Money Laundering For Dummies

January 11, 2014, 6:11 am

≫ Next: Belize A Cautionary Tale For Africa

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

$

0

0

How The Drug Money Flows Into The financial System
Two boats pull into the docks. The first boat is full of a
white agricultural product grown in Latin America called sugar. The owner of the cargo, lets call him Darin, sells his boat load of white agricultural substance to the sugar wholesaler on the docks for how much money?

Ok, so let's say that Darin sells his entire boatload of sugar to the sugar wholesaler on the docks for X dollars.

Now, after Darin pays his workers and all his costs of growing and transporting the sugar, and after he and his wife spend the weekend in Miami and he pays himself a bonus and buys some new harvest equipment and pays his taxes, how much cash does he have left to deposit into his bank account? 

Or, another way of saying this is: What is Darin's net cash margin on his sugar business?

Well, it depends on how lucky, hard working and smart Darin is, but let's say that Darin has worked hard he makes around 5-10 percent. Darin the sugar guy has a 5-10 % cash profit margin. Let's call Darin's margin S for slim or Slim %.

Back on the docks, the second boat---an exact replica of the boat carrying Darin's sugar---is a boat carrying Barry's white agricultural product called cocaine. The planting, harvesting and production of this white agricultural substance, Barry's cocaine, are remarkably like Darins's sugar.

Ok, so if Darin the sugar man sold his sugar to the sugar wholesaler for X dollars, how much will Barry the coke guy sell his cocaine to the drug wholesaler for? 

Well, where Darin is getting pennies, Barry is getting bills. If Darin had sales of X dollars, Barry had sales of 500-1000 times X. Darin may carry the same amount of white stuff in a boat but from a financial point of view, Barry the coke guy has a lot more "sales per boat" than Darin the sugar guy.

Now, after Barry pays his workers and all his costs of growing and transporting the drugs, and after he and his wife spend he weekend in Miami and he pays himself a bonus and buys some new boat and radar equipment and spends what he needs on bribes and bonuses to a few enforcement and intelligence operatives and retainers to his several law firms, how much cash does he have left to deposit into his bank account? 

It's also going to be a multiple of Darins's margin, right?Maybe it will be 2000 or 3000 % or more? Let's call it B for
Big, or Big %. Barry the coke guy has a much bigger "cash profit per boat" than Darin the sugar guy. Part of that is, of
course, once Barry has set up his money laundering schemes, even after a 8-15 % take for the money laundering fees, it's fair to say his tax rate of 0 percent is lower than Darin's tax rate. While it is expensive to set up all the many schemes Barry might use to launder his money, once you do it you can save a lot avoiding some or all of the IRS's take.

Look at your estimate of Darin's and Barry's sales and profits. Now answer for yourself the following questions.

Who is going to get laid more, Darin or Barry?
Who is going to be more popular with the local bankers, Darin or Barry?
Who is going to have a bigger stock market portfolio with a large investment house, Darin or Barry?
Who is going to donate more money to political campaigns, Darin or Barry?
Whose wife is going to be bigger in the local charities, Darin or Barry?
Whose companies will have more prestigious law firms on retainer, Darin or Barry?
Whose children are going attend the most exclusive private schools, Darin or Barry?
Who is going to be more influential within their local community, Darin or Barry?
Who is going to buy the other's company first, Darin or Barry? 
Is Barry the coke guy going to buy Darin the sugar man's company, or is Darin the sugar man going to buy Barry the coke man's company?

When they want to buy the other's company, will the bankers, lawyers and investment houses and politicians back Darin the sugar guy or Barry the coke guy? 
Whose son or grandson has a better chance of getting into an Oxbridge or Ivy league school or getting a job offer at Goldman Sachs, Darin or Barry?

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.”

Don't listen to me. And don't listen to BBC, CNN or Reuters Who do you think pays their salaries? 

Who owns the companies they work for?  Darin or Barry?

Don't listen to anyone else. Think about the numbers and listen to your heart. What do you believe?

There is very little about how the money works on the drug trade that you cannot know for yourself by coming to grips with the economics over a fifty year period of Darin or Barry and their boat loads of white agricultural substance. It is the magic of compound interest.

Many Boatloads Later
It's more than fifty years now since the boats transporting Many Boatloads Later

It's more than fifty years now since the boats transporting Sam and Dave's white agricultural products docked in Miami. We don't know what the Narco National Product was 50 years ago, but lets say it was a billion dollars or less. Today, the Narco National Product is estimated to be about $400 billion globally and about $150 billion plus in the United States.

It helps to look at the business globally as the United States is the world leader in global money laundering. According to the Department of Justice, the US launders between $500 billion - $1 trillion annually. I have little idea what percentage of that is narco dollars, but it is probably safe to assume that at least $100-200 billion relates to US drug import-exports and retail trade.

It's more than fifty years now since the boats transporting Darin's and Barry's white agricultural products docked in Miami. I don't know what the Narco National Product was 50 years ago, but lets say it was a billion dollars or less. Today, the Narco National Product that number is estimated to be about $400 billion globally and about $150 billion plus in the United States.

So let's think about how much Darin or Barry have in accumulated profits in their bank and brokerage accounts.

Let's assume that the US narco national product 50 years ago was $1 billion and it has grown to about $150 billion today. Assume a straight line of growth from $1 billion to $150 billion, so the business grows about $3 billion a year and then tops out at $150 billion. 

America is about as stoned on illegal drugs as it can get, and growth in controlled "Schedule II" substances has moved to Ritalin and other cocaine-like drugs for kids that 
government programs and health insurance will now finance.

Let's take the Big % margin that we estimated for Barry the coke guy's net cash margin. Let's say that every year from 1964 through 2014, that the cash flow sales available for reinvestment from drug profits grew by $3 billion a year, throwing off that number times big %. Assume that the reinvested profit grew at the compound growth rate of the Standard & Poor's 500 as it got reinvested along the way. That amount is an estimate for the equity owned and controlled by those who have profited in the drug trade. 

Total Narco dollars. How much money is that? 
We made an Excel spread-sheet once to estimate total narco capital in the economy. Our numbers showed` that Barry the coke guy had bought up not only Darin's companies, but ---if you throw in other organized crime cash flows----a controlling position in about most everything on the NYE, FTSE, DAX and the TSE.

When you think about it, this analysis make sense. The business people with the big % --- big cash margin ---- would end up rich and in power and the guys working 
hard for a slim % --- a low cash margin --- would end up working for them. 

A Real World Example: NYSE's Richard Grasso and the Ultimate New Business "Cold Call"
Lest you think that my comment about the New York Stock Exchange is too strong, let's look at one event that occurred before the "war on drugs" went into high gear through Plan Colombia, banging heads over narco dollar market share in Latin America.

In late June 1999, numerous news services, including Associated Press, reported that Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange flew to Colombia to meet 
with a spokesperson for Raul Reyes of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the supposed "narco terrorists" with whom we are now at war.

The purpose of the trip was "to bring a message of cooperation from U.S. financial services" and to discuss foreign investment and the future role of U.S. businesses 
in Colombia.

Some reading in between the lines said to me that Grasso's mission related to the continued circulation of cocaine capital through the US financial system. FARC, the Colombian rebels, were circulating their profits back into local development without the assistance of the American banking and investment system. Worse yet for the outlook for the US stock market's strength from $500 billion - $1 trillion in annual money laundering - FARC was calling for the decriminalization of cocaine.

To understand the threat of decriminalization of the drug trade, just go back to your Darin and Barry estimate and recalculate the numbers given what decriminalization does to drive big % back to slim % and what that means to Wall Street and Washington's cash flows. No narco dollars, no reinvestment into the stock markets, no campaign contributions.

It was only a few days after Grasso's trip that BBC News reported a General Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress as saying: "Colombia's cocaine and heroin 
production is set to rise by as much as 50 percent as the U.S. backed drug war flounders, due largely to the growing strength of Marxist rebels"

We deduced from this incident that the liquidity of the NY Stock Exchange was sufficiently dependent on high margin cocaine profits (Big %) that the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange was willing for Associated Press to acknowledge he is making "cold calls" in rebel controlled peace zones in Colombian villages. 

I presume Grasso's trip was not successful in turning the cash flow tide. Hence, Plan Colombia is proceeding apace to try to move narco deposits out of FARC's control and back to the control of our traditional allies and, even if that does not work, to move Citibank's market share and that of the other large US banks and financial institutions steadily up in Latin America.

What are the four states with the largest market share in illegal narcotics trafficking? 
New York, California, Texas and Florida.

It makes sense. Those are the biggest states. They have big coastal areas and borders and big ports. It would make sense that the population would grow in the big states where the trade and business flow grows. If you check back to the two businesses models. One was Darin's sugar business 
that had a % profit. The other was Barry's drug business that had a big %  profit. It would make sense that these four states would be real big in both Darin's sugar business and Barry's drug businesses.

What are the four states with the biggest business in money laundering of narco profits and other profits of organized crime? Not surprising? Same four states. They are all known as banking power places.

New York, California, Texas and Florida.

What's next? What are the four states with the biggest business in taking the laundered narco profits and using them to deposit money in a bank, or to buy another 
company, or to start a new company, or just buy stock in the stock market? That's what I call the reinvestment business.

Same four, right? New York, California, Texas and Florida.

Who were the governors of these four states in 1996?

Well, let's see. Jeb Bush was the governor of Florida. Governor Jeb was the son of George H. W. Bush, the former head of an oil company in Texas and Mexico and the former head of the CIA and the former head of the various drug enforcement efforts as Vice President and President. Then George W. Bush, also the son of George H. W. Bush, was the governor of Texas. So the governors of two of the largest narco dollar market share states just happen to be the sons of the former chief of the secret 
police.

Do you think it is possible to become the governor of a state with the support of the slim % profit businesses and the opposition of the big % profit businesses, particularly after the big % profits have bought up all the slim % profit businesses?

When you think about it, a governor would need to win the majority of the people who donate from the slim % profit businesses but control the reinvestment of the big % profit industry cash flow to win. The competition for the support of the people who control the reinvestment from the big % 
business cash flow in the biggest states would be fierce.

Drugs as Currency
One of challenges of doing the numbers on the narcotics business is that narcotics are not always a commodity -- sometimes narcotics are a currency used to pay for 
other things.

Former Asset

The arms industry sometimes markets to third world countries, or groups such as terrorists, who cannot pay with cash,but can pay with drugs. So, for example, it is not 
unusual to see arms-drugs transshipment operations, in which payment for arms is taken with drugs and then the drugs retailed in the US to facilitate the arms trading and profits.

If you trace back the history of the family and family networks of America's leaders and numerous other leaders around the world, what you will find is that narcotics and arms trafficking are a multi-generational theme that has criss-crossed through Asia, North America, Europe, Latin America and Eurasia and back through the City of London and Wall Street to the great pools of financial capital. Many a great American and British fortune got going in the Chinese opium trade.

One of the benefits of learning how narco dollars work is that it will help you sort through the money laundering and insider trading news on the War on Terrorism. Terrorism and narcotics trafficking often get linked through narcotics as currency. Terrorists need guns. Narco dollars need private protection and covert operations. Indeed, what a history of narcotics trafficking and piracy and various other forms of organized crime over the last five hundred years show is that our leaders have been in a double bind for centuries. The only thing more dangerous than getting caught doing organized crime, is not being in control of the reinvested cash flows  from it. This is why monarchs played footsie with pirates in Elizabethan times and no doubt have been doing so ever since.

The Bottom Line
Here is the bottom line on how the money works on narco dollars. After taxation, organized crime is a society's way of forming lots of pools of low cost cash capital. 

Organized crime is a banking and venture capital business.
Unless Darin switches to cocaine, Barry will win his wife, his
mistress, his banker, buy his company, buy his MP or congressman and be the star at the local charities. Everyone will admire and pay attention to Barry.

---

Belize A Cautionary Tale For Africa

February 24, 2014, 11:37 am

≫ Next: LatAm Drug Cartels Set Up in Africa

≪ Previous: Money Laundering For Dummies

$

0

0

There are many similarities between a small sovereign nation like Belize and Guinea Bissau in West Africa. A growing number of organized crime which operates largely with impunity, is breeding corruption,threatening the security across a region where the value of drugs present is higher than their national GDPs.

As observed by experts from the UNODC, drug trafficking is best facilitated by the involvement of state officials. No matter if active or passive in their actions, politicians, high-rank military authorities and civil servants can largely smooth the path for the traffickers to operate also blurring the line between the state and the organized crime. The U.S. government has estimated that up to 90% of the 700 metric tons of cocaine headed from South America to the U.S. wends its way through Belize.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control announced it was freezing the assets of three Belize residents alleged to be drug traffickers and “key associates” of a Mexican drug trafficking group lead by Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera ("El Chapo") ,Ismael Zambada García ("El Mayo") and Juan José Esparragoza Moreno ("El Azul"). 

John Zabaneh

The three suspects targeted Tuesday are John Zabaneh, his nephew Dion Zabaneh, and a“close associate” named Daniel Moreno. described by U.S. officials as “criticalfigures” with ties to Colombian suppliers and allhave been identified as Sinaloa CartelOperatives in Belize.

Belize, scarcely populated and often forgotten, is getting its fair share of drug action. The desolate western portion of the nation, which borders often lawless northern Guatemala, has become a breeding ground for growing drug trafficking organizations in the area. The tourist driven coastal area to the east has become a playground for dollar spending drug lords looking to launder money and relax for a few days. Belize City, the largest city, is seeing an urban struggle between street gangs for drug profits.

According to the Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB), 43 percent of youth aged 14-24 are unemployed, while 46 percent of the total labour force is illiterate. Moreover, only 12 percent of the total labour force has completed high school.

