would not have a clue it was being used for something else.


The Los Zetas Cartel already operate a vast telecommunications network involving two-way radios, encrypted, secure radio networks, computers and burner cell phones. The original Zetas experience in the military lead to a number of innovative techniques in the Zetas operations including successfully using existing networks securely and building their own radio systems. 

“A piece of equipment that cannot be decoded or tracked – that is what is now in place.

“There’s no longer any need for face-to-face meetings, so no more getting caught by surveillance.

“No longer is there a need for pay-as-you-go phones you can throw away or ‘chatting’ on PlayStation forums. A few weeks ago police raided a house in which this form of COM system was being used.

“Organised crime has moved on, the communication idea was bankrolled at the top level and IT and  encryption specialist unconnected to the cartels were brought in to devise a suitable plan and implement a system.

“I would say tens of millions have been spent on securing a network that enables people to do business in a safe and risk-free way.”

He said the system was being used by all the major players in the drugs trade, including in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, The Caribbean,West Africa and Spain.

It faces“rife corruption” in West Africa where our insider accused some governments of sending out military ships to target traffickers smuggling tons of cocaine through international waters.

Once escorted to shore, he said drug runners are ordered to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars before the shipments are handed back.

“The Government gets brownie points for the big drug bust and pockets a nice backhander too.

“The cocaine isn't destroyed – it’s simply sent to its destination via a different route. Latin American cocaine traffickersmay also be using submarines to move the Europe-bound drugs across the Atlantic Ocean, cocaine seizures have gone down throughout the region, at the same time that consumption in West Africa is going up. A United Nations report showed that the illicit flow of cocaine through the region boomed, surpassing even the GDP of some of the countries through which the drugs were trafficked.

Trying To Avoid PRISM 
Scalability to support surveillance of large, complex IP networks (such as the Internet).
High-speed packet processing performance, which enables it to sift through the vast quantities of information that travel over the Internet. Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviours  in real-time. That is it can track individual users, monitor which applications they are using (e.g., web browsers, instant messaging applications, e-mail) and what they are doing with those applications (e.g., which web sites they have visited, what they have written in their emails/IM conversations), and see how users' activities are connected to each other (e.g., compiling lists of people who visit a certain type of web site or use certain words or phrases in their e-mail messages. High reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis. Its functionality 
can be configured to feed a particular activity or IP service such as security lawful intercept or even Skype detection and blocking.

The intercepted data flows into a Intercept Suite. This data is stored and analysed for surveillance and forensic analysis. Other capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e., VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyse the payload/ attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Other software, such as Pen-Link, offer the ability to quickly analyse information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules.

A single terminal can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 256k DSL lines or 195,000 56k telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of just one installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.
Intercept Suite (NIS) is a network traffic intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing and reconstruction of web-mail traffic... including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail". However, currently most web-mail traffic can be HTTPS encrypted, so the content of messages can only be monitored with the consent of service providers.
The system can also perform semantic analysis of the same traffic as it is happening, in other words analyse the content, meaning, structure and significance of traffic in real time. The exact use of this data is not fully documented, as the public is not authorized to see what types of activities and ideas are being monitored. 

Strange Bed Fellows
Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel are using Atlantic Ocean drug routes to West Africa and perhaps working together on logistics to deliver shipments to Europe  to achieve a shared common goal. If the Saudis and Israelis can find common ground working together why not the two competing cartels.

Once organized crime groups have smuggled the narcotics – cocaine, marijuana, heroin and synthetic drugs – into West Africa, they transport them, often in vehicles or small air planes, to Europe. Other transnational criminal organizations based in other parts of Latin America also are trafficking drugs to Europe through West Africa, authorities said.

Among the criminal groups which are sending greater amounts of drugs to Europe through West Africa include the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian Norte del Valle cartel. Latin American drug traffickers are using two basic methods to transport drugs to Africa and Europe, authorities said: 

By sea, transnational criminal organizations hide drugs in large ships that travel from Latin America to Africa and Europe. Drug traffickers set up fake export operations and hide their drugs in the cargo of the phony export businesses, authorities said. Once the large ships have reached their ports, organized crime operatives often use smaller “fast boats” to transport the drugs from the ship to land;

By air, organized crime groups hire travellers  who are known as“drug mules,” to hide drugs in their luggage, clothes or even inside their bodies.

Once the drugs have reached West Africa, drug traffickers often load the drugs into land vehicles, such as SUVs, and transport them to their distribution points in Europe.

Security forces in Latin America and the United States have succeeded in recent years in slowing the amount of drugs smuggled north to the U.S. and Mexico by transnational criminal organizations.

This success has made the Atlantic drug routes to Africa and Europe more important to narco-traffickers, said security analyst Alfredo Rangel Suárez, the director of the Democracy and Security Centre at Colombia’s Sergio Arboleda University.

“The fight against crime and the closing of border crossings by authorities in countries where cocaine is directly introduced have forced the FARC, Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel to look for new routes to satisfy demand in the European drug market, which means ports in Western Africa,” Rangel Suárez said.

For Colombian narco-traffickers, “the Atlantic route is becoming more important than the Pacific one,” according to the World Drug Report 2013 of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Many Brazilian drug traffickers ultimately transport their drugs to Portugal in part because they speak Portuguese, making communication easier, according to the UNODC report.

Entry points
Sixteen African countries comprise the main points of entry for Latin American drug traffickers, according to a report by the American Police Community (AMERIPOL), a continental police organization of 18 countries in the Americas, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala,Haiti, Nicaragua, and the United States.

The African countries commonly used as entry ports are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea,Guinea Bissau,Liberia,Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria,Senegal,Togo and Sierra Leone.

Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel 
Two Mexican transnational criminal organizations, Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel, smuggle cocaine from Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil into Sierra Leone and then to Europe, according to Rangel Suárez. Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel, which is led by fugitive kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, often collaborate with other Latin American organized crime groups.

Faces of The FARC

For example, Guzmán has formed alliances with Colombian organized crime groups, such as the Oliver Solarte cartel. Once in Europe, DTOs traffic cocaine using local gangs. According to Europol, El Chapo has presence in Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the Czech Republic.  As for Los Zetas, they created an alliance with the Ndrangheta in Italy. From Italy, the Ndrangheta is responsible for distributing cocaine in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, France, Belgium, Spain, Bulgaria, and Albania.

“This alliance is beneficial for both criminal groups. Los Zetas transports the drugs to and within Europe while ‘Ndrangheta guarantees secure distribution points,” the report stated.

In 2011, Italian police arrested 45 individuals linked to an unspecified Mexican cartel (most likely Los Zetas). In addition to drug trafficking, Los Zetas are involved in human trafficking between Europe and Mexico.

The FARC
The FARC is responsible for many of the drugs that are transported to West Africa and then to Europe, Rangel Suárez said.

“The FARC is the biggest cocaine smuggler in the world,” he added. “In Colombia, more than half of the drugs produced and exported to other countries are marketed by the FARC.”

Three other Colombian organized crime groups – the Popular Revolutionary Anti-Subversive Army of Colombia (ERPAC), Los Urabeños and Los Rastrojos – also transport drugs to West Africa and on to Europe.

Venezuela Connection

October 30, 2013, 12:41 pm

≫ Next: African Drug Cartels Taking Over Latin American Drug Shipments

≪ Previous: Narco Technology In West Africa

$

0

0

The term “Cartel of the Suns” (Cartel de los Soles) is used to describe shadowy groups inside Venezuela’s military that traffic cocaine. It is in some ways a misleading term, as it creates the impression that there is a hierarchical group, made up primarily of military officials, that sets the price of cocaine inside the country. There are cells within the main branches of the military -- the army, navy, air force, and National Guard, from the lowest to the highest levels -- that essentially function as drug trafficking organizations. However, describing them as a “cartel” in the traditional sense would be a leap. It is not clear how the relationship between these cells works, although rivalries between them has apparently turned deadly in the past.

The elements of the military believed to be most deeply involved in Venezuela’s drug trade are, unsurprisingly, concentrated along the western border with Colombia, especially the states of Apure, Zulia, and Tachira. The power of these cells comes from their access to Venezuela’s major airports, road checkpoints, and ports, including Puerto Cabello in Carabobo state. These military organizations are thought to source some of their cocaine from Colombian guerilla group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), particularly the Eastern and Magdalena Medio Blocs.

The term “Cartel of the Sun” was reportedly first used in 1993 when two National Guard generals, anti-drugs chief Ramon Guillen Davila and his successor Orlando Hernandez Villegas, were investigated for drug trafficking and other related crimes. As brigade commanders, each wore a single sun as insignia on their shoulders, giving rise to the name “Cartel of the Sun” (later on, when allegations emerged that division commanders -- given double suns in their ranking -- were involved in the drug trade, the term became the “Cartel of the Suns”).

In the 1990s, accusations emerged of National Guard troops collaborating with drug traffickers, but, generally speaking, this mainly consisted of accepting payments to look the other way while traffickers moved their wares. The military did not have direct connections with suppliers, and for the most part they did not move or store cocaine themselves.

Three significant developments then contributed to the rise of organized crime in Venezuela. In the first place, Colombia signed the multi-billion dollar security program Plan Colombia with the United States, which allowed Colombian security forces to pressure guerilla groups the FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) as never before. This military pressure encouraged the guerrillas to shift more of their operations to Venezuela’s poorly policed border states.
Then in 2002 there were two key events, one after the other. The first was the ending of the peace process between the FARC and the government of President Andres Pastrana, which meant the rebels lost their huge safe haven in southern Colombia, and needed other refuges. The second was the attempted coup d’etat that saw President Hugo Chavez temporarily removed from power. This led the Chavez to focus much of his energy on identifying and penalizing coup supporters, while dealing with other intense political battles such as the 2002-2003 oil strike.

The fallout from the coup led the Chavez administration to tighten its circle of trusted supporters; it also meant that many influential government positions or lucrative contract opportunities were given to army loyalists. The government took on the feel of a Praetorian regime, with serving or retired military officers taking up positions in state institutions.
Chavez also set up military areas of operations along the border with Venezuela, citing fears of a US invasion via Colombia. Now elements of the army as well as the National Guard became corrupted by the drug trade.

The term “Cartel of the Suns” was brought back to public attention by journalist and municipal councilman Mauro Marcano in 2004. He accused National Guard brigade commander and Director of Intelligence Alexis Maneiro, and other National Guard members, of links to drug traffickers, before being gunned down. The Marcano affair suggested more systematic corruption in the National Guard, yet the government only made a half-hearted effort to investigate. No investigation was opened against Maneiro, and he was transferred to a less visible position.

Treasury Dept designates four Officials Drug Kingpins

Around this time, there were other signs that drug trafficking was increasing inside Venezuela. 2004 saw record narcotics seizures inside the country: 32 tons of cocaine and 12 tons of heroin and marijuana. The military’s involvement in facilitating the movement of cocaine also came under scrutiny in August 2004, when several guardsmen framed three airline passengers (including a US citizen) for smuggling drugs through Caracas’ international airport. National Guard officials were also arrested in a separate case, caught loading cocaine into a private plane at Maiquetia airport (now the Simon Bolivar International Airport). Such incidents highlighted the military’s role in the drug trade, and their tendency to only seize drug shipments when they had not received the appropriate pay-offs.

In 2005 there was another development that contributed to the strengthening of organized crime networks inside the country, when Chavez accused the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of espionage. This brought US-backed counter-narcotics projects to a halt, including one initiative which would have updated screening technology in the port Puerto Cabello, one of the country’s most important exit points for drug shipments.

One of the clearest indications that officials at the top level of the security forces were deeply involved in organized crime came in 2008 when the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sanctions against the following individuals:

- Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, at the time the director of military intelligence.
- Henry de Jesus Rangel Silva, whom Chavez named general-in-chief and then defence minister in January 2012.
- Ramon Emilio Rodriguez Chacin, former Minister of Interior and Justice.

Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios

All supposedly served as contacts for the FARC in a drugs-for-weapons scheme.
In September 2011, the OFAC sanctioned another four Venezuelan officials, reportedly based on evidence retrieved from the laptops found at the encampment of slain FARC commander Raul Reyes:
- Cliver Antonio Alcala Cordones, later appointed as head of the army's Guiana Integral Strategic Defense Region (REDI Guayana)
- Congressman Freddy Alirio Bernal Rosales, a former Caracas mayor
- Intelligence officer Ramon Isidro Madriz Moreno
- Amilcar Jesus Figueroa Salazar, a politician described as “a primary arms dealer for the FARC, and ... a main conduit for FARC leaders based in Venezuela.”

- Ramon Emilio Rodriguez Chacin

Supporters of the Chavez administration have argued that the OFAC list is based on unsubstantiated evidence from the FARC laptops, and that there exists no concrete evidence of this “Cartel of the Suns” actually carrying out criminal operations. Others have criticized the OFAC list as a political tool used to smear the Chavez regime.

Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the security forces did not carry out fully transparent investigations into the alleged misconduct of Maneiro, Alcala, and others when they had the chance. Other incidents -- such as the “narco avioneta” case of 2011 -- also fed the impression that there was complicity with organized crime at the very highest levels of the government and military. A small aircraft captured in the northern state of Falcon, carrying some 1,400 kilos of cocaine, was discovered to have taken off from La Carlota military base in Caracas in August 2011. Spokespeople for the military, air force, and government issued different explanations for what had taken place. Throughout the history of the Cartel of the Suns there has been very little investigation into professional misconduct, and plenty of suggestions that the integrity of the armed forces has been severely compromised by organized crime.

Narco Avioneta

During the mid-2000s elements of the National Guard and other branches of the military became much more active participants in the drug trade. Cells in the security forces began to purchase, store, move, and sell cocaine themselves, whereas previously their primary role had been to extort drug traffickers moving cocaine shipments. One theory for why this evolution took place is because Colombian drug smugglers began paying the military in drugs rather than cash, forcing the Venezuelans to find their own markets for the narcotics.

There is no family tree for a structure as nebulous as the Cartel of the Suns, only a list of names published by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and plenty of speculation. It seems evident that the primary branches of the armed forces -- the National Guard, the army, the navy, and the air force -- all have factions that traffic drugs. While they sometimes appear to work together, there is also evidence that they work against each other and steal drug shipments (a practice known as “tumbes”). There have been reports of a drug trafficking faction within the military made up of officers involved in the 1992 coup attempt, a group informally known as the “Cartel Bolivariano.”

Henry de Jesus Rangel Silva

Cocaine shipments are purchased in the Venezuelan border states of Apure and Zulia, or else in the Colombian border states. Because dollars are in short supply in Venezuela, and because the bolivar is frequently devalued in the black market, it is rare for the purchases to involve cash. Cocaine is often swapped for weapons, especially in deals with the FARC. Otherwise, the Venezuelans act as partners with the Colombian-based traffickers, agreeing to split the profits from the sale of the cocaine overseas.

The most popular trafficking routes are by air to the Dominican Republic and Honduras. Another route is to move the cocaine by land to Suriname, then by air or boat to West Africa and onwards to Europe. When moved by land, the cocaine is usually stored in local ranches and farms owned by civilian contacts.

Walid Makled

The National Guard worked with civilian drug trafficker Walid Makled in order to move their drug shipments out of Venezuela. Makled has also claimed to have worked with dozens of top level military officials. But while it appears that the National Guard and the army both used Makled as their “broker” to organize the movement of cocaine shipments outside the country, there is no love lost between these two factions of the security forces. The two have fought, stealing cocaine shipments from one another and then reporting them as seizures. But it is rare that the reported cocaine seizures are totally destroyed -- usually they are skimmed off, then trafficked once again.

After Makled’s arrest in Colombia in 2010 and extradition back to Venezuela in 2011, it seems as though corrupt elements in the military have more or less successfully co-opted his trafficking networks in Zulia state. The National Guard cartel, meanwhile, is strongest in other Western parts of Venezuela, including along the Colombian departments of Arauca and Northern Santander.

Updates
Chavez appointed Navy Admiral Diego Molero Bellavia as the country’s new defense minister, replacing General Henry Rangel Silva, according to El Universal. In an address to a rally in the state of Merida delivered by telephone and broadcast yesterday on state television, Chavez announced that Rangel would be stepping down to run for governor in his home state of Trujillo in the December 16 local elections.

African Drug Cartels Taking Over Latin American Drug Shipments

October 30, 2013, 1:27 pm

≫ Next: Venezuelan Leader Hints at DEA Role in $270 million Air France Cocaine Smuggling Operation

≪ Previous: Venezuela Connection

$

0

0

Troops from Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Burkina Faso train with DEA FAST units July 2012 in Senegal

For years, West African cocaine traffickers have worked as mules for Latin American drug cartels seeking to smuggle their powder to Europe. But now the mules are going independent and muscling their former bosses out of some of the world’s most in-demand drug turf. Just last week Senegal authorities said they were investigating allegations that the National Chief of Police has been directly involved in drug trafficking for at least 12 years. Abdoulaye Niang served as head of the anti-drug squad for 12 years before his transfer to the police force last year. A report prepared by his replacement alleges that during that time, he was implicated in an international drug trafficking ring involving Senegalese and Nigerians.The issue came to a head after Abdoulaye Niang,the ex drug squad director was accused of having connections with a Nigerian cartel boss. During his cross examination on Wednesday, the Nigerian suspect conceded that he had run his cartel with the help of senior Senegalese anti-drugs unit officers.

Abdoulaye Niang

The Nigerian, described one of the anti-drugs unit bosses as "a friend" who he first met at  a piano bar and restaurant. As the relationship developed, cocaine confiscated from traffickers were taken into the custody of the police commissioner who then sold them.

According to a report released this week by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, West African drug smugglers are playing a more direct role in trafficking the $1.25 billion worth of cocaine moving through the region every year. Most of the region’s cocaine still originates with Latin American cartels like the FARC, but these cartels direct involvement in trafficking drugs through Africa to Europe has declined. In their place, West African trafficking groups are building their own narcotics transport and distribution systems, pushing out the Latin Americans, and are now producing their own methamphetamine on a large scale.

This means the West African traffickers have grown up, in a way, instead of working as couriers underneath the Latin American cartels. The West African cartels are now shipping cocaine by sea, a safer alternative for traffickers than high-risk smuggling on commercial planes, which can more easily be interdicted by police. Nigerian criminal groups have also moved to take control of cocaine exports in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, where most of the Africa-bound coke leaves the continent. Latin American gangs are left to sell coke to the locals.

“In the end, the gross volume of drugs transiting the region is less relevant than the way West Africa interacts with it,” according to the report. “It appears a growing share is not merely the property of Latin Americans making use of West African logistic services, but that West Africans are playing an increasingly independent role in bringing the drugs into their region.” The report also notes: ”Over time, Latin American involvement in the region appears to have declined, and so has the average seizure size.”

But it’s not exactly good news, whether or not it reduces profits earned by Latin American cartels. It means West African cartels are likely to grow and become wealthier than ever before. “Unless the flows of contraband are addressed, instability and lawlessness will persist, and it will remain difficult to build state capacity and the rule of law in the region,” the report notes.