Poor education quality and lack of economic opportunity are variables that push youth into environments of crime. Initiation into a local gang could lead to contract work for Mexican cartels that promise anything a young man could ever want: money; drugs; status; and power. Aside from routine murders and robberies, these same gangs are also responsible for the 2011 raid of the Belize Defense Force (BDF) armoury in Ladyville, taking M-16 and M4 military issue riffles, 9 millimeter handguns, and grenades.

Within the last two years the Zetas have pushed into western Belize, while drug style murders have risen in Belize City from street gangs. The murders of at least 15 people in Belize in just over two weeks, that’s almost one per day, has fuelled concerns that criminal groups are embroiled in inter-gang feuds and/or where groups are competing over lucrative drug-trafficking routes into and out of the country.

There are also signs that police forces are involved with narcotraffickers—especially with Mexico’s  Zetas cartel In 2010, police stopped traffic and lit a highway to allow a night landing for a twin-engine Beech craft crammed with $130 million worth of cocaine. The cargo was seized by national authorities with aid from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after the craft clipped a wing. All of this, unfortunately, presents a golden opportunity for narco traffickers. Belize’s institutions are weak, police corruptible and unemployed population aplenty.

In the coastal town of Punta Gorda, a white, twin-engine airplane — larger than the planes usually used for domestic flights in Belize — landed right in the middle of Southern Highway. The plane had stopped in Belize to refuel, but since its wings were slightly damaged upon landing, the Beechcraft Super King Air wasn't able to take off and the crew abandoned it, police said. The crew left behind a cargo of 2,600 kilograms of Colombian cocaine. Local police said it was the biggest drug bust in Belize’s history.

Recent news reports have stated that the DEA has5 commando style squadsthat have been deployed to Latin American countries to help in fighting drug trafficking organizations. Belize is one of those countries.

Arthur Young

Recently the two most prominent gang leaders in the country, Shelton Pinky Tillett and Arthur Young have been killed - after a weekend that rocked the nation to its core and caused widespread panic and public terror.

Shelton Pinky Tillett was not a menacing or aggressive character - but he was considered the boss of the George Street Gaza - the most powerful and dangerous gang in Belize.Around pm he parked his pick-up at the entrance of a petrol station and went inside the store.

When he got back into the vehicle a man described as wearing a dread hat and a mask over his face - came out of a silver pathfinder -armed with a gun- and began firing shots inside the vehicle. According to one eyewitness, at least 13 shots were fired. Both Tillett and his female companion Andrews died just moments after and their bodies were quickly transported to the hospital.

Immediately after that killing the word went out from Police and on the streets that Arthur Young was the masked man who pulled the trigger. Bar none, Young is the most feared man on the streets. At 38, Young had lived longer than anyone expected him to.despite his criminal history, and multitudes of enemies, Arthur young was a genius at re-invention and a master at survival.

On April 6, 2010 he made this statement
"I am in hiding because I heard the police have a charge for me for something I am not involved with."The way I see it right now, if I meet up to the police, if they meet me in a spot I think they are going to try to kill me. The police force is trying to kill me for ever so long. For what, I don't know."

Arthur Young, the leader of Taylor’s Alley Gang was allegedly shot and killed in the pan of a police truck around mid-night on Sunday. According to police, Young resisted arrested and a scuffle ensued, whereby Young was fatally shot by a police officer and according to sources was shot three times, in the chest and the mouth.  Young was wanted in connection with the murders of thirty-one year old Shelton “Pinky” August, leader of George Street Gang and twenty-three year old Kamille Andrews. 
   
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Belize had a murder rate of 39 per 100,000 in 2011, ranking alongside neighbouring Guatemala and Jamaica. The accelerating rate of gang-related murders taking place in 2012 indicates that this trend, far from abating, may be getting worse.

The northern Guatemalan province of Petan, which borders Belize, was the home to the ranch massacre that left 27 workers murdered and decapitated. An estimated 200 gunmen, believed to be Zetas, arrived at the ranch in buses. The Zetas have attacked land owners and local drug lords in a recent power seize in the area. Guatemalan authorities reported that a four-wheel-drive vehicle with Belize license plates had been used by its members and found in the ranch. Police said the diplomatic vehicle had been stolen from a Guatemalan driver assigned to an outpost of the Organization of American States along Guatemala’s border with Belize.

Tons of South American cocaine are believed to be imported through the Belize coast into Mexico. Vessels have been recently given to the Belize coast guard from the United States to help detect and confiscate incoming shipments.

To the south-east of Belize lies Honduras which faces very similar and escalating problems. The coastline is being used to smuggle cocaine inland and towards the United States. Fisherman are known to fish for the "white lobster" (lost floating cocaine packages), as much as for fish.

Belize is facing similar US formed gang problems as other Central American Countries. In Belize the gangs are US Blood and Crip based. While Central American gangs like MS-13 and M-18 recruit a wide range of Latinos, often English speaking and African decent Belizeans are drawn into traditional African-American street gangs like the Bloods and Crips. Belize has had a large numbers of deported criminals from the US who now run the streets looking for criminal profits and way to live.

Back in the US, a Belize immigrant street gang known as the Belizean Bloods was recently cracked down on in the Salt Lake City area. The gang was in the middle of planning to rob a Mexican based DTO operation during the raids. Five men with loaded guns were arrested as part of a multi-city effort to bust the Belizean Bloods gang, which allegedly used fake U.S. passports while shipping cocaine and other narcotics from Belize to the Chicago area and several other cities. The Belizean Bloods narcotics distribution route allegedly included Illinois, Utah, Ohio, Indiana, New York and California.

Drug Trafficking Organization Profiles with Ties to Belize
Los Zetas-Created in 1999 by former special forces deserters who used their skills to work for The Gulf Cartel.

El Mendozas 
Based in Guatemala's northern-most province of Peten,next to Belize, the Mendozas mainly ran contraband before becoming one of Central America's drug trafficking organizations (DTOs).

They have sought political alliances with powerful members of the government and strategic alliances with other DTOs in the country. This may have included a short-lived agreement that some called the "Pacto de Peten" between themselves and the Lorenzanas to split the country north from south and push out the rival Leones, who they believed were responsible for stealing much of their merchandise. 

According to some Guatemalan sources, they used hired guns to attack the Leones, supposedly bringing in feared Mexican group the Zetas, who in March 2008, assassinated Juancho Leon in the Zacapa province. This strategy, however, backfired, and the Zetas co-opted territory in south-eastern and central Guatemala. Much of the Mendoza clan is thought to have fled, or to be regularly using Belize as a refuge. Nonetheless, they are also believed to have the best contacts in Guatemala’s government, something the Zetas may still lack.

El Lorenzanas
The Lorenzanas are a traditional contraband family, who, over time, became enmeshed in the lucrative drug trade. Despite the capture of the family's patriarch, Waldemar Lorenzana, in April 2011, they still command respect and support mainly in the western states of Izapal and Zacapa.

The Lorenzanas have become crucial players in the cocaine trade, acting as middlemen between Colombian producers to the south and Mexican distributors to the north. Once shipments of cocaine arrive in Guatemala, the Lorenzanas reportedly work with the Sinaloa Cartel to move the drugs into Mexico and, from there, to the United States.

Lorenzana’s criminal empire became so powerful, in fact, that it developed a kind of grassroots following. According to the Prensa Libre, when U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials raided La Reforma in July 2009 in an effort to locate Lorenzana, hundreds of protesters staged a massive rally in the city to support the family.   The protests succeeded in partially interfering with the operation, allowing the kingpin and his family to escape.

In April 2010, the U.S. Treasury froze the assets of Waldemar and his three sons, citing connections with the Sinaloa cartel. A source affirms that some in the family may be using Belize as a respite, waiting for the numerous battles between local and international cartels play out.

Juancho Leon

El Leones
The Leones, who operate along the Eastern border with Honduras and El Salvador, were car thieves and cattle rustlers before entering the drug trade.

Much of their business was via robberies of many Mendoza and Lorenzana cargoes traveling through Zacapa. Once considered one of the most powerful and violent families in Guatemala, the Leones have since gone underground. On March 25, 2008, Zeta gunmen killed 11 members of the Leon clan in Zacapa, including Juancho Leon, one of the group’s leaders.

But the reasons for this battle are not altogether clear. One theory is that the Mendozas and the Lorenzanas schemed to get rid of the Leones using the Zetas, an agreement dubbed the “Pacto de Peten.”Alternatively the massacre could have resulted from a broken Leones-Zetas alliance. In either case, the Leones' power is on the decline, and the Zetas are now thought to control their old turf.

LatAm Drug Cartels Set Up in Africa

February 24, 2014, 11:38 am

≫ Next: DEA Boosts Fight Against West African Narco-Cartels

≪ Previous: Belize A Cautionary Tale For Africa

$

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 shareholder s” 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 growing influence of Latin American DTOs has  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 back handers 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.

DEA Boosts Fight Against West African Narco-Cartels

February 27, 2014, 6:27 am

≫ Next: The Jihadists and Latin American Drug Cartels Pact

≪ Previous: LatAm Drug Cartels Set Up in Africa

$

0

0

U.S. authorities are stepping up counter-narcotics operations in West Africa, a key route for Latin American cocaine bound for Europe and allegedly a major source of funds for al-Qaida groups spreading their tentacles across the continent.

Indictments unsealed in April against senior officers in the armed forces of Guinea-Bissau, the former Portuguese colony that's at the center of the narcotics route from South America to North Africa, marked a sharp escalation in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's offensive.

Among them was Rear Adm. Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, former commander of the tiny state's navy and a suspect drug-smuggling kingpin.

He was arrested April 2 by U.S. agents and local police in international waters off the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic Ocean 650 miles west of Guinea-Bissau, which Western authorities consider to be the world's only true narco-state.

Bubo Na Tchuto has been a DEA target since 2010, when he and Guinea-Bissau's air force chief of staff, Gen. Ibraima Papa Camara, were identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as narcotics kingpins in the notoriously unstable country.

They were accused of working with the Latin American cartels moving large shipments of cocaine bound for Europe through West Africa.

Bubo Na Tchuto and others await trial in New York. Trafficking prosecutions are possible in U.S. courts even if illegal narcotics never enter the United States as long as intent to import drugs is proven.

Bubo Na Tchuto was accused of leading a coup attempt in December 2011 in Guinea Bissau, a ramshackle country of 1.5 million people that's sandwiched between Senegal and Guinea on Africa's westernmost point.

The country's latest military-backed coup was staged April 12, 2012, and U.N. officials who monitor the vast narcotics trade in the region say drug trafficking in Guinea-Bissau has grown under the new junta.

The drugs are mostly carried in aircraft, usually cargoes of around 1.5 tons, on 1,600-mile flights across the Atlantic to Africa's western shoulder, landing on remote airstrips dotted around Guinea-Bissau.

A senior DEA official recently commented "people at the highest levels of the military are involved. ...

"In other African countries government officials are part of the problem. In Guinea-Bissau, it's the government itself that's the problem."

The Latin American cartels opened up the transatlantic route several years ago to counter mounting DEA seizures on more direct land and air routes from Central America and Mexico.

The DEA operations have raised the stakes against the drug smugglers and the Islamist militants further north in the Sahara region who provide the routes and protection for the narcotics that eventually are shipped across the Mediterranean to France, Spain and Italy.

The DEA's push consists largely of undercover sting operations, often with agents posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- as in the capture of Bubo Na Tchuto -- or as Lebanese paramilitaries.

There have been at least six major West African sting operations since December 2009, U.S. officials said.

This is taking place as the United States and France, a former colonial power in North Africa, are intensifying special operations against jihadist groups led by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

Pressure on AQIM, and its allies, such as the Those Who Sign in Blood Brigade and the increasingly bloodthirsty Boko Haram group in Nigeria, has been intensified through U.S. bounties of $3 million to $7 million on these groups' leaders.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime says Nigerian crime organizations have increasingly muscled in on the cocaine trade, in some cases edging out the Latin American cartels.

The U.N. agency estimates that 10 percent of the cocaine going to Europe, around 18 tons a year, passes through West Africa, from where it's moved north to the Mediterranean for shipment.

That's up from an estimated 7 percent in 2009 but down from an estimated 27 percent in 2007. This is probably accounted for by the Nigerians taking over the smuggling routes starting in 2008.
Africa has not only become a transit point for cocaine trafficking, the continent is also said to be consuming more of the illegal substance. According to a senior UN official, the continent’s consumption of cocaine is seemingly rising. According to the 2013 World Drug Report launched last week, over 2.6 million people in Africa used cocaine in 2011 only compared to a million from 2004 to 2005. “In Africa, consumption appears to be growing,” said Yury Fedotov, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in a statement June 26, 2013 to mark the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.

Mr. Fedotov called for international support to monitor the situation and to prevent the continent from becoming increasingly vulnerable to the drugs trade and organized crime.

“There is also a need to help the large number of drug users who are the victims of the spill-over effect of drug trafficking through the continent,” he added.

The trade is conservatively valued at some $2 billion a year and is considered responsible in part for destabilizing much of the region, including expansion of al-Qaida's operations in North Africa and fighting in Mali where jihadists took over the entire north of the country in early 2012, triggering a French-led military intervention.

The Jihadists and Latin American Drug Cartels Pact

March 4, 2014, 9:27 am

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

≪ Previous: DEA Boosts Fight Against West African Narco-Cartels

$

0

0

The radical Islamist groups who operate in the Sahara, the Sahel and in the West Africa regions finance their military activities with money from drug trafficking. They have negotiated agreements with Latin American cartels to transport drugs through the areas they control intended for the European market. With their focus on attacking Islamic terrorism, the governments of the European Union have neglected the drug trafficking phenomenon in the African Continent. Experts warn that narcos, jihadists and corrupt politicians could consolidate into an "explosive coalition" in the region.

Konstantin Yaroshenko

 "The struggle against Islamic terrorism has so absorbed the attention of Western leaders that their battle against drug trafficking has moved to a secondary plane. It's a pity. Perhaps the chaos that took Mali to the edge of collapse and provoked French military intervention, as well as the ever more devastating role that drug trafficking plays in the Sahel and West Africa regions will make them rethink their priorities," declares Alain Rodier.

A former officer with French intelligence services, Rodier carried out several missions in Afghanistan in the 1980's and since then, he follows closely the evolution of Al Quaeda. An expert in transnational organized crime and Islamic terrorism, author of a book on Chinese Triads, another on Iran and two more on Al Quaeda, Rodier is chief of research with the French Centre of Intelligence Research (CF2R: Centre Francais de Recherche sur le Renseignement).

Ayman Joumaa

He explains to the reporter: "During the last decade, Latin American cartels created new routes in Africa to transport cocaine and synthetic drugs to Europe and, to a lesser degree, to the United States. All of the continent is affected by drug trafficking, from South Africa to the Magreb countries. Independent research centres --like the CF2R and specialized institutions within the UN or in the European Union -- tried to alert the politicians. They weren't successful. 

"It didn't take long to see the results. The drug trafficking gangrene infected the majority of the West Africa governments and established contact with radical Islamic groups. Today, we are faced with a new, very explosive phenomenon; "narco jihadists."

Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, former special representative of the UN Secretary General in West Africa, Somalia and Burundi, and who for two years has presided over the Centre for Security Strategies in the Sahel and the Sahara -- a private organization with headquarters in Mauritania--, shares Rodier's concerns.

Arrested

In an interview on February 3 last year with Christophe Champin, a Radio France International specialist on drug trafficking in Africa, Abdallah stated: "I think that by focusing so much on the problem of terrorism, there is a risk of underestimating the gravity of the drug trafficking problem. What surprises me is that Western intelligence services are aware of everything, but they seem to be interested only in terrorism." 

The African Trampoline
Jihadist combatants are not the only ones talking with Latin American drug traffickers in Africa, and above all in the Sahel-Sahara and West Africa zones. This is shown by reports from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and specific reports from institutions like the Research and Information Group for Peace and Security (GRIP, Groupe de Recherche et d'Information sur la Paix et la Securite, an independent centre based in Brussels), or the Carnegie International Foundation.

Experts realize that, while cocaine consumption has stabilized in the United States, it is growing exponentially in Europe. According to their calculations, in 1998, demand in the United States was four times greater than in Europe, but in 2009, both were almost the same, with 157 tons in the U.S. and 123 (tons) in Europe.

Arrested

They also point out that, while most of the cocaine continues to "travel" directly by boat from Latin America to Europe, since the start of this century drug traffickers are increasingly using the African continent to warehouse and redistribute the drug.  

Georges Berghezan, GRIP researcher, explains in the introduction to his report "Panorama of Cocaine Trafficking in West Africa," published last June:  

"During the course of this last decade, cocaine trafficking established itself as an extremely important illegal activity in Africa. The crises that are shaking Mali and Guinea-Bissau demonstrate its potential to destabilize. The impact is due to the involvement of the security forces' high commands, of members of the ruling elite, of armed groups that pursue military or simply criminal objectives. All these actors are connected directly or indirectly with an army of professional drug traffickers disguised as "economic operators."

He specifies: "After arriving by boat or by air from Latin America, the largest share of the cocaine quickly leaves West Africa on its way to Europe. Drug traffickers multiply the itineraries and the modes of transportation. Up until 2009, transporting cocaine was the "speciality" of the countries on the Atlantic coast.

"But after the year 2000,  it was concentrated on the countries of the Sahel, like Mali, where there are immense deserts difficult to patrol, weak and corrupt central governments and a myriad of small armed groups looking for revenues to control ever larger territories.

"In that context, it is the traffickers who benefit from the disintegration of the Libyan State. They obtain cheap weapons and take advantage of  a lack of border controls," emphasizes Berghezan, then  he launches into a case by case analysis of the impact of Latin American drug trafficking on the 15 countries of the Economic Community of West African States.

Devastating
He starts with Nigeria, the most populated country in Africa (162 million inhabitants). In 2006, authorities in that country confiscated 14 tons of cocaine in the port of Lagos that came from Peru hidden in sacks of cement. Four years later, in July 2010,  450 kilos of cocaine were confiscated, also in Lagos. They arrested a Nigerian customs official and two Chinese businessmen. The boat had left Chile and made stops in Peru and Belgium. Last year, the Nigerian National Drug Law enforcement Agency -- advised by the DEA -- seized 110 kilos of cocaine from a boat that came from South America.

But the zones of influence of the Nigerian cartels, who negotiate detailed agreements with their Latin American counterparts -- the reports consulted by the reporter never mention the names of these mafias -- reach beyond the borders of their own country.

Berghezan emphasizes: "The two principal poles for the arrival of cocaine in West Africa are the Gulf of Benin and the maritime zones along the coasts of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. In these two areas, it is the Nigerian cartels who rule and who collect the major share of the three billion dollars ($3,000,000,000.00) generated by drug trafficking in all of Africa."

Not all drug traffickers come out unharmed from their activities. On of them, Nigerian Chigbo Peter Umeh, was arrested in Liberia in the middle of negotiations to send several tons of cocaine to the United States. He was extradited to that country, were he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Also, Berghezan points out that the Nigerians are particularly active in Italy, where they have agreements with the Calabrese mafia, the Peter Umeh

Ndrangheta.

The seizure of large quantities of drugs in Benin shows that that country, like the others in the region, has been infected with the drug trafficking gangrene. The numbers are eloquent: 100 kilos of cocaine seized at the home of a former Minister of Finance and Economics in 2006; 350 kilos confiscated from a drug trafficker from Ghana in 2007;  200 kilos seized from a Pakistani cargo ship in the port of Cotonu and 400 kilos a few weeks later in the same port.

Togo is not far behind: In October, 2008, 500 kilos of cocaine were seized near the port of Lome and eight Colombians were arrested and extradited to the United States.

It worries the GRIP researcher that high ranking officers in the Togo armed services, including relatives of President Faure Gnassingbe are involved in drug trafficking. At least, that's what WikiLeaks documents show.

The same problem affects Ghana, whose inertia in the face of drug trafficking was also revealed by confidential communications leaked by WikiLeaks. Little is known about what is happening in Senegal. Alassane Ouattara (who came to power in April of 2011 with the support of France and UN forces) seems determined to combat the local consumption of drugs. In August, 2012, he announced the seizure and incineration of two tons of cocaine, without providing more details.

Sierra Leone also seems to attract Latin American drug traffickers, as shown by the 2007 seizure -- by Venezuelan authorities -- of 2.5 tons of cocaine hidden in a private aircraft that made an unauthorized landing at the Lungi airport. The network of drug traffickers arrested included six Colombians, a Cuban with a Togo passport and a Mexican. Three Colombians, the Cuban and the Mexican were extradited to the United States.

The airplane carried Venezuelan Red Cross registry and had taken off from the Colombia-Venezuela border.

Guinea is a special case. In December, 2008, after the death of President Lansama Conte, who was overthrown by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, the scope of the complicity between the former president, his family, high ranking police, armed forces and customs officials and drug trafficking was revealed to the public.

However, in February, 2008, the French Navy and the DEA intercepted a Panamanian cargo ship, El Junior, when its crew -- made up of Greek, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau sailors-- was throwing more than three tons of cocaine packed into107 boxes into the sea. The operation was carried out thanks to the cooperation between the French intelligence services, the DEA and Greek authorities. The Greek shipper  of the El Junior, Nikolaus Karnilakis, was given a life sentence in Greece.

Often described as the first African "narco-state" or as a mafioso State, Guinea-Bissau is a poor country whose swampy coasts shelter a multitude of small islands in the Bissagos Archipelago. Since 2005, it is obvious that Latin American and Nigerian drug traffickers are taking advantage of that country's decadence to establish bases of operation there.

A not very exhaustive list of the quantities of cocaine seized gives an idea of the true scope of the trafficking: 700 kilos in 2005; 600 kilos, then two tons more in 2007; 500 kilos in 2008...

In 2007, while the DEA was reporting that each night between 800 and a thousand kilos of cocaine enter Guinea-Bissau exclusively by air, it became known that that country's authorities had leased port facilities, airports and several islands to drug traffickers.

That same year, a UN report brought the incident before the Security Council. It was analyzed for seven minutes then forgotten. On March 2, 2009, President Joao Bernardo Vieira was hacked to death with a machete. Everything seems to indicate, according to Berghezan, that drug traffickers caused his death.

The situations in Gambia, Cabo Verde, Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso are also worrisome, as is the involvement of the Frente Polisario in drug trafficking.  [The Frente Polisario is an African  national liberation group.--un vato] 

But Mali breaks records. The airport  in Bamako is full of "mules" controlled by Nigerian cartels. In addition, the annals in Africa will always memorialize the case of the half-incinerated Boeing 737 found in 2009 near the city of Gao. The aircraft had left Venezuela and made a clandestine landing in Mali. It is estimated that it could have transported about seven tons of cocaine, which disappeared before the airplane went up in flames.

The UNODC mentions two other "strange" flights: The case of the Beechcraft BE 300, also from Venezuela, which landed on the frontier between Mali and Mauritania at the end of January, 2010. That same day, the arrival of a second airplane carrying cocaine was detected near the city of Timbuktu.

Afterwards, there was talk about a third airplane that had transported four tons of cocaine in the Kaynes region on the border with Guinea, and of a last aircraft that landed close to the frontier with Niger. In these latter two cases, regional public officials had received the aircraft. 

At the close of this edition, Rodier informed the reporter that on Monday, (February) 4, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) police arrested seven drug traffickers who were transporting synthetic drugs and cocaine from Brazil via the following route: From airports in Punta Negra and Maya Maya (Congo-Brazzaville) to Johannesburg (South Africa), then to the (airports) in Kinshasa and Luano (DRC). The criminals were arrested along with their alleged accomplices: immigration and police officials.

All the cases mentioned in our reports are merely the visible parts of an immense iceberg," concludes Rodier. "There's an urgent need to gauge the problem adequately and to prevent the consolidation of that explosive coalition between drug traffickers, jihadists and corrupt politicians in Africa. The future of that continent and the security of Europe are at risk."

The al-Qaeda commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who shot to prominence after the bloody Algerian gas plant hostage crisis, has reportedly been killed by Chadian soldiers in Mali.
The death of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the jihadist mastermind behind the Algerian gas plant siege in January, could have dangerous repercussions for French hostages held by Islamist militants, experts have warned.

The lives of the 15 French hostages held in Africa, and especially those of seven captured in northern Mali who may be being used as human shields, could be seriously endangered if the jihadist leader is confirmed dead.
A statement by the armed forces read out on national television in Chad said:

"On Saturday, March 2, at noon, Chadian armed forces operating in northern Mali completely destroyed a terrorist base. ... The toll included several dead terrorists, including their leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar."

Only the day before, Chad's president, Idriss Deby, said his soldiers had killed another al-Qaeda commander Adelhamid Abou Zeid in a different raid in the same area.
A statement by the armed forces read out on national television in Chad said:

Analysts said the death of two of al Qaeda's most senior commanders in the Sahara region would mark a significant blow to Mali's Islamist rebellion.

"Both men have extensive knowledge of northern Mali and parts of the broader Sahel and deep social and other connections in northern Mali, and the death of both in such a short amount of time will likely have an impact on militant operations," said Andrew Lebovich, a Dakar-based analyst who follows al Qaeda in the region. Western and African countries are worried that al-Qaeda could strengthen ties with African Islamist groups like al Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria, and use it as a base to launch international attacks from.

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

March 10, 2014, 8:38 am

≫ Next: Africa Could Be The Next South America

≪ Previous: The Jihadists and Latin American Drug Cartels Pact

$

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.

Africa Could Be The Next South America

March 17, 2014, 7:45 am

≫ Next: Haiti’s Cocaine Coup and the CIA Connection

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

$

0

0

"Drugs from South Africa are moving via Mozambique and Kenya to the Far East," South Africa's representative on the UN International Narcotics Control Board, Dr Lochan Naidoo, said yesterday.

"For example, it would cost about R50 to be able to get 1g of methamphetamine (tik) in Cape Town. That same 1g would sell for about $1000 (about R10800) in the streets of Japan so it would encourage people to be become drug mules for small packages."

The board's annual reportrevealed that, while South African police have successfully dismantled many tik laboratories, amphetamine-type stimulants continue to be illicitly manufactured in the country and exported to Asia and possibly Australia.

Within South Africa, the abuse of tik, methcathinone (or cat) and heroin has increased since 2012.

Said Naidoo: "Seizure data for the period 2010/2012 suggests that heroin originating in Afghanistan is tracked, using dhows and to a lesser extent container shipments, from Iran and Pakistan towards the sea borders of Kenya and the United Republic of Tanzania, for further transportation by road to South Africa."

According to the report, international drug traffickers are testing the Port of Ngqura and Durban's harbour as possible entry points for smuggling drugs into Southern Africa.

"Durban has been named for the first time in the report. That is why it is important that the report was launched in this city. There is a great concern about southeast Africa becoming the next South America," Naidoo said.

The report also criticised the "misguided" legalisation of cannabis in Uruguay and Colorado and Washington in the US, with Naidoo disputing marijuana's medicinal properties.
The report stated that promoting "alternative drug regimes" would lead to much greater use of such drugs and higher levels of addiction.

Sex Pays For Student Habit
According to information from Durban University of Technology's student services unit, health workers, protection services and residence supervisors, 15% of the 4500 students living in the Durban residences are using drugs.

University spokesman Alan Khan said 2% of female students become prostitutes and 10% have relationships with "sugar daddies" to sustain their drug habit.