The U.N. reached its conclusion using several metrics. Brazilian officials reported increasing control of that country’s cocaine exports by Nigerian gangs. The number of cocaine shipments captured in West Africa is also dropping, but importantly, that doesn't mean cocaine trafficking is actually going down. The report explains how African drug cartels hustle cocaine in smaller amounts of 175 kilos or so, instead of big shipments of multiple tons, which are more characteristic of the Latin American cartels. If the African cartels are taking a bigger role in cocaine, that means there are fewer truly big shipments for European police to intercept, and more little shipments, creating the illusion of trafficking in decline.

The U.N. thinks that might be the case, especially since demand for cocaine in Europe has doubled in the past decade. As demand increased, Latin American drug cartels moved into Africa to use as a staging ground. “For the Latin American traffickers, one of the virtues of using the West African route was its novelty— law enforcement authorities were not expecting cocaine to come from this region,” the report notes. “By 2008, due to the international attention the flow received, much of this novelty had been lost.”

Beyond the cartels’ turf getting stale, the U.N. proposes several other theories. Political and economic crises — including rebellions, wars and coups in 2008 and 2009 — “may have disrupted the channels of corruption that facilitated trafficking through the region.” Before 2009, most of the cocaine being seized in the region was being moved by West African traffickers, but owned by Latin American cartels and abetted by corrupt officials. After large-scale drug busts, and then having cocaine vanish from police custody (and presumably into the hands of West African traffickers), the Latin American cartels“may have concluded that they had been betrayed by the corrupt officials they were sponsoring, and severed relations.”

The African cartels are also cooking meth. According to the report, there’s now evidence of large-scale methamphetamine production in Nigeria, along with trafficking in the region growing rapidly since 2009. Ephedrine, an organic compound used in decongestants and a commonly-used precursor for meth, is loosely regulated in West Africa and hard to track.

Drug traffickers may have also adopted the drug after gaining experience smuggling cocaine for the Latin American cartels in the 2000s — basically, learning the ropes from the pros before going solo. As Walter White from Breaking Bad could tell you, meth has low entry costs compared to cocaine (for one, you don’t have to grow it), and is a good choice for the newly independent drug trafficker. It also helps to be sitting on an in-demand piece of real estate. Mexico’s cartels are similar, with growing meth production and sitting between their supply of yayo in South America — and their demand — in the United States. West Africa’s gangsters are simply doing it for Europe.

---

Venezuelan Leader Hints at DEA Role in $270 million Air France Cocaine Smuggling Operation

November 15, 2013, 2:48 am

≫ Next: $1.2 Billion of Cocaine Passes Through W. Africa Each Year

≪ Previous: African Drug Cartels Taking Over Latin American Drug Shipments

$

0

0

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro he was investigating whether DEA agents were involved in a huge cocaine drug bust as part of a plot to brand Venezuela a "narco state."

President Nicolas Maduro announced that his own law enforcement officials are investigating whether the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was involved in a recent criminal case involving a multi-million dollar cocaine smuggling operation, according to Jerry Langher, a former narcotics detective and director of corporate security.

"After the gun-smuggling snafu by [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] U.S. federal agents on what's known as Operation Fast and Furious, more political leaders are finding it easier to make outrageous accusations against the United States," said Iris Aquino, a former NYPD police official.

"The [Fast and Furious] scandal gives Maduro's accusation against the DEA more credibility than it would otherwise enjoy," she added.

French officials interdicted almost a ton-and-a-half of cocaine from a commercial flight from Caracas, Venezuela to Paris, France, on Sept. 11, 2013. The confiscated cocaine shipment is believed to be worth upwards of $270 million (U.S. currency) on American streets, according to Langher.

During his visit to the Bolivarian National Guard base in Caracas, Maduro promised that such an occurrence would not be repeated in his country.

"The people responsible are imprisoned here in Venezuela. It's something that should not have happened. Drug trafficking has great power and this incident is being used as a political weapon to label Venezuela as a 'narco-state'. I would not be surprised if the DEA (US Drug Enforcement Administration) is behind this. We're investigating to see if this was done by the DEA through mafias," Maduro said in a speech.

"Wherever the DEA is, there are drugs, and what this looks to have been is a controlled handover of drugs," he alleged.

Maduro claimed that the DEA is "a true transnational drug trafficking agency," and alleges that the drug traffickers involved in this case are "friends of the [U.S.] drug enforcement agents."

Venezuela stopped working with the DEA during the Hugo Chavez presidency, when in 2005 Chavez accused the DEA of infiltrating Venezuela's narcotics enforcement units.

Despite spending tens of millions of U.S. dollars on surveillance along its northern and southern borders, the United States failed to interdict the tons of drugs entering the U.S., Maduro claims.

"U.S. agencies will accuse us of being a 'narco-state', but we fight drug trafficking. This is a campaign to morally attack our armed forces," he said.

Venezuelan authorities have arrested 23 people, three members of Venezuela's security forces were arrested, a first lieutenant from the anti-drug unit of the Bolivarian National Guard" along with two National Guard sergeants,in connection with the 1.3 tonnes of cocaine French police found aboard an Air France flight that originated in Caracas. 

The six suspects come from two European countries, Italy and the UK, adding that the smuggling was most likely organized by the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia said to be behind 80 percent of the cocaine trade in Europe.

$1.2 Billion of Cocaine Passes Through W. Africa Each Year

December 21, 2013, 6:41 am

≫ Next: The OG American Narcos

≪ Previous: Venezuelan Leader Hints at DEA Role in $270 million Air France Cocaine Smuggling Operation

$

0

0

Guyanese Connection

The U.N. secretary-general says an estimated $1.2 billion worth of cocaine transits through West Africa each year. The council issued a presidential statement Wednesday after Ban Ki-moon briefed it on the widespread risks to stability in a region where borders are porous, governments are poorly funded and extremist groups are active.

West Africa's recent rise as a route for cocaine and other drugs from Latin America to Europe has startled the international community.  Diplomats now point out that the region is producing its own drugs, including methamphetamine. Ban says the region now has "more than a million users of illicit drugs,"which hurts development in the vast region where unemployment earlier this year was estimated at 10 percent.

The region is seeing a "growing number of HIV infections due to drug injections," Yury Fedotov, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, told the Security Council.