"A significant number of male students indulge in drug and alcohol abuse, though more female students indulge in alcohol than males," he said.

And more female students have been caught on campus with drugs, he added.

Haiti’s Cocaine Coup and the CIA Connection

March 31, 2014, 10:37 am

≫ Next: Narco-Corruption In Africa

≪ Previous: Africa Could Be The Next South America

$

0

0

It was a day before the scheduled return of Haiti’s exiled president Jean Betrand Aristide, and it was clear that the October 30, 1993 deadline for a return to democratic rule in the western hemisphere’s poorest nation could not occur. Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest who had been elected nearly three years before with 70 percent of the vote in Haiti’s first free election, was speaking to a packed session of the United Nations General Assembly.

In a dramatic move, Aristide told the diplomats that the military government of Haiti had to yield the power that was to end Haiti’s role in the drug trade, a trade financed by Colombia’s Cali cartel, that had exploded in the months following the coup. Aristide told the UN that each year Haiti is the transit point for nearly 50 tons of cocaine worth more than a billion dollars, providing Haiti’s military rulers with $200 million in profits.

Aristide’s electrifying accusations opened the floodgate of even more sinister revelations. Massachusetts senator John Kerry heads a subcommittee concerned with international terrorism and drug trafficking that turned up collusion between the CIA and drug traffickers during the late 1980s’ Iran Contra hearings.

Kerry had developed detailed information on drug trafficking by Haiti’s military rulers that led to the indictment in Miami in 1988, of Lt. Col. Jean Paul. The indictment was a major embarrassment to the Haitian military, especially since Paul defiantly refused to surrender to U.S. authorities. It was just a month before thousands of U.S. troops invaded Panama and arrested Manuel Noriega who, like Col. Paul, was also under indictment for drug trafficking in Florida.

In November 1989, Col. Paul was found dead after he consumed a traditional Haitian good will gift—a bowel of pumpkin soup. Haitian officials accused Paul’s wife of the murder, apparently because she had been cheated out of her share of a cocaine deal by associates of her husband, who were involved in smuggling through Miami.

The U.S. senate also heard testimony in 1988 that then interior minister, Gen. Williams Regala, and his DEA liaison officer, protected and supervised cocaine shipments. The testimony also charged the then Haitian military commander Gen. Henry Namphy with accepting bribes from Colombian traffickers in return for landing rights in the mid 1980’s.

It was in 1989 that yet another military coup brought Lt. Gen. Prosper Avril to power. Under U.S. pressure Avril, the former finance chief under the 30-year Duvalier family dictatorship, fired 140 officers suspected of drug trafficking. Avril, who is currently living in Miami, is being sued by six Haitians, including Port-au-Prince mayor Evans Paul, who claim they were abducted and tortured by the Haitian military under Avril’s orders in November 1989. According to a witness before Senator John Kerry’s subcommittee, Avril is in fact a major player in Haiti’s role as a transit point in the cocaine trade.

Gen. Williams Regala

Four years later, on the eve of Aristide’s negotiated return as Haiti’s elected president, a summary of a confidential report prepared for Congress and leaked to the media says that corruption levels within the (Haitian military-run) narcotics service are substantial enough to hamper any significant investigation attempting to dismantle a Colombian organization in Haiti. The report says that more than 1,000 Colombians live in Haiti using forged passports of the neighbouring Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic leader Joaquin Balaguer opposes the UN blockade of Haiti, and maintains close ties with the Haitian military. The road connecting Port-au-Prince with the border town of Jimini in the Dominican Republic is the only well paved route in Haiti, and serves as the lifeline for the regime. Despite the embargo and U.S. naval blockade of Haiti, the road to the Dominican Republic has become not only the route for oil tanker trucks breaking the embargo, but the major route for cocaine shipments as well.

Fernando Burgos Martinez, a Colombian national with major business interests in Haiti, has been named in congressional records as a major cocaine trafficker, brazen enough to do business with other Colombian drug dealers on his home telephone. One DEA source says both the U.S. embassy and Haitian government have been pressed unsuccessfully to authorize wiretaps, despite DEA allegations that Martinez has been involved in every major drug shipment to Haiti since 1987.

The Kerry report claims Martinez is the bag man for Colombia’s cocaine cartels, and supervises bribes paid to the Haitian military. According to Miami attorney John Mattes, who is defending a Cuban-American drug trafficker cooperating with U.S. prosecutors, Martinez was paid $30,000 to bribe Haitian authorities into releasing two drug pilots jailed in Haiti after the engine in their plane conked out, forcing them to land in Port-au-Prince.

Martinez claims innocence from his lavish home in Petionville, an ornate suburb where Haiti’s ruling class live, overlooking the slums of the capital. He runs the casino at the plush El Rancho Hotel, that prior to the embargo realized nearly $50 million in business each week, a cash flow adequate to conceal a major money laundering operation.

But the most disturbing allegations have been of the role played by the CIA in keeping many of the coup leaders on the agency’s payroll, as part of an anti-drug intelligence unit set up by the U.S. in Haiti in 1986. Many of these same military men have had their U.S. assets frozen, and are prevented from entering this country because of their role in overthrowing Aristide, and subsequent human rights violations, including torture and murders of political opponents, raising the question—was the U.S. involved in a cocaine coup that overthrew Aristide?

Fernando Burgos Martinez El Rancho Hotel Haiti

War on Drugs and Human Rights Violations
When thousands of U.S. soldiers went crashing into Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega on December 20 1989, the administration of President George Bush justified the action as a major victory in the war on drugs. The cost of that victory was played down in the rush of propaganda hailing a rare victory, in a war where the light at the end of the tunnel isn't often seen. The White House claimed casualties were low, 200 Panamanians killed along with about 20 U.S. soldiers. Bush declared the price worth the achievement of ending Panama’s role as banker and transit point for cocaine smuggled from the cartels of Colombia.

But the human cost turned out to be a great deal larger then the official pronouncements. A lawsuit brought by New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights on behalf of 300 victims of the Panama invasion, charges that the casualties were actually more than 2,000 killed, that the assault left 20,000 homeless and damages exceeding $2 billion. Mass graves were unearthed after the invasion, and hundreds of victims buried in U.S.-made body bags were discovered, and eyewitnesses testified that they saw U.S. troops throwing the bodies of civilians into trenches. These revelations moved the OAS to open an investigation into possible human rights violations by the United States during its invasion of Panama, the first such investigation of a U.S. intervention ever mounted by an international body.

The gunfire had barely subsided in Panama, and General Noriega was hardly settled into his new digs in a federal prison, when another battle in the war on drugs seemed won. In Haiti, decades of brutal dictatorship seemed to be passing, with the election of President Jean Bertrand Aristide to lead the Caribbean nation of six million. It was a time when dreams of a better future by Haiti’s impoverished people seemed within reach.

But it wasn’t long before the dream was transformed into a nightmare. Less than a year after the election, on September 30 1991, Haiti’s army launched a ruthless coup d’etat that forced Aristide into exile. The coup ushered in yet another period of military repression in Haiti’s tortured history—a history marked by twenty years of U.S. military occupation, beginning with the 1915 crushing of a popular revolt by U.S. Marines.

Human rights groups report that Haitians killed in the repression following the coup may be more than 3,000. More than 2,000 others were seriously injured, including victims of gunshots and torture. The OAS imposed an embargo that failed to topple the coup leaders, but forced negotiations, brokered by the UN at Governors Island in New York last July. There coup leader General Raoul Cedras agreed to allow Aristide to return in exchange for an end to the embargo.

Aristide & General Raoul Cedras

Yet as the date for Aristide’s return grew near, the military began a campaign of terror against their opponents. The killings peaked in the days before the scheduled return of Aristide, with the brazen murder of Antoine Izmery, a businessman and key Aristide backer, who was abducted from a cathedral and gunned down on a busy city street. Later, Guy Malary, Aristide’s justice minister, was also killed, and his body left by a roadside.

President Bill Clinton publicly expressed his support for Aristide’s return to Haiti, and sent the transport USS Harlan County, with hundreds of troops, to insure the transition to democracy. But at the port where the ship was to dock, pro-military government thugs staged a demonstration, prompting the Harlan County to turn back. It was shortly after the images of dead U.S. troops dragged through the streets of Somalia had shocked Americans, and provided an excuse for the Clinton administration to back off from what promised to be another open-ended intervention.

The Boys From the Company
Meanwhile, the CIA was openly running a full-scale disinformation campaign against Aristide. Ultra-conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, a leading opponent of Aristide, brought CIA analyst Brian Latell to Capitol Hill in October, to brief selected senators and representatives on allegations that Aristide had been treated for mental illness. It turned out that the time during which the CIA report alleges Aristide was treated at a Canadian hospital falls within the same period that Aristide was studying and teaching in Israel. Latell also said he saw no evidence of oppressive rule in Haiti.

While Helms was a long-time backer of the brutal dictatorship of Jean Claude Duvalier, the Democrats have their own ties to the human rights violators and drug dealers who rule Haiti.

Former Democratic party head and secretary of commerce Ron Brown headed a law firm that represented the Duvalier family for decades. Part of that representation was a public relations campaign that stressed Duvalier’s opposition to communism in the cold war. United States support for Duvalier was worth more than $400 million in aid to the country, before the man who called himself Haiti’s President-for-Life was forced from the country. 

Ron Browns Mysterious Death
On April 3, 1996, the Commerce Secretary, Ron Brown and 34 others had died when their Air Force 2 plane crashed into a Croatian mountainside.

Here is what we know for sure about Ron Brown’s last days.

• To protect his son Michael from prison, Ron Brown threatens to expose the White House’s yet unrevealed Asian fund-raising scheme, in which Brown played a major role.
• The Air Force calls the pilot’s nearly two-mile deviation into a Croatian hillside “inexplicable.” No aircraft has ever drifted inland before at that airport. The AWACS data suggest sabotage of the ground-based navigation system, a line of inquiry that the Air Force is not allowed to pursue
• For the first time ever on friendly soil, the White House orders the Air Force to skip the “safety” phase of the investigation and move directly to the “accident” phase.
• Three days after the crash and two days before his scheduled interview by the Air Force, the Croatian responsible for the airport’s navigation system is found with a bullet hole in his chest.

Ron Brown had a strange hole is his skull, thought to be a bullet hole. Regardless of whether it is or is not a bullet hole, it should have resulted in an autopsy. None was performed. 

The official copies of the X-ray and photos of Ron Brown vanished. 

It is worth noting that Ron Brown was just one of four Clinton campaign fund raisers to die under questionable circumstances. The others were C. Victor Raiser II, Hershel Friday, and Ed Willey, a total of three plane crashes and
one suicide. Following Brown's demise, his personal attorney as well as a co-worker at the Department of Commerce, Barbara Wise also died under questionable circumstances.

When the rescuers arrived, they found one survivor, an Air Force Sergeant named Shelly Kelly, one of two stewardesses assigned to the T-43 (a modified Boeing 737) which had only recently been converted from a navigation
training aircraft equipped with all the latest navigation aids to a VIP passenger transport. The rescuers spotted Shelly Kelly moving about the wreckage, several hours after the crash itself. Shelly was placed on a helicopter and evacuated to the hospital, but strangely, was dead on arrival of a broken neck. We strongly suggest that you ask your own doctor just how likely is it that someone who survives a crash by several hours and is seen moving around will suddenly develop a broken neck during a helicopter ride. 

The CIA and the Cocaine Connection
As Jesse Helms was using the CIA to slag Aristide in the media, an intelligence service in Haiti set up by the agency to battle the cocaine trade, had evolved into a gang of political terrorists and drug traffickers. Three former chiefs of the Haitian National Intelligence Service (NIS) are now on the list of 41 Haitian officials whose assets in the United States were frozen for supporting the military coup.

The CIA poured millions into the NIS from its founding in 1986 to the 1991 coup. A 1992 DEA document describes the NIS as a covert counter-narcotics intelligence unit which often works in unison with the CIA. Although most of the CIA’s activities in Haiti remain secret, U.S. officials accuse some NIS members of becoming enmeshed in the drug trade. A U.S. embassy official in Haiti told the New York Times that the NIS was a military organization that distributed drugs in Haiti.

Aristide’s exiled interior minister Patrick Elie says the relationship between the CIA and NIS involves more than drugs. Elie told investigative reporter Dennis Bernstein that the NIS was created by the CIA. Created, Elie says, to infiltrate the drug network. But Elie adds, the NIS, which is staffed entirely by the Haitian military, spends most of its resources in political repression and spying on Haitians.

After the 1991 coup, Elie maintains that the drug trade took a quantum leap, taking control over the national Port Authority through the offices of Port-au-Prince Police Chief Lt. Col. Michel Francois. It was Francois’s thugs, called attaches, who were primarily responsible for the waves of political killings since the coup.

Police Chief Lt. Col. Michel Francois.

United States government sources say the NIS never provided much narcotics intelligence, and its commanding officers were responsible for the torture and murder of Aristide supporters, and were involved in death threats that forced the local DEA chief to flee the country. Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee and received extensive CIA briefings, said that the drug intelligence the U.S. was getting came from the very same people who in front of the world are brutally murdering people.

Legacy of Corruption
In the early 1980’s, when Haiti was still under Duvalier’s rule, the drug trade in Haiti was the province of individually corrupt military men associated with Duvalier’s powerful father-in-law. By 1985 the cocaine cartels began to seek transit points for the booming cocaine industry. A natural candidate was Haiti lying just south of the Bahamas—another favorite transit route.

Haiti is particularly attractive to the drug smugglers because the most direct route from the Colombian coast to Florida lies through the Windward passage between northern Haiti and eastern Cuba. Port-au-Prince is approximately 500 nautical miles north of Colombia and 700 miles southeast of Miami. A former agent in charge of the Miami DEA, Thomas Cash, told Senator Kerry’s committee that Haiti’s attraction to smugglers is aided by dozens of small airstrips, the lack of patrols over Haitian airspace and the total lack of any radar monitoring approaches to the country. Combined with the legendary corruption of public officials, these conditions make Haiti a very fertile ground for drug traffickers.

In fact, infamous drug trafficker George Morales told Kerry that during the mid 1980’s I used the isle of Haiti mainly as a parking lot, as a place that I would place my aircraft so they could be repaired. When asked if he shipped drugs through Haiti, Morales replied, Yes, I did, adding, its something which is done fairly commonly.

Since then the role of Haiti in the drug trade has grown, and the profits to the Haitian officials involved have skyrocketed. This may explain the difficulty Aristide experienced during his short rule, in trying to interdict drug shipments. A confidential DEA report provided to Michigan Representative John Conyers told of the case of Tony Greco, a former DEA agent in Haiti, who fled for his life in September 1992, following the arrest of a Haitian military officer charged with drug running.

Patrick Elie says he got no assistance from the Haitian military in attempts to interdict drug shipments. And when Greco received information in May 1991 that 400 kilos of cocaine were arriving in Haiti, the DEA man watched helplessly as the drugs were delivered to waiting boats. Greco told Elie that the military was conspicuously absent at a moment they knew drugs were coming in.

Greco said he finally gave up and fled the country after he received a telephone death threat against his family from a man who identified himself as the boss of the arrested officer. Greco says only army commander Raoul Cedras and Port-au-Prince police chief Michel Francois, leaders of the 1991 coup, had his private number.

Despite Tony Greco’s experiences, the DEA defends their continuing presence in Haiti. There are currently two DEA agents still stationed in the country, and the DEA has continued its contacts with the military following Aristide’s ouster, despite the DEA’s admission that over 26,400 pounds of cocaine entered the United States in 1993, transhipped through Haiti with the cooperation of the military.

The DEA remains defensive of its contacts with the Haitian military. Agency spokesperson William Ruzzamenti says, Quite frankly and honestly, we have gotten reliable and good support in the things we’re trying to do there. He acknowledged that the DEA has received reports of Haitian army officers’ involvement in the drug trade, but said that the reports have not been verified.

The International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, released in April by the U.S. Department of State—Bureau of International Narcotics matters, says the current level of detected air and maritime drug-related activity in Haiti is low. On the subject of official corruption, the report says the United States does not have evidence directly linking senior government of Haiti officials to drug trafficking, though rumors and (unsubstantiated) allegations abound. Responding to the State Department report, Representative Major Owens, who heads the Haiti committee of the Congressional Black Caucus, told the SHADOW that the State Department’s failure to act on evidence of corruption by Haiti’s military commanders was a good question the government has failed to answer. Owens says Secretary of State Warren Christopher is guilty of a double standard motivated by racism against Black Haitian refugees.

The Shadowy World of Col. Francois
Most Haitians believe that Port-au-Prince police chief Col. Michel Francois and his elder brother Evans currently run the drug trade. Col. Francois has gained that control and become one of Haiti’s most powerful men , by recruiting hundreds of police auxiliaries or attaches, to control and eliminate his rivals. Francois commands his own independent intelligence service that spies on opponents and allies alike, while running a protection racket for local drug traffickers. Michael Ratner, an attorney with the CCR, says Francois and former dictator Prosper Avril are the rule behind the facade of General Cedras.

Francois and his men have a history of involvement in the torture of opponents and death-squad-style murders of Aristide supporters. In one recent incident, attaches mobbed Port-au-Prince City Hall to prevent the capital’s mayor, Evans Paul, an Aristide supporter, from entering his offices.

Prosper Avril

One person was killed and 11 wounded during the September 8th incident, when the mob opened fire on Aristide supporters. Witnesses say the attack began when attaches dragged two of Paul’s aides from a car, viciously beating an Aristide official. Francois is also considered responsible for the murder of Justice Minister Guy Malary.

Journalist Dennis Bernstein writes that Francois was trained at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas , known in Latin America as La Escuela de Golpes, the school of coups. Originally based in Panama, the SOA was moved to Ft. Benning, Georgia in 1984. In its 40-year history, the SOA has trained 55,000 military personnel from Latin America, including the late Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto d’Aubuisson.

On April 21st 1994, a convicted Colombian drug trafficker, Gabriel Taboada, who is in the fifth year of a 12-year sentence in a Miami federal prison, fingered Francois at a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing chaired by Senator John Kerry. Taboada testified that Lt. Col. Francois collaborated in shipping tons of cocaine to the United States during then 1980’s.

Taboada said he met Francois while he was in the Medellin, Colombia office of drug king Pablo Escobar, in 1984. During a thirty minute conversation, Taboada told Francois he was a car importer. Francois, he said, asked why wasn't I in the drug business since the drug business made good money.

Speaking through an interpreter, Taboada said: I asked him what his business was and he said that at the time he was in Medellin arranging a cocaine deal. Taboada said he later learned that Francois was Chief of Police in Haiti.
Taboada told the committee that the cartel took planes out of Colombia and landed in Haiti, protected by the Haitian military. Michel Francois protected the drugs in Haiti, and then allowed the drugs to continue to the United States. Taboada also told the subcommittee that Haitian military figures often met Medellin cartel members in Colombia, including strongman Prosper Avril, who along with Francois, has long been linked to the drug trade in Haiti.

---

Narco-Corruption In Africa

April 22, 2014, 8:45 am

≫ Next: Narco Technology In West Africa

≪ Previous: Haiti’s Cocaine Coup and the CIA Connection

$

0

0

In the last decade, West Africa emerged as a major transit hub for Latin American Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) transporting cocaine to Western Europe. Since that time, there has been cause for hope and despair. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and an array of international donors have made great strides in acknowledging the growing problem of drug trafficking
and have implemented practical measures to stem this flow. All the while, the fears of many observers have been confirmed as the insidious effects of the drug trade have begun to take effect in many West African states.

Consumption is on the rise and narco-corruption now undermines the rule of law and legitimate economic growth necessary for development and stability. One of the most alarming trends that place Africa and Africans on the radar of policy makers, law enforcement, and researchers alike is the number of fronts on which the illicit drug trade is growing. Its geographic expansion beyond the relatively confined region of West Africa is now endangering East and Southern Africa. 

The arrival of new drugs to the region--heroin and Amphetamine has been accompanied by the discovery of local manufacturing facilities to process them. The growing level of activity by Africans--who initially served as facilitators but now appear to be taking a more proactive role--raises concerns that a new generation of African DTOs is rising in the ranks.

Globalization,which is the integration of regional economies, societies, and cultures, is considered one of the most significant developments of the 20th century. In addition to multitude of cultural, political, economic, and technological benefits it brings to many fortunate countries, globalization has also brought with it opportunities for the weak,poor,and oppressed to participate in traditionally closed markets. Yet, while globalization has been lauded for fostering free trade and economic prosperity, its so-called dark-side has also created opportunities for criminals,businessmen,institutions and politicians to enrich and empower themselves by taking advantage of lucrative illicit markets, or by creating new ones. The forces of globalization and its causes and effects have been well documented and are largely accepted as having facilitated the expansion of licit as well as illicit markets to regions that otherwise would not have enjoyed significant economic activity.

Africa is the exemplar, whose geographic proximity between the source zone and final markets for many illicit goods has contributed to its exploitation by DTOs.  The emergence of West Africa as a major transit point for Latin American cocaine en route to Europe has taken the international community by surprise. Europe and the United States, in particular, are concerned for many reasons. 

From Europe's perspective, it is now experiencing increasing levels of cocaine entering its borders from West Africa, at least partly as a result of highly effective counternarcotics strategies that have concentrated law-interdicting drugs on commercial airflights from the Caribbean to Europe (primarily the Netherlands Antilles to Amsterdam and Jamaica to London). This strategy has been so effective at disrupting major trafficking routes and deterring couriers that traffickers have been forced to identify new routes to enter Europe where law enforcement is less likely to detect their shipments. From its experience as both a transit zone and a final market for heroin, Europe is all too familiar with the public health and safety issues associated with addiction, crime, prostitution, and violence that typically accompany drug trade.

From the U.S perspective,it fears the existence of several anti-American terrorist groups operating in Africa coupled with drug revenues that could cultivate a crime-terrorist nexus, thus threatening its interests in yet another region. Furthermore, since the DTOs operating in West Africa are the same ones that traffic drugs into the United States, Americans view the proceeds of these Africa-based operations as bolstering the strength of those DTOs operating on its southern border with Mexico. All parties are concerned with the destabilizing impacts of the drug trade,including its potential to finance local insurgencies,expand into new illicit markets (such as arms), and its under mining effect on programs that improve governance, anti corruption,accountability, and raise public trust in government institutions.

Today these concerns are more relevant than ever, with new drugs, higher quantities, and an ever-increasing number of transit states now characterizing Africa's drug trade. 

Despite regional and international counter-narcotics programs designed to interdict drugs and build the capacity of local law enforcement institutions to detect trafficking activity and prosecute the offenders, the continent appears to be growing in importance to DTOs. Whereas Africa's involvement in the global drug trade before the mid-2000s was generally limited to West African heroin distribution networks, the last several years has witnessed an unrelenting expansion of the drug trade throughout the continent. Cocaine, synthetics, and increasing amounts of heroin are now transiting Africa where some portion of it stays to satisfy the local market, while the remainder is moved to final destinations in Europe and North America. 

Regrettably, the growth of transnational organized crime in Africa is not limited to the drug trade. Trafficking in humans, cigarettes, arms, natural resources (most notably diamond, timber, and minerals), oil, hazardous waste, and most recently, the manufacture and sale of fake pharmaceuticals, are all illicit trades that continue to thrive in Africa. 

Narco Technology In West Africa

April 24, 2014, 5:12 am

≫ Next: West African Cocaine Routes To Europe

≪ Previous: Narco-Corruption In Africa

$

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 in to a Intercept Suite. This data is stored and analysed for surveillance and forensic analysis. Other capabilities include playback of streaming media, 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.

West African Cocaine Routes To Europe

April 24, 2014, 6:09 am

≫ Next: Cocaine Routes Are Wreaking Havoc In West Africa

≪ Previous: Narco Technology In West 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.

Cocaine Routes Are Wreaking Havoc In West Africa

April 24, 2014, 6:09 am

≫ Next: European Drug Use is Fueling Addiction in West Africa

≪ Previous: West African Cocaine Routes To Europe

$

0

0

Adeolu Ogunrombi

At the end of June, the United Nations held its yearly International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. Yury Fedotov, head of the UN's drugs crime office, marked the occasion with a speech. The Illegal  highs market is still booming and the planet's governments are still losing the War On Drugs.

However, Fedotov did make an interesting point about the emerging cocaine market in (mainly Western) Africa. “In Africa, [cocaine] consumption appears to be growing,” he announced, before asserting – worryingly – that this noted increase in “drug trade and organised crime is fuelling economic and political instability in Africa”. 

The heavy policing on traditional cocaine routes from South America has caused the smugglers to pivot and instead use countries like Ghana and Nigeria to get their product through to European customers.

Adeolu Ogunrombi is currently the Project Coordinator of Youth RISE Nigeria and West African Countries, an initiative which focuses on advocacy, capacity building and research on drug policy reform with a special focus on young people. He has an extensive background in public health and human rights practices. 

He has been at the forefront of the debate on drug policy reform in Africa. He has authored and presented scientific papers in many international conferences on issues bordering on HIV/AIDS, drug policy, harm reduction and young people. He was nominated among the 100 global Youth Leaders by Women Deliver in 2010.

Interview with Adeolu Ogunrombi from the West African Commission On Drugs

So, Adeolu. Where does all this cocaine come from?
Adeolu Ogunrombi: The cocaine comes from Latin America, over the Atlantic and through West Africa towards its intended customers in Europe.

Okay. And is this really a new smuggling route?
The West African route has been exploited for a long time, but what we've witnessed in the last decade is an increase in the volume of the drug passing through the region as transnational drug cartels collaborate with local criminal and smuggling networks, corrupt officials and terrorists to transport their goods to Europe and North America. The traditional routes are being policed more heavily, so the traffickers find alternatives. 

Is this having any knock-on effect on the use of cocaine in the area?
Yes, the consumption of cocaine and other hard drugs in the area is increasing. This affects most of the countries within the region, from Mali to Cape Verde,Nigeriato Sierra-Leone and Ghana toGuinea-Bissau. The 2013 World Drug Report showed Nigeria topping the list of hard drug consumers in Africa, with a very high level of cocaine use.

And that increase is definitely because of the trafficking? You're saying that there are "spill-over" markets?
Yes. As the drugs are trafficked through the countries, some of the product inevitably finds its way into the local supply. According to the UNODC, about 30 percent of trafficked drugs are consumed locally. Because of the increase in availability, the drugs are becoming more affordable and accessible. For example, a hit of crack cocaine is about $2 or $3 – a price much more suited to the area.

This has created all sorts of problems, including an increase in the number of people who are addicted and the number of injecting drug users. Young people are increasingly being affected, too.

If you’ve got people injecting drugs, you’re going to have a problem with the spread of HIV and AIDS through dirty needles. Do you feel that West Africa has the facilities to deal with any increase in addicts caused by these new trafficking routes?
That’s a big challenge at the moment, because the infrastructure isn't there and harm reduction services are next to non-existent. Law enforcement within the region still embraces a punitive approach. There was a recent case in Ghana, which was also reported in the print media, of a young man who was caught smoking marijuana. Police shot him dead during their efforts to arrest him.

Who's doing the trafficking?
I can’t really give you a list of all the people involved, but we've had reported cases of people from Colombia, Bolivia and Brazil. Cartels from these countries then meet local contacts in the West African countries who know the area.