Despite efforts put in place by the various governments along the coast of West Africa to curtail the hauling of cocaine through its coastline, the illegal trade has rather become more sophisticated.According to Alexandre Schmidt, Regional Head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, drug cartels were now using new methods of hauling illicit drugs, including the use of submarines, in order to outwit the security agencies.

In December 2013 an Accra court in Ghana convicted Guyanese Premchand Singh, Ghanian Seth Grant, Australian Samuel Monty, Percival Junior Curt and Ronald O’Neil Miller were arrested in Sekondi in the western region of Ghana, in connection with the importation of 400 kilogrammes of suspected cocaine worth $50 million.

Latin American cartels are using a new secret weapon to smuggle more than 3,000 miles across the ocean to Africa. Submarines are now part of an elaborate drug smuggling operation to avoid detection. Up to 100 feet long and nearly impossible to detect , they are capable of distributing several tons of coke in just one shipment. Dozens of subs are thought to be in operation between the coasts of South America and Africa, and law enforcement estimates that another 70 will be built in the next year alone.

The OG American Narcos

January 3, 2014, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Is West Africa The Next Honduras?

≪ Previous: $1.2 Billion of Cocaine Passes Through W. Africa Each Year

$

0

0

As the body count climbs across Mexico, the drugs continue flowing across the border by the ton. Despite the evident disconnect–a “war” on drugs that increases the supply while  lowering the price, in the best tradition of our reigning “free market” ideology the American media regales the public with fairy tales of heroic “warriors” doing battle with murderous gangsters named “Joaquín,” “Jorge” and “Amado.” The fact is, more likely than not, the real narcos taking the biggest cut from deep inside the reeking abattoir of the grisly trade have far less prosaic names like “Brett,” “Ethan” or “Jason.”

The Only Liquid Investment Capital
Earlier this month, The Observer reported that “The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich ‘consuming’ countries–principally across Europe and in the US–rather than war-torn ‘producing’ nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new
research has revealed.”

The authors of that report provide compelling evidence that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems. Indeed, at the height of the global financial crisis Antonio Maria Costa, then the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer “he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse during the financial crisis. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

“Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.” While Costa “declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.”

Brent Kovar

Selective Prosecutions
In stark contrast to the impunity enjoyed by our capitalist overlords, the wall street journal reported that the U.S. Treasury Department “slapped sanctions on two more key operatives of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

The Journal informed us that “Kingpin Act sanctions were placed on Maria Alajandrina Salazar Hernandez and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, the wife and son of Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán, the fugitive drug lord who heads the Sinaloa Cartel.”

In announcing sanctions against the Guzmán clan, Adam Szubin, the director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, said in a statement: “This action builds on Treasury’s aggressive efforts, alongside its law enforcement partners, to target individuals who facilitate Chapo Guzmán’s drug trafficking operations and to pursue the eventual dismantlement of his organization, which is culpable in untold violence.”

While Chapo, Inc. earned honourable mention at No. 1153 on Forbes “World’s Billionaires List,” and may very well be responsible for the estimated 25% of illegal drugs trafficked into the United States as the DEA alleges, his place at No. 55 on Forbes list of “The World’Most Powerful People,” sandwiched between PIMCO founder and “Bond King” Bill Gross and Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Director-General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, speak volumes about the rather interesting juxtapositions between the worlds of finance, crime and covert operations.

Pedro Alatorre Damy

Citing findings by two Colombian academics,  Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía in their study, Anti-Drugs Policies In Colombia: Successes, Failures And Wrong Turns, Ed Vulliamy disclosed “that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering  97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.”

Gaviria told The Observer, “Colombian society has suffered to almost no economic advantage from the drugs trade, while huge profits are made by criminal distribution networks in consuming countries, and recycled by banks which operate with nothing like the restrictions that Colombia’s own banking system is subject to.”

Where, inquiring minds can’t help but wonder, are Treasury’s “aggressive efforts” when it  comes to those simple, yet readily demonstrable facts?

A case in point. Back in 2000 when Narco News publisher Al Giordano and Mario Menéndez, a reporter for the Mexican newspaper Por Esto! were sued in a New York court for libel by Banamex-Citigroup, Giordano wrote that “The true bosses of the illegal drug trade do not appear on the FBI ‘Most Wanted’ list.”

No, Giordano averred, “The Chief Operating Officers of drug trafficking are not Mexicans, nor Colombians: they are US and European bankers, those who launder the illicit proceeds of drug trafficking. Institutions like Citibank of New York–as this report documents–are the true beneficiaries of the prohibition on drugs and its illegal profits.”

Urrego Cardenas

While Chapo Guzmán’s family are now targets of Treasury Department sanctions, what can we learn from recent reporting on Justice Department inaction when it came to prosecuting  officers of America’s fourth largest bank, Wachovia, bought by Wells Fargo & Co. in 2008 at the height of the capitalist financial meltdown?

Bloomberg Markets Magazine and The Observer revealed in 2010 and 2011 respectively, that Wachovia was up to its eyeballs in laundering hot money for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. One customer that Wachovia took on in 2004 was Casa de Cambio Puebla SA,” Bloomberg Markets reported. The Puebla, Mexico currency exchange was the brainchild of Pedro Alatorre Damy, a “businessman” who “had created front companies for cartelsAlatorre, and 70 others connected to his network were arrested in 2007 by Mexican law enforcement officials. Authorities discovered that the accused money launderer and airline broker for the Sinaloa Cartel controlled 23 accounts at the Wachovia Bank branch in Miami and that it held some $11 million, subsequently frozen by U.S. regulators. Although investigators from DEA and the IRS uncovered evidence that Wachovia had laundered as much as $378.4 billion, “a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico’s gross national product–into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico,” and later paid federal authorities $110 million in forfeiture, including a $50 million fine “for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine,” no criminal proceedings were ever brought against bank officers.

Following extensive  research into the origins of two aircraft seized in Mexico with some 
ten tons of cocaine on board, we learned that as many as 100 planes had been purchased 
with hot money laundered through Wachovia Bank.Bloomberg’s Michael Smith reported, “a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. On board army marines found 128 identical black suitcases “packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100 million. The stash was supposed to have been delivered from Caracas to drug traffickers in Toluca, near Mexico City. One of the two owners of the DC-9 (tail number N900SA) busted at the airport in Ciudad del Carmen that freighted 5.5 tons of cocaine had been appointed in 2003 to the Business Advisory Council of the National Republican Congressional Committee by then-Congressional Majority Leader Tom Delay,

The owner Brent Kovar had cloned a jet flown by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration. An official-looking seal read “Sky Way Aircraft, Protection of America’s 
Skies”. When FAA and corporate records were searched revealed evidence indicating that the firm is part of a cluster of related air charter firms being used as dummy front companies to provide ‘cover’ for CIA flights.”