Mexico Cartels

If you look at all of the violence in Mexico – the drug cartels fighting among themselves, civilians getting hurt and killed and the political process being undermined – do you worry about that happening in West Africa?
Of course. You can look at the situation in Latin America as guidance; everyone is fighting for control of the region, and competing for powerful positions because of the huge amount of money they get from the trade. Such a situation may arise in West Africa as well if the necessary measures aren't put in place. Bear in mind, too, that the value of the cocaine passing through the region is far higher than the national budgets of some of the transit countries themselves.

Do you, like Yury Fedotov, think organisations such as yours need more funding?
Definitely. But it’s not just that. While many people allude to the growing challenge of drug trafficking and consumption within the region, it is yet to be one of the main agendas of many governments and institutions within West Africa. Not many people know about the gravity of the situation; how it is undermining security, governance and development as a whole – no one is talking about it.

So you need money to raise awareness?
Yes, and the right approach to drug control in general. At the moment we stick with the traditional tactic, the indicators of which are the number of arrests, the number of drug seizures, etc. Whereas our progress should be measured by the number of people in need of drug treatment who are able to access it without fear of arrest or coercion; the number of new cases of drug-related HIV being averted – things to do with health rather than crime.

So it’s not the drugs that are the main concern, it's the laws that are triggering worse problems?
I'd say so, yes. The laws themselves are what are causing problems all over the world. When you’re driving the drug user population underground by making their habit illegal and putting the trade completely in the hands of criminal groups, the social harms produced are much greater than the harms of the drugs themselves.

European Drug Use is Fueling Addiction in West Africa

April 24, 2014, 6:11 am

≫ Next: Mexico's Drug War

≪ Previous: Cocaine Routes Are Wreaking Havoc In West Africa

$

0

0

There’s a disparity between the way we choose what we buy in stores, and what we buy on the streets. As a result, one of the world’s most deprived areas is being plunged further into violence crime and addiction.

Despite the world’s gaze being fixed on West Africa due to the Malian conflict,  the destruction of that part of the world by the increased flow of narcotics through the area is still not widely known. It’s not hard to understand why an area of ungovernable desert and underfunded governments is a fine breeding ground for cartels to operate. Couple that with the endemic poverty of countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso (where around half of the population live on less than $1.25 per day) and the supply of drug runners who will work for little remuneration is endless.

In the last ten years trafficking in the area has boomed. 13% of the world’s cocaine, with a street value of $15-$20 billion, now travels through the region -  roughly the same as the entire GDP of Mali or Guinea and twice that of Mauritania, some of the worst affected areas. Naturally, new gangs have formed from Guinea-Bisseau and Guinea right through to the north of the continent; to protect supply lines to the lucrative European market. As with all gangs, tales of organised brutality in the region – one all to familiar with violence – are beginning to surface. As with all drugs gangs, they target the vulnerable young.

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.

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. 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.

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.

The United Nations says the rate of consumption of illegal drugs in Africa is on the rise. Africa in terms of hard drugs has never been a continent for consumption, however that situation is rapidly changing. According to UN statistics 37,000 people in Africa die annually from diseases associated with the consumption of illegal drugs. The UN estimates there are 28 million drug users in Africa,there are an estimated 1.5 million of coke users in West Africa alone, the figure for the United States and Canada is 32 million and to make matters worse the 
region lacks drug-treatment centres.

More African youths are becoming addicted to hard drugs, while West Africa gradually transforms from a drug transportation region, to a drug consuming region and finally a drug producing one. According to the Washington Post, the transit route fulfills a cocaine market in Europe that has grown four fold in the past few years and reaches an amount almost equal to  the United States.

A growing amount of the drugs coming from Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil into West Africa are being consumed locally.  This is new, though not surprising:  low prices and high supply of cocaine, particularly around the main entry points in Guinea-Bissau and Guinea-Conakry cause havoc among a youth, already so distraught by so many problems. Its now certain that drug addiction is coming to Africa in a massaive wave.

European and U.S consumer markets are providing the demand for this trade. In the most recent British crime survey it has been revealed that cocaine use had more  than trebled among consumers. Up from 1.3% to 4.2% of the 16-24 demographic group were users during the period 2011/12. However, among  consumers there is little responsibility for the effects of their consumption.

The majority of consumers fall into two broad categories. Firstly, there are the apathetic and uninformed who either care little or know nothing of the harms of the trade. Secondly, and increasing in size, there are those who avert the blame; choosing instead to point to the criminal status of cocaine and shirking responsibility to policy makers. They miss the point. Even if it were decriminalised in Europe, it would still be illegal in the more socially conservative African west. It would still cause just as much harm.

The current problems only tell half the story. The reason the focus of this piece is West Africa and not Latin America is poverty. The impoverished nature of West Africa means that governments have few resources to fight what are increasingly well-armed and well-funded drugs gangs. Much of South and Central America is mired in conflict arising from the cocaine trade. The huge demand for Drugs in Europe and the U.S is creating a legion of home grown crack addicts and dire social problems.

However, the relatively wealthier nature of the states means that living standards are not as adversely affected despite the all too frequent incidences of brutality. Guinea and Guinea-Bissau which are the main port countries for cocaine arriving from South America are among the world’s poorest countries. Money being spent combating drugs gangs is money desperately needed for infrastructural and education spending.

The situation in Mali is dire. Fuelled by demand from Europe, cocaine trafficking is rampant in the Saharan state. Its ungovernable desert borders to the north make for safe routes for cartels to access North Africa and beyond. Its southern-based central government lacks the capability to mount any sort of response to the vast organised criminal gangs. Factor into this already bleak picture the current conflict that is creating uncertainty and harming investment opportunities, and living standards are plummeting.

The notion that we ought not to buy things produced or transported by dubious means has been around for centuries. From the boycotts of sugar picked by slaves in the late eighteenth century, to more modern practices such as the refusal to buy products made in sweatshops, or those that have been tested on animals. People have often been the standard bearers for conscientious consumption. There is however one outlier. Worryingly, many who wouldn't dream of lining their coats with fur all to keenly line their nostrils with cocaine, one of the most damaging industries. One that is destabilising a part of the world which can ill-afford it.


Get Involved, Make A Difference
Our Pura Calma Africa Rehab
Our facility will offer a drug addiction treatment will be a Holistic approach to drug rehab programmes, to go deeper offering an extensive, multi-faceted drug addiction treatment that treats the root of the problem rather than just the symptoms.

We are looking to reach out to all health professionals, rehab professionals and anybody that would be willing to devote a little time and energy to help The Pura Calma Africa Rehab Project become a reality.

Contribute a word, an idea, your time or experience and help us make Pura Calma Africa Rehab a success for Africa.

Share with us africanblog@gmail.com

Mexico's Drug War

April 24, 2014, 6:13 am

≫ Next: Europe's Appetite for Cocaine

≪ Previous: European Drug Use is Fueling Addiction in West Africa

$

0

0

Mexico's Drug War: Balkanization Leads to Regional Challenges
This Security Weekly assesses the most significant cartel-related developments of the first quarter of 2013 and provides updated profiles of Mexico's powerful criminal cartels, as well as a forecast for the rest of this year. It's the executive summary of a more detailed report available to clients of our Mexico Security Monitor service.

"Mexico's Drug War: Balkanization Leads to Regional Challenges is republished with permission of Stratfor."

By Tristan Reed
Tactical Analyst

Balkanization of Cartels
Since the late 1980s demise of the Guadalajara cartel, which controlled drug trade routes into the United States through most of Mexico, Mexican cartels have followed a trend of fracturing into more geographically compact, regional crime networks. This trend, which we are referring to as "Balkanization," has continued for more than two decades and has impacted all of the major cartel groups in Mexico. Indeed the Sinaloa Federation lost significant assets when the organizations run by Beltran Leyva and Ignacio Coronel split away from it. Los Zetas, currently the other most powerful cartel in Mexico, was formed when it split off from the Gulf cartel in 2010. Still these two organizations have fought hard to resist the trend of fracturing and have been able to grow despite being affected by it. This led to the polarized dynamic observed in 2011 when these two dominant Mexican cartels effectively split Mexican organized crime in two, with one group composed of Los Zetas and its allies and the other composed of the Sinaloa Federation and its allies.

This trend toward polarization has since been reversed, however, as Balkanization has led to rising regional challenges to both organizations since 2012. Most notable among these is the split between the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the Sinaloa Federation. The Sinaloa Federation continues to struggle with regional crime groups for control in western Chihuahua state, northern Sinaloa state, Jalisco state and northern Sonora state. Similarly, Los Zetas saw several regional challengers in 2012. Two regional groups saw sharp increases in their operational capabilities during 2012 and through the first quarter of 2013. These were the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the Knights Templar.

The Beltran Leyva Organizationprovides another example of the regionalization of Mexican organized crime. It has become an umbrella of autonomous, and in some cases conflicting, groups. Many of the groups that emerged from it control specific geographic areas and fight among each other largely in isolation from the conflict between Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Federation. Many of these successor crime groups, such as the Independent Cartel of Acapulco, Los Rojos and Guerreros Unidos are currently fighting for their own geographic niches. As its name implies, the Independent Cartel of Acapulco mostly acts in Acapulco, while Los Rojos and Guerreros Unidos mostly act in Morelos state.

The ongoing fragmentation of Mexican cartels is not likely to reverse, at least not in the next few years. Despite this, while Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Federation continue to face new rivals and suffer from internal splintering, their resources are not necessarily declining. Neither criminal organization faces implosion or a substantial decline as a transnational criminal organization as a result of rising regional challengers. Both Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Federation continue to extend their drug trafficking operations on a transnational level, increasing both their influence and profits. Still, they will continue to face the new reality, in which they are forced to work with -- or fight -- regional groups.

Los Zetas
In Hidalgo state, a former Zetas stronghold, the Knights Templar have made significant inroads, although violence has not risen to the level of that in the previously mentioned states. Also, the turf war within Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas states between the Gulf cartel and Los Zetas that began when Los Zetas split from the Gulf cartel in 2010 continues.

In light of Ivan "El Taliban" Velazquez Caballero's dissent from Los Zetas and the death of former leader Heriberto "El Lazca"Lazcano Lazcano, Zetas leader Miguel "Z-40" Trevino Morales could face organizational integrity issues during 2013. Signs of such issues appeared in Cancun during the first quarter when some members of Los Zetas reportedly broke from the group and adopted the Gulf cartel name. Besides possible minor dissent, a seemingly new rival has emerged in Tabasco state to counter Los Zetas. A group called Pueblo Unido Contra la Delincuencia, Spanish for "People United Against Crime," carried out a series of executions in Tabasco state throughout the first quarter, but the group's origins and significance remain unclear. No indicators of substantial splintering among Los Zetas have emerged since the Velazquez split.

Sinaloa Federation
Regional organizations continued to challenge the Sinaloa Federation on its turf in western Chihuahua state, northern Sinaloa state and Jalisco state through the first quarter. Intercartel violence in mountainous western Chihuahua continues as the Sinaloa Federation fights La Linea for control of the region's smuggling routes and drug cultivation areas. Los Mazatlecos so far has maintained its control over northern Sinaloa cities, such as Los Mochis and Guasave. It also has continued violent incursions into southern areas of Sinaloa state, such as Mazatlan, Concordia and El Rosario with its ally Los Zetas. 

Gulf Cartel
At the beginning of 2012, Gulf cartel territory appeared likely to be absorbed by larger cartels -- essentially signaling the end of the Gulf cartel. Support from the Sinaloa Federation and the Knights Templar combined with fractures within Los Zetas allowed a Gulf cartel resurgence, leading to a renewed Gulf assault on Los Zetas in the northeastern states of Mexico. The resurgence ended with a series of notable arrests during the last quarter of 2012, such as that of former top leader Jorge Eduardo "El Coss" Costilla Sanchez. The arrests triggered additional Gulf cartel infighting, which peaked in March 2013.

The escalated infighting in the Gulf cartel, particularly in Reynosa, Tamaulipas state, highlighted the new state of the Gulf cartel: Instead of operating as a cohesive criminal network, the Gulf cartel now consists of factions linked by history and the Gulf label. The infighting began in 2010 after the death of former top Gulf cartel leader Antonio Ezequiel "Tony Tormenta" Cardenas Guillen. The death of Cardenas Guillen split the Gulf cartel into two main factions, Los Rojos and Los Metros. By the first quarter of 2013, infighting had broken out between Los Metros leaders, such as Mario "Pelon" Ramirez Trevino, David "Metro 4" Salgado and Miguel "El Gringo" Villarreal. This suggests the Gulf cartel is further fractured and no longer consists of just two opposing sides. The Gulf cartel may begin acting as a cohesive network during the second quarter after the escalated infighting in March, though this cannot be definitely predicted.

From March 10 to March 19, Reynosa became the focal point for Gulf cartel infighting as Ramirez Trevino escalated his conflict against Villarreal. Ramirez Trevino reportedly expelled Villarreal's faction and its allies from the Reynosa plaza and killed Salgado. This could mean Ramirez Trevino has consolidated control over other Gulf cartel factions. If true, this would represent a substantial shift in organized criminal operations in northeastern Tamaulipas state, where the Sinaloa Federation and the Knights Templar smuggle drugs, people and other illicit commodities through the border towns of Reynosa and Matamoros while Los Zetas maintain a constant interest in fighting for control of the stated cities.

As mentioned during the last annual update, Gulf cartel factions are increasingly reliant on Sinaloa Federation and Knights Templar support to defend the remaining Gulf cartel territory in Tamaulipas state from Los Zetas. This certainly remains true after the first quarter, although the recent shift from Gulf cartel infighting may signal a shift in inter cartel dynamics. Since the Gulf cartel in reality consists of separate factions, there is likely a separate relationship between each Gulf cartel faction and the larger criminal organizations reportedly in alignment with them. With Ramirez Trevino now in charge of Reynosa, a city valued by both the Sinaloa Federation and the Knights Templar, his existing relationship with the two organizations will likely influence their strategies for maintaining their interests in Gulf cartel-controlled areas. Additionally, it is not yet clear whether Ramirez Trevino suffered any substantial losses during the March fighting in Reynosa. If he did lose some capabilities fighting Los Zetas in Tamaulipas state, or if he has challenged a faction loyal to either the Sinaloa Federation or the Knights Templar, either organization would likely have to use its own gunmen for defending Gulf cartel-controlled areas or mounting their own incursions into Zetas territory, particularly Nuevo Laredo.

Intercartel violence in the Gulf cartel-controlled city of Reynosa will likely diminish compared to the first quarter of 2013 if Ramirez Trevino has indeed won. This reduction in violence will continue only as long as Ramirez Trevino is able to hold his control over Reynosa. Influence from external organizations, such as Los Zetas, the Sinaloa Federation and the Knights Templar, could once again spark violence if Ramirez Trevino's efforts have harmed their trafficking operations through Reynosa or presented a new opportunity to seize control. What, if any, Gulf cartel infighting is ongoing is difficult to gauge.

Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion
The severing of the relationship between the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the Sinaloa Federation came to the forefront of conflicts in the Pacific states of Michoacan and Jalisco during the first quarter of 2013. The Sinaloa Federation relied on its alliance with the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion in defending the critical location of Guadalajara from Los Zetas and used the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion as an assault force into Los Zetas strongholds, such as Veracruz state.

Although evidence of the rift between the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the Sinaloa Federation began to appear in open-source reporting during the last half of 2012, the conflict between the two organizations only became clear when the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion went on the offensive in Jalisco state by attacking Sinaloa Federation allies Los Coroneles, the Knights Templar and the Gulf cartel. 

With a now-fully independent Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, the polarization of warring cartels in Mexico has effectively ended. In addition to the existing conflicts between the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas, the Sinaloa Federation must now focus on reclaiming an operational hold over Jalisco state from the now-rival Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion. The second quarter will continue to see a conflict between the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and Sinaloa Federation-aligned groups in Jalisco state as well as neighboring states like Michoacan.

Knights Templar
The Knights Templar experienced intensified conflict during the first quarter from their principal rival, Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion. In an effort to combat the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, the Knights Templar have allied with other Sinaloa Federation-aligned groups, the Gulf cartel and Los Coroneles, referring to themselves as "Los Aliados" to fight the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion within Jalisco. Violence as a result of this alliance against the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion has been most notable in the Guadalajara metropolitan area as well as towns lying on highways 15 and 90, which connect to Guadalajara.

In addition to the Knights Templar offensive into Jalisco state, the group is currently defending its stronghold of Michoacan state. The Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion also has conducted violent assaults against the Knights Templar in Michoacan, particularly on routes leading from Jalisco state toward Apatzingan, Michoacan state. This assault has increased intercartel violence along the border of the two states as part of a tit-for-tat dynamic. 

Citizens of Buenavista Tomatlan, Michoacan state, a municipality lying amid territory contested by the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the Knights Templar, have recently set up a community police force to counter Knights Templar operations in the municipality. As in some other areas of Mexico, this community police force is a volunteer force that assumed law enforcement responsibilities independent of the Mexican government. The community police, while established to thwart the Knights Templar, have created tension between the communities of Buenavista Tomatlan and the government. On March 8, the Mexican military detained approximately 34 members of the community police force that had been created in February in Buenavista Tomatlan.

The Buenavista Tomatlan arrests occurred after the community police took over the municipal police station March 4 and detained the municipal police chief, who the Mexican military later freed. Notably, the Mexican government claimed at least 30 of the detained community police belonged to the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion. If true, this suggests it has made territorial gains to the point of infiltrating the community police. However, there has been no confirmation on whether the accusations are true. Regardless, the community police force of Buenavista Tomatlan has placed its focus on stopping Knights Templar operations in the area, a focus that could only benefit the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion's war with its rivals.

Europe's Appetite for Cocaine

April 24, 2014, 6:14 am

≫ Next: Africa's Narco State 6

≪ Previous: Mexico's Drug War

$

0

0

A Boeing aircraft from Venezuela landed on an improvised landing strip in Mali’s Gao region, with ten tones of cocaine on board. News reports about aircraft in West Africa loaded with cocaine are becoming more and more frequent. The drugs cartels in Latin America have discovered that they can reach the European market via Africa. Organised crime is such a rewarding industry in Europe because ordinary Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and money snorting coke through €50 notes.

In case you think this is a wild exaggeration, take note of an article published by the London Sunday Telegraph. So much cocaine is being used in London that traces of the white powdered narcotic can be detected in the River Thames. Citing scientific research that it had commissioned, it said an estimated 2kg of cocaine, or 80 000 lines, spill into the river every day after passing through users’ bodies and sewage treatment plants.

It extrapolated that 150 000 lines of the illegal drug are snorted in the British capital every single day, or 15 times higher than the official figure given by the Home Office. Europeans belong to the largest consumers of illicit drugs, absorbing about one fifth of the global heroin, cocaine and cannabis supply, as well as one third of ecstasy production (UNODC World Drug report, 2008). 

The Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) in Oslo and the Mario Negri Institute in Milan led a research initiative, directly collaborating with 11 European research institutes. Raw sewage samples from 19 large European cities were collected by the participants of the study during a single week in March 2011 and analyzed for the urinary bio markers of cocaine, amphetamine, ecstasy, meth and cannabis. The total amount of the drugs used by inhabitants of each of the 19 cities was measured and then the results were adjusted for population size.

The data show distinct temporal and spatial patterns in drug use across Europe. Cocaine use was higher in Western and Central Europe and lower in Northern and Eastern Europe. High per capita ecstasy loads were measured in Dutch cities, as well as in Antwerp and London. In general, cocaine and ecstasy loads were significantly elevated during the weekend compared to weekdays. Per capita loads of meth were highest in Helsinki, Turku, Oslo and Budweis, while per capita loads of cannabis were similar throughout Europe.

MPs Double Standard

A recent scandal broke out among Italian parliamentarians, in a clever yet classic sting operation staged by the producers of Le Iene, a popular prime time TV show, a secret drug test taken by Italian parliamentarians revealed that almost one out of three Italian MPs appeared to have taken illegal drugs in the previous 36 hours. More precisely, the secret drug test showed that 16 out of 50 politicians had allegedly tested positive for cocaine use.The cult TV show Le Iene, sent a reporter and camera crew, purporting to represent Fox TV, to the Italian Parliament at asking MPs for their views on the 2007 budget draft. Yet unknown to the politicians posing for the camera, the make-up artist dabbing the sweat from their brows during their ‘interview’ was in reality collecting their perspiration in order to test it for the presence of illegal substances. The tests were conducted with a device called Drugswipe, used by German and Swiss police in random traffic checks,it can test for drug use within the last 36 hours in as little as five minutes. 

Former president of the lower house Pierferdinando Casini stated, ‘The value of this experiment is precisely zero.’ In response to concerns about the test’s reliability, the chief producer of Le Iene, Davide Parenti, had argued that the Drugswipe ‘is 100 % accurate. Amid parliamentary uproar over the shocking results of the secret drug test conducted by Le Iene. 

The Privacy Authority blocked the transmission of the segment, contending that the data was collected in a covert and illegal manner, thereby invading the MPs’ privacy.

Instead, the first episode of the autumn series broadcast a similar segment in which the Drugswipe test was unknowingly used on the patrons of a nightclub. Results showed that 20 out of the 40 club-goers interviewed had tested positive for cocaine. However, in this case the Italian Privacy Authority did not censor the segment.

Italian parliament Palace Flying High

But wouldn't an identical sting on the Italian public also be a violation of an individual’s privacy? Is this a double standard applicable only to Italian MPs who consider themselves above the law, yet the citizenry not? Is this so-called ‘privacy privilege’ among MPs valid only for those who passed the‘zero tolerance’ drug law last February, abolishing the distinction between hard and soft drugs and making possession as well as dealing a criminal offence?

Italian politicians have a long history of drug misdemeanors. 
In 2003 the former prime minister Emilio Colombo admitted that he had purchased cocaine after his drug dealer was arrested but said it was for "therapeutic purposes".

During a debate on Italy's drug law, former deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini admitted having smoked a joint once while he was on holiday in Jamaica; Pierferdinando Casini also said he had tried the drug.

Italy's drug laws were relaxed after a 1993 referendum but were tightened again last year in a zero tolerance policy 
promoted by the former deputy prime minister, Gianfranco Fini. The new laws abolished the distinction between hard and soft drugs and made possession, as well as dealing, a criminal offence. Under the new laws, anyone found in possession of as little as two cannabis joints could, in theory, be prosecuted as a dealer.

Huge Money At Stake

Between 1998 and 2009 global production of opium rose almost 80% … "Just a decade ago, the North American market for cocaine was four times larger than that of Europe, but now we are witnessing a complete rebalancing. Today the estimated value of the European cocaine market ($65-billion) is almost equivalent to that of the North American market ($70-billion), it has simply experienced a geographical shift in supply and demand.

According to the latest United Nations World Drug Report, a gram of the white powder fetched just £40 ($62) in Britain 
in 2010. In Germany, it cost $87. Only in Portugal and the Netherlands is cocaine cheaper on the street than it is in 
Britain. Prices have been falling in Britain for years, even as they have increased elsewhere. Cocaine is now half as expensive as it was in 1998, even before accounting for inflation. 

Curiously, the trend has continued despite rising wholesale 
prices. Since 2007 the price of a kilogram of cocaine at the border has increased from £30,000 to around £55,000.

A big reason for cheap retail prices, say police, is that dealers have discovered cutting agents which allow them to pad their products without losing custom. Cocaine is adulterated before it arrives in Britain, to around 65% purity, most commonly with levamisole, a drug used to treat worms in cattle. Local dealers then cut it with other chemicals such as benzocaine, a local anaesthetic which simulates the numbing effect that real cocaine has on the gums.

Dean Ames, a drugs specialist at LGC Forensics, a private forensic science company, says that the street-level cocaine 
he analyses has fallen from between 30% to 60% purity in 2007 to between 10% and 35% now. Around two-fifths of samples contain benzocaine. 

Drug trafficking, the critical link between supply and demand, is fuelling a global criminal enterprise valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars that poses a growing challenge to stability and security. Drug traffickers and cartels are forming transnational networks, sourcing drugs on one continent, trafficking them across another and marketing them in a third. 

In some countries and regions the value of the illicit drug trade far exceeds the size of the legitimate economy. Given the enormous amounts of money controlled by drug traffickers, they have the capacity to corrupt officials. In recent years we have seen several such cases in which ministers and heads of national law enforcement agencies have been implicated in drug-related corruption. We are also witnessing more and more acts of violence, conflicts and terrorist activities fuelled by drug trafficking and organised crime.

The transporting of narcotics via the west coast of Africa has proven to be the most secure way of getting drugs to customers in Europe. The so-called Atlantic route (South America – Portugal – Spain) is becoming steadily more difficult, so the drugs cartels have turned their attention to West Africa, which has a practically unguarded coastline and impoverished, weak and easy-to-bribe governments.

Waterbed Effect
“The drugs trade, which has Europe as its primary destination, now chooses the African route. Especially the poor, open-to-bribery countries, but also the larger and more stable parts of Africa such as Nigeria and South Africa”, says Wil Pantsers, Director of the Mexican Studies Centre at the University of Groningen.

Every time a country somewhere in the world proudly presents figures showing the progress of the war against drugs trafficking, figures in another part of the world give precisely the opposite impression. The golden rule of supply and demand that defines the marketplace certainly applies to the drugs trade.

Weak States
Forty tonnes (27 percent) of the cocaine consumed in Europe have passed through various West African countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia,Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau,Cape Verde,Senegal, Mali or Mauritania. The international airports on the other side of the continent serve as through-routes for heroin that is imported from Asia and sold on the streets of Amsterdam or London. That’s according to the annual report of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) of the United Nations.

The rapid growth is not only the consequence of the creativity and vast experience of the Latin American drugs cartels. The weakness of the states with which they do business, and the extreme poverty, makes this region an ideal place for their illegal practices.

Lack of Everything
Guinea-Bissau is a good example of an extremely violent state, where the drugs trade is flourishing at the highest levels of the land. Tom Blickman, from the Transnational Institute of Policy Studies in Amsterdam, points out the extreme weakness of the government: “In Guinea-Bissau there’s no means of keeping drugs trafficking under control. The police don’t have any cars. They don’t have any radios. They don’t have anything.”

Guinea-Bissau Drug Rehab

In the last few years, the Mexican drugs cartels have conquered the international market. 90% of the drugs in the United States come into the country via Mexico. The Mexican drugs cartels, along with that of Colombia, together form an enormous criminal force that reaches far beyond the borders even across oceans.

Corruption
In Mexico, neither the huge army nor the police are in any position to bring an end to the drugs gangs. Since 2008, drug-related violence has so far cost the lives of more than sixty thousand dead and fifteen thousand missing. The drugs trade is even infiltrated by individuals at the highest levels of the police and politics.

Mexico is an important through-route to the north from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, but at the same time the quantity of marijuana and poppies has increased enormously. What particularly strikes researchers is the spectacular growth in the production of synthetic drugs.

Crossroads
Mexico has developed into the crossroads for drug trafficking, and that is feeding destabilization in the region, says Luis Astorga from the Independent National University of Mexico. “This position that Central America has taken up in the cocaine route, is becoming increasingly important. Every success by Colombia or Mexico in the fight against drugs has immediate negative consequences in the Caribbean and Central America, where the governments are weaker.”