The companies involved include Royal Sons, Express One International, Genesis Aviation 
and United Flite Inc. The second plane, a Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) which crash landed on the Yucatán peninsula in 2007 with four tons of coke on board, was registered to a “Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc.” (DBA, or “doing business as”) and was previously employed as a “private charter” that did “terrorist” rendition flights for, who else, the CIA.The “key to the ill-fated Gulfstream II cocaine shipment is a prolific Colombian narco-trafficker and U.S. government informant named Jose Nelson Urrego Cardenas–who was recently arrested by police in Panama. Urrego allegedly played a major role in organizing the cocaine shipment as part of [Immigration and Customs Enforcement's] Mayan Express. 
operation.

This may highlight the CIA’s role in managing, not eliminating, the global drug trade, Narco News disclosed that the Agency had a “quid-pro-quo” arrangement with Chapo Guzmán’s 
Sinaloa Corporation’s “leadership and US government agencies seeking to obtain information on rival narco-trafficking organizations.” Indeed, one of the “private aircraft” used in Chapo Guzmán’s drug importation schemes was none other than that ill-fated Gulfstream II (N987SA) which crash-landed in the Yucatán in 2007. Purchased with funds laundered through Wachovia Bank, the business jet was subsequently linked by Council of Europe investigators to CIA ghost flights.

Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla from the Chapo Guzmans Sinaloa cartel claims “he served as the ‘logistical coordinator’ for the ‘cartel,’ helping to oversee an operation that imported into the U.S. ‘multi-ton quantities of cocaine … using various means, including but not limited to, Boeing 747 cargo aircraft, private aircraft … buses, rail cars, tractor trailers, and automobiles’.Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla claimed that a deal exsisted between the U.S and Guzman that “assured protection for the Sinaloa Cartel’s business operations while also undermining its competition–such as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization out of Juárez, Mexico. The information provided by the Sinaloa Cartel to US agencies against its rivals assures a steady flow of drug busts and media victory headlines for US agencies and for the Mexican government.

Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla

This war of minds in the media  is necessary for hoodwinking their citizens into believing  that progress is being made in the drug war and thereby assuring the continued funding of bloated drug-war budgets and support for failed policies. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography of Mexico has released startling figures: 27,199 homicides were recorded in 2011; between 2007 and 2011, the total came to 95,632 murders.

The global drug connection is not just a lateral connection between CIA field operatives and their drug-trafficking contacts. It is more significantly a global financial complex of hot money uniting prominent business, financial and government as well as underworld figures. Martin Woods, a former senior detective with London’s Metropolitan police anti-drugs squad joined Wachovia in 2005 as the bank’s chief anti-money laundering investigator and paid a steep price for his diligence. Hounded out of his position when he refused to stop filing suspicious activity reports to headquarters in Charlotte over dubious deposit practices by Wachovia branches in London and Miami, Woods told The Observer: “New York and London have become the world’s two biggest laundries of criminal and drug money, and offshore tax havens. Not the Cayman Islands, not the Isle of Man or Jersey. The big laundering is right through the City of London and Wall Street.

UNODOC estimate that profits derived from narcotics rackets amount to some $600 billion annually and that up to $1.5 trillion dollars in drug money is laundered through seemingly legitimate enterprises.In U.S. federal court, conviction of possession of crack cocaine with a street value of only $378 results in a minimum sentence of 5-10 years in prison. The majority of the 2.3 million jailed people in the United States are there for small-time drug offenses.

So, the Wachovia executives, who admitted their guilt, must have gotten really long sentences for their $378 billion drug business, right? Not exactly. Not one Wachovia executive spent a night or even an hour in jail, although the value of their crime was 1 billion times greater than the average street dealer. The federal prosecutors, after making strong-sounding speeches for public relations purposes, settled the case by fining Wachovia (which by then had been acquired by Wells Fargo) only $110 million and penalizing them an additional $50 million. That amounts to about .04 percent of the $378 billion they laundered, and a mere 2 percent of Wells Fargo’s profits for 2010. Apparently, if you operate a multi-billion dollar bank, crime does pay. Contemporary capitalism is in no position to renounce the cartels. Because it is not the cartels that has transformed itself into a modern capitalist enterprise, it is capitalism that has transformed itself into a cartel, the rules of drug trafficking are also the rules of capitalism.

Is West Africa The Next Honduras?

January 8, 2014, 9:21 am

≫ Next: Turnover of Global Organized Crime: $870 Billion… a Year

≪ Previous: The OG American Narcos

$

0

0

                                                                                  
                                                                                      

Experts are drawing comparisons between the drug fuelled violence raging in Latin America and the potential for similar developments in certain countries in Africa. 

Latin American leaders have joined together to condemn the US government for soaring drug violence in their countries, blaming the United States for the transnational cartels that have grown rich and powerful smuggling dope north and guns south.

Mexican president Calderon stated  in September at a public dinner held in his honour by the Council of the Americas in Washington. 

"We are next to the largest illegal drug market in the world, we are living in the same building, and our neighbour is the largest consumer of drugs in the world and everyone wants to sell him drugs through our door and our window."

But the Latin American leaders need to tread cautiously because of their economic, political and military relationships with the United States, it is also important to see the US war on drugs as an extension of its foreign policy, particularly in the military arena.

A law enforcement war on drugs has proved challenging to defeat a dynamic global commodities market, the illegal drug market is very much the same as alcohol, food, etc.  
As long as there is demand, there will be a supply. Attempts at interdiction just moves the drug trafficking around, wreaking havoc in its wake.

We are being told that the African continent is transforming into the newest centre in the international cocaine and heroin trade and that the international community and African governments need to act swiftly to contain the threat. West Africa is fast developing as a gateway for a cocaine trade pushing into Europe, thanks to a hollowed Euro and evolving U.S. drug interdiction in the Caribbean and Latin America. 

The comparisons between West  Africa and Central America are striking both find themselves geographically between the large drug consumption markets (Europe & U.S.) and the largest drug producers.  Add into the mix political instability, poorly funded law enforcement agencies, low illiterate rates, no social welfare, endemic corruption and porous borders and you have cocktail for extreme social upheaval.. 