The fight against worldwide drugs trafficking is a major challenge for the international community, maybe even greater than the fight against international terrorism. Drugs’ trafficking brings democracies to their knees, and destabilizes not only countries, but whole regions.

---

Africa's Narco State 6

May 4, 2014, 11:43 am

≫ Next: Africa's Narco State 5

≪ Previous: Europe's Appetite for Cocaine

$

0

0

Organized crime and cement often go together, but in Guinea Bissau this happens in an untraditional way. The cement importing and sales company, SOMEC, was salvaged by Colombian Juan Pablo Camacho, a convicted drug trafficker who spent five years in prison in Miami on drug trafficking charges. 

He and his partner, Luis Fernando Ortega Mejia, bought the company that had been ruined in 1998 by Guinea Bissau’s civil war. Camacho and Mejia were both detained in September 2006 in the biggest bust the country had ever seen. The Judiciary Police seized firearms, ammunition, grenades, laptops, 674 kilos of cocaine and $39 million in various currencies. Unusual, for a cement company.

The Colombians, however, were able to walk away. The cocaine and money were stored in the treasury vaults, for safekeeping. The next day, the army seized both the drugs and the cash, and the evidence vanished. No evidence, no case. The Colombians were freed, thanks to Carlos Lopes Correira and Armando Mango, the same lawyers who defended Augusto Bliri.

Camacho denied every accusation and said that his wife and five children, who were still in Bogotá, would soon arrive in Bissau and that he planned to live there for the next few years. The Colombians are said to have left the country since, skipping bail, but the suspicion is that they still trade drugs, through a local network.

The Bissau-Conakry Strategy
Several years ago, two long-friends met in Guinea Conakry to talk about some business opportunities. They were Lasana Conte and Joao Vieira, the presidents of Guinea Conakry and Guinea Bissau. It was 2006 and cocaine trafficking in West Africa was at a development stage.

President Lasana Conte proposed that his counterpart Nino Vieira come on board, and then easily convinced him to allow Latin American traffickers to use Guinea Bissau as point of transit for their business. The profits would be huge, the risks minimal.

In late December 2008, Conte died, after almost forty years of dictatorship. A few hours after his death, a bunch of soldiers seized power in a coup d’etat. According to this new, untried military junta that has ruled Conakry since the coup, the overall goal is to clean up the country from corruption and extirpate cocaine trafficking — and to do so before the next scheduled elections, in 2010.

On February 26th, three days before Viera was killed, Lasana Conte’s oldest son Ousmane was arrested by the military on drug charges. He confessed on national television his involvement in drug trafficking, admitting his ties with some Colombian partners.

Ousmane Conte’s trial was broadcast on TV because the junta is trying to convince the Guinean people that they’re doing something necessary for their country, something good.  It is a sort of propaganda. But according to some analysts at the UN Office of Drug Control, this is really a strategy to put the South American traffickers out of the game — to open a new era of African drug trafficking organized by Nigerians and Guineans, in cooperation with Guinea Bissau and Conakry armies.The vacuum left by the double assassination of Vieira and Tagme and the situation in Conakry opens a new scenario in West Africa. The big plan is to transform the whole region into a sort of traffickers’ paradise, a dangerous plan that may seriously destabilize West Africa, leading to new conflicts in a region that is trying to heal from bloody civil wars from the past decade in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast.

Crack and Prostitution, Cocaine’s Other Face
I drive through Reno, Bissau’s poorest slum, heading to Justino’s house. He’s 16 and a crack addict. Justino started to smoke quisa, as they call crack in Bissau, one year ago with his sister, Sadia. Now they both spend the whole day smoking the drug. Since they started, their old lives vanished. Justino lost his job and Sadia began to sell her own body. It’s 10 a.m. when I park my car in front of their house. Sadia waits by the door, holding her cachimbo, the crack pipe that has become her best friend. All around the house it’s garbage, rotten water and pigs.

This sounds like any other crack story, but there’s a difference: We are in Guinea Bissau, a place where crack was totally unknown until traffickers decided three years ago to target this country.

Sadia’s eyes are lost into the emptiness that surrounds her life. She waits for her brother to bring the drug. He comes with a friend and they immediately start smoking. I sit on the house floor with them. Sadia stretches out on a mattress while Justino and his friend feed the pipe; they start the ritual, which lasts at least 40 minutes. They completely ignore me. They ignore everything but the cachimbo. Their entire lives revolve around the drug.

The situation in Bissau is particularly sad. There is no prevention, no rehabilitation. The issue is so new that there is no data available. It’s impossible to say how many people are lost in crack addiction. And mostly, there is no consciousness among the people about the long-term effects of this plague. 

I meet Sadia and her group of friends at Baiana’s, at night. They are all prostitutes, all crack addicts. They spend most of the time waiting for a client to take them to a brothel. At one point a white, brand new, four-wheel-drive Toyota parks in front of the restaurant. On the doors, the Portuguese flag and the logo from the Cooperacion Portuguesa. The driver and his friend sit to drink some beers when Nadi and Tusha, two of Sadia’s friends, join the men. They will leave a few minutes later, on the Jeep.

Prostitution in Bissau is not for locals. Nobody can afford to pay a prostitute, and in the local culture, women cannot refuse a man. All the clients are foreigners. Sometimes sailors from anywhere, but mostly people who work for NGOs, the UN or Embassy employees. Almost every night I shared a coffee with Nadi, Tusha, Sadia, Fatima, Carolina and other prostitutes. They are somewhat proud of their work, and they see crack addiction as a minor issue. Smoking a cigarette or doing quisa – it’s just the same, to them.

They all dream of going to Europe – to Spain or Portugal or Italy. Nadi has a daughter who lives in Spain. She had the child with a Spanish businessman who used to travel to Bissau often: she doesn’t live with her child but says she is happy all the same, for the 250 Euros per month she receives from the father.

Nuno (an alias name) is a Portuguese sailor. He used to work on a ship but was forced to stay in Bissau after he fought with the captain. He asked his family to send him money to come back, but then got lost into alcohol. He’s a usual client of the girls and he has AIDS. He’s always drunk and spends his nights at the Baiana before heading off with two or three girls. The alarming issue is that none of the prostitutes that I met use condoms.

Since cocaine arrived in Bissau crack has spread, prostitution has increased and so has HIV-AIDS. Drug trafficking has destroyed the precarious political stability of Guinea Bissau and destroyed the lives of thousands of people. They are paying the price of Europe’s voracious appetite for coke.

Marco Vernaschi

Africa's Narco State 5

May 4, 2014, 11:43 am

≫ Next: Africa's Narco State 4

≪ Previous: Africa's Narco State 6

$

0

0

 A gangster's paradise
In Bissau I met a former journalist who had been a correspondent for a Portuguese magazine, I ask him to show me where the local drug lords live. We meet at night, in front of my hotel and we go for a ride through the darkness, where he felt safer than in bar.

“It all started when the fishermen found the drug in the sea…” he tells me while I drive “…a load of cocaine was dumped overboard, from a ship that was intercepted by the Senegalese coast guard, in 2005. The fishermen in Biombo found these packs and didn’t even know what it was. Some of them used it to fertilize their crops, some to paint their bodies and others simply kept the packs in their house. In this country very few knew what cocaine was.” He shakes his head, and smiles bitterly. We pass in front of the UN Building, taking a dark deserted road.

“See this? That’s where Augusto Bliri lives”. My journalist friend points to a huge mansion with a yellow Hummer parked in the courtyard. “That’s the traffickers’ neighborhood. This other house is where Bubo Na Tchuto used to live before he fled to Gambia… I guess the house is empty now… Look, over there, that was Pablo Camacho’s hideout”.

I keep on driving through this kind of Hollywood where the actors are drug lords and show biz is replaced by cocaine trade. Each mansion is guarded by armed security.

One is the local gangster, one the Colombian trafficker, and one, Na Tchuto, a former Rear Admiral for Guinea Bissau’s navy. Neighbors, and business partners. Augusto Bliri is a young but talented drug lord who is legend in Bissau. He’s the one who started the cocaine business in the country. He lived in Germany for several years, so when the fishermen found the mysterious packs with the white powder, he instantly knew what to do: he bought some kilos for almost nothing and converted them into hundreds of thousand of Euros. He spends most days driving around in his yellow Hummer and he often visit the Samaritana, a small bar in front of a parking lot in the centre of Bissau. 

In this place, traffickers and dealers share drinks while watching children cleaning their SUVs for few coins. Bliri’s gang is the strongest in town, that everyone either respects or fears, depending on the point of view. A few months ago one of Bliri’s lieutenants killed a Spanish trafficker in Bissau who had tried to steal some cocaine.  The police arrested and imprisoned the suspected killer but after three days he was freed. No trial, no evidence. Nothing. 

The same happened when Bliri was busted and convicted in 2006. The Police found firearms in his Hummer and a large amount of money. He was sentenced to four years but his lawyer, Carlos Lopes Correira, convinced the judge to let him go; his client was sick, Correira argued, and the basement where he was imprisoned was unhealthy.

I ask Lucinda Barbosa, chief of the Bissau police, if Bliri’s gang is in some way connected to the Lebanese network. “Of course they are. The Lebanese are too smart, and would never put their own hands in the fire, so they protect these gangs because they need someone to do ‘the job’. These kids are untouchable, and they know it. They resolve any problem with bribes so they don’t fear anyone.”

I managed to infiltrate into Bliri’s gang, but in two months I never met him personally. The Interpol knew I wanted to infiltrate, so they provided me with valuable advice and information. 

I approached one of Biliris’ lieutenants (I will call him Omar, an alias that I promised to use to protect his identity) the third day I was in Bissau. He was smoking marijuana with his friends at the Samaritana. After an improvised conversation about cars and music I suddenly ask him to meet me, this same night.

“I’ll be waiting for you at the Kilimanjaro, at 11 o’clock,” Omar replied. The Kilimanjaro is an isolated, dark patio with a grill that the owner calls “a restaurant.” While approaching the table where Omar was waiting, I realized there was nobody else in this place. Even the owner was gone. But I already was there, with him.

“Have a sit and let’s talk… what can I do for you?” he said shaking my hand. I was a bit nervous, but I sensed he was tense, too. My strategy was to be straight and tell him exactly who I was and what I was looking for. “I know who you are and what your business is but, frankly, I don’t care. I have no intention to denounce you, nor to give you troubles. I just need you to show me how the whole thing works. I'm a photographer and I'm making a book on cocaine. But don’t worry; nobody will know your name nor see your face. I promise. Would you help me?”


That’s exactly what I told him, word by word. I waited for few seconds, until he replied. “Holy crap… I don’t know if you’re crazy or brave, but what you are asking for is really risky. I have great respect for you, brother, but you’re a little mad! Do you know you could have been killed if you would have met someone else rather than me?” His answer kind of surprised me, but reading between the lines I understood this was a sceptical “yes”. After the conversation we had a drink. He took my phone number, and then we both left.

In the weeks that followed I met him almost every day. He tested me several times, gradually opening up to reveal his world. He introduced me to his people, inviting me three times in one week to share dinner with his gang. I’m still not sure if this was a way to have his friends pass judgment on me or if it was, in some way, a spontaneous and sincere attempt at socializing.

In any case I was gaining credibility and Omar’s respect, and after two weeks I felt we really trusted each other. It was carnival in Bissau, and I was invited for a beer at the cabañas of barrio Bra, a place where no stranger would go alone. Everyone was drinking and dancing to the loud beats of Bissau’s pop music. Omar was a little high and started to tell me about his problems with his girl. I think we had become, somehow, friends after this night.

The cliché of drug trafficker that we all have in mind is something that we inherited from Miami Vice or similar movies. In Bissau, most of the gangsters are still very naïve as the drug trade’s dynamics are still new to them. They are mostly kids who never had a single chance, most of them have been living in poverty their whole life, and cocaine trafficking is an unexpected, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the only real chance to achieve something and leave their slums. 

Augusto Bliri is the local hero because he was the first who took this chance. He’s smarter than every other local drug lord in Bissau and he’s extremely dangerous, always carrying a gun on his person and an Uzzi in his Hummer. After some weeks, I ask Omar if Bilri knows that I exist. I already know the answer, but I need to test Omar. He laughs at the question, “If Augusto wouldn't know about you, we wouldn't be here now. I gave him my word that you’re reliable. If you do something wrong I will probably get killed, but in this case I wouldn't be the only who would die. You know, we have our rules here. This is Africa, brother”.

One of the things I liked most about Omar was that he was honest, direct and clear. And he was always on time, a rare quality in Bissau. We gather for another party in an apparently abandoned lot where the gang set up a wall screen with a DVD projector playing one of 50Cent’s concerts. The grills are crowded with dozens of camaraos tigre, a jumbo shrimp the size of a lobster. Four buckets are filled with beers and a group of girls, the gang’s groupies, dance and shake just like Beyonce taught. The men keep on drinking.

None of them speaks English, but to celebrate they salute 50Cents with a loud “Go, mother fucker!” followed by a big laugh. I’m pretty sure they have no idea what it means, but it’s what the singer says. “One of these days I’ll show you what happens to those who break the rules” says Omar, holding my arm. He had a strange smile on his face and his eyes were shining when he pointed at mine. I was shivering and asked what he meant to say. “Ah-ah-ah!” He erupted into a loud laugh “You don’t have to worry, nothing is going happened to you... unless you break some rule…” He keeps laughing, my face paralysed and my eyes clearly betraying my emotions. “No one is going to die, don’t worry… we don’t kill people that often here… we’re cool. I'm just going to show you something, but not tonight.”

Omar is a good guy, but sometimes he’s a little scary. When I leave the party I keep wondering what he was talking about; but it was a few  days later before I had an answer. I was in my room, ready to sleep, when my phone rings, a few minutes before midnight. You should come now. There’s something I promised