Another interesting development in this underground, trans-Atlantic trade route is the transformation of West African markets from delivery and transit to production-oriented. This was one of the concerns noted by the UNODC, “In the past few months several laboratories used to produce cocaine hydrochloride (HCL), the finished product, from cocaine paste have been discovered in Guinea-Bissau's neighbour  Guinea, along with machines that can be used to make ecstasy pills.”

If drug traffickers are indeed exploiting cheaper labour to produce finished drugs in West Africa instead of Europe or elsewhere, profitability increases along with risk. Colombian, Venezuelan  Brazilian and Mexican traffickers are feeling sufficiently confident in their ability to move product through West Africa and upping the size of their loads based on that confidence. In testing new routes they always start small, to minimize losses if the route isn't working. Once they are confident they flood the zone. It seems that this is the first indication that the West Africa zone is now being flooded.

                                                                                              







Kind as the past decade has been to West Africa’s business people – the region includes some of the world’s faster-growing economies – it’s been even kinder to its people whose business is drugs. European consumption of South America’s cocaine doubled in the decade, and West Africa juts outward into a particularly profitable stretch between the two. The region, the size of the US, hides impenetrable wetlands and vast Saharan tracts, whose police often earn, in the case of Guinea-Bissau, around $100 a month. The country’s border agents don’t have uniforms, many police stations don’t have bicycles, cars, or gas, and the coast guard doesn't have a ship.

Closing the trafficking routes through the Caribbean by the United States coastguard just drove traffickers to find alternative routes like Africa. It is no coincidence that since Colombia has improved, Mexico’s drug situation has declined. And again, no big coincidence that since Felipe Calderón’s government started to fight back against the drug gangs in 2006, levels of drug related violence have increased in Guatemala and other Central American countries.

Since Colombian cartels first docked  in Guinea-Bissau in the early 2000s, the tiny West African country was supposed to be the crossroads – just the crossroads – of Africa’s booming drug trade, a four-continent-crossing caravan of cocaine, heroin, and war weaponry. More and more, however, this country’s cobblestone capital and the region around it constitute a thing more dreadful: a market. It has become a place to sling crack and hook users

                                                                                        









“We have seen a huge increase in crack addiction in West Africa,” says Regional Representative Alexandre Schmidt for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Tons of
cocaine intended, originally, for Europe have been kept in West Africa as payment for shipments. They accounted for one-third of the 35 tons thought to have been unloaded that year from the unregistered speedboats, planes, cargo ships, Boeing jet liners – and maybe even submarines– that dock, land, or bubble up onto West Africa as they carry their coke toward Europe’s night life.

Most payments are now being done in drugs, and these drugs are falling into the streets. This is exactly the same scenario we've seen in Jamaica, Haiti, Honduras  Mexico and Guatamala and their dire consequences for these countries. 

Traditionally it was Latin Americans doing the deals but now Russians, Ukrainians, Dutch, Lebanese and Moroccans are thought to be involved, with many more acting as middlemen and agents on the ground. The traffickers use ground agents to disperse the drugs across porous African borders and onwards to Europe, either by boat or on commercial flights to Europe with human mules carrying cocaine in their stomachs.

Africa’s cities are larger, younger, and flush with more disposable income than ever before. Increasingly, drug traffickers – who are often paid in drugs themselves – are finding way to unload their product inside the region’s overcrowded cities. The tonnage is staggering: The UN estimates that 13 metric tons of cocaine – an $800 million snow worth as much as the entire gross domestic product of Guinea-Bissau– were inhaled in West Africa in 2009, the UN’s last year on record.

Instead of crossing north toward the Sahara, West Africa’s drug cartels increasingly transverse Africa, transit the product toward Somalia, and from there, Persian Gulf states, Russia, and finally Europe. In the past year, the UN says they've seen the region’s drug trade shift. Afghanistan’s heroin has found a route through Africa’s Sahara, where it exits the continent through Guinea-Bissau before heading to the US.

Much of that heroin is being bought locally, too. In the first six months of 2011 West Africans consumed 400 kilograms of heroin, a drug that was nearly non existent prior. West African barons are achieving decision-making ranks in Latin American drug cartels that use them as traffickers. What we are seeing in West Africa is similar to what we've seen in Mexico, a rise in the number of drug traffickers who are becoming more powerful.

So what's in store for West Africa if this trend continues?
We only have to look at the effect on much smaller Honduras – which has the largest homicide rate in the world, with prisons that are virtually lawless. Or Guatemala, which aside from now having a murder rate higher than during their civil war, is dealing with the Mexican Zeta and Sinaloa drug gangs, preferring to pay locals in drugs rather than cash, bringing on a whole new dimension of problems. In all, a UN 2011 Global Study found that Central American countries are near “breaking point” with their levels of homicide. Somewhere between 250 and 350 tons of cocaine, The Economist notes, now pass through Guatemala on the way to the United States. Mexico's Sinaloa, Gulf and Zetas mobs operate through much of the Central American isthmus and — unlike the Colombians — pay their help in drugs, not cash.

Danny Kushlick, from UK-based international NGO Transform Drug Policy Foundation, explains that “any victories against the cartels in one area only serve to squeeze the gangs into new territory.” It is a metamorphosing organ, like trapped air, just looking for the next space to move into, in what is aptly named ‘the balloon effect’.

Kushlick, states that “a shift in the global regime from prohibition to one of management of production, supply, and use would bring numerous wide-ranging benefits to Central America.”
He explains that “first, with the reduction in price following regulation, the narcos would leave the trade, as there would no longer be the huge untaxed profits to be made. This would have the knock on effect of reducing violence as gangs stop fighting over turf.

There are no wine "cartels" or beer "gangs." No one "smuggles" alcohol. Off-Licenses are called "businesses," not gangs, and they "ship" products instead of "smuggling" them. They settle disputes with lawyers rather than guns. 

On a global level, as the U.S. expands its drug interdiction efforts to Africa and elsewhere, critics are expressing alarm about the impact of those policies on countries already rocked by instability and weak democratic institutions. Given the deadly toll the drug war has exacted in places like Honduras, Bolivia, Mexico, and Colombia, the United States should be exceedingly careful about the consequences of militarising counter-narcotics efforts.

All over the world, drug organizations depend upon corrupting border guards, customs inspectors, police, prosecutors, judges, legislators, cabinet ministers, military officers, intelligence agents, financial regulators, and presidents and prime ministers. Drug cartels corrupt bank officers and tellers, accountants, lawyers, financial advisers  property brokers, securities dealers, freight forwarders, shipping companies, airline employees, etc. to ship and pay for drugs, and to launder their receipts and profits. Large amounts of money are made trafficking drugs through the weak states like The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, but the process does not stop there. The profits go on to countries with stronger economies, like Senegal and Ivory Coast, to be "cleaned" in formal businesses like bars and in the construction business.

In one example, in March 2010, corruption was exposed in the Wachovia unit of Wells Fargo Bank, now the fifth largest U.S. bank by deposits. Wachovia was forced to disgorge $110 million and was fined $50 million for failing to internally police $378 billion in transactions with casas de cambio in Mexico that laundered drug profits. 

In 1971, US President Richard Nixon decided put an end to “public enemy number #1” and declared a war on drugs. Since then, the United States, the world’s largest consumer of drugs, has spent over US$1 trillion on fighting this war at the root, instead of focusing on treatment at home. In 2010 alone, the bill was US$51bn, yet according to the UNODC, the number of drug users has risen from 18 millions to some 210 millions in the last 10 years.

In the U.S. over the last 40 years drug money has fuelled the growth of violent street gangs , from two (Bloods and Crips) with a membership of less than 50 people before the drug war to 20,000 gangs with a membership of about 1 million across the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice. These gangs serve as the distributors, collection agents and enforcers for the Mexican cartels that the Justice Department says occupy more than 1,000 U.S. cities.

When one cartel leader is arrested or killed, it makes no impact on the drug trade and only serves to create more violence, as lower-level traffickers fight for the newly open top spot. Moreover, US law enforcement depends heavily on the $44 billion spent annually on the drug war. In spite of the expenditure in money and personnel, the drug trade and the violence has increased. A recent news report stated that the cost of cocaine is 74% cheaper than it was 30 years ago.

The hard lesson is that the war on drug dealers, decreed by Calderón and partially funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government assistance, has not only failed to curb the trade but intensified horrific violence, corruption and human-rights abuses.
A sad reality — underscored by a recent report in The Economist — is that the drug-running and drug wars between cartels are now infecting virtually all of Central America. We need to learn lessons from the past so that West Africa doesn't become the next Honduras, Guatamala or Mexico with the bubble effect.

Is there an alternative? Maybe
In 2001 Portugal became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? 

At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

                                                                                                                                                                                    






Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. 
Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%. 

New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Turnover of Global Organized Crime: $870 Billion… a Year

October 30, 2013, 12:42 pm

≫ Next: Money Laundering For Dummies

≪ Previous: Is West Africa The Next Honduras?

$

0

0

“Transnational organized crime reaches into every region, and every country across the world. Stopping this transnational threat represents one of the international community’s greatest global challenges,” said UNODC’s Executive Director, Yury Fedotov, in a news release.
.
“Crucial to our success is our ability to raise public awareness and generate understanding among key decision and policy-makers.”The $870 billion turnover from transnational organized crime is six times the amount of official development assistance, and is comparable to 1.5 per cent of the global domestic product, or seven per cent of the world’s exports of merchandise, according to UNODC. Drug trafficking is the most lucrative form of business for criminals, with an estimated value of $320 billion a year.

The Huge Impact of Drug Abuse
“Heroin, cocaine and other drugs continue to kill around
200,000 people a year, shattering families and bringing
misery to thousands of other people, insecurity and the spread of HIV,” Fedotov told the UN General Assembly, during a special thematic debate on drugs and crime as a 
threat to development.

“At present, only around one quarter of all farmers involved in illicit drug crop cultivation worldwide have access to development assistance – if we are to offer new opportunities and genuine alternatives, this needs to change,” Fedotov said.
.
The Assembly’s debate coincided with the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, observed on 26 June, and was also the forum for Fedotov’s launch of UNODC’s flagship study, the 2012 World Drug Report.
The UNODC chief said that drug-producing and drug-consuming countries have a stake infighting the illicit drug trade,adding that Governments should not forget that illicit drugs also affect health and security globally.

Drug use appears to be spilling over into countries lying on trafficking routes, such as in West and Central Africa, which are witnessing rising numbers of cocaine users, and Afghanistan and Iran, which are grappling with the highest rates of opium and heroin use.

Mr. Fedotov noted that as developing countries emulate the lifestyles of industrialized nations, drug consumption will probably increase, placing a heavier burden on countries ill equipped to deal with burgeoning drug demand. International support should therefore aim at strengthening the capacity of vulnerable nations to confront that challenge, he said.

The 2012 World Drug Report finds that although global patterns of illicit drug use, production and health consequences largely remained stable in 2012, opium production had rebounded to previous high levels in Afghanistan, the world’s biggest opium producer. In addition, lower overall levels of cultivation and production of opium and coca have been offset by rising levels of synthetic drug production.

230 Million People Use Illicit Drugs
Around 230 million people, or five per cent of the world’s adult population, aged 15 to 64, are estimated to have used an illicit drug at least once in 2010, according to the Report. Problem drug users, mainly heroin- and cocaine-dependent persons, number about 27 million, roughly 0.6 per cent of the world adult population, or 1 in every 200 people.

On opium, the Report says that Afghanistan has returned to high levels of opium production. Global opium production amounted to 7,000 tons in 2011, up from 2010, when plant diseases wiped out almost half the crop yields and triggered steep price rises in Afghanistan. Myanmar remained the world’s second largest poppy-crop grower and opium producer after Afghanistan, with cultivation up by 14 per cent in 2011 and a nine per cent share of global opium production.

On cocaine, the Report finds that the number of estimated annual cocaine users in 2010 ranged from 13.3 million to 19.7 million– or around 0.3 to 0.4 of the global adult population.

North America, Europe, Australia, Major Markets for Cocaine
The major markets for cocaine continue to be North America, Europe and Australia. The United States saw cocaine use decrease from 3.0 per cent in 2006 to 2.2 per cent in 2010 
among adults, and in Europe cocaine use remains stable but continues to rival use in the United States. However, cocaine use is up in Australia and South America, and it is also spreading to parts of Africa and Asia.

The 2012 World Drug Report finds that the use and global seizures of amphetamine-type stimulants, the second most widely used drugs worldwide, remained largely stable.

However, in 2010, methamphetamine seizures, of around 45 tons, more than doubled those of  2008, due to significant seizures in Central America and East and South-East Asia. In Europe, ‘ecstasy’ pill seizures more than doubled, from 595 kilograms in 2009 to 1.3 tons in 2010, indicating a stronger market on that continent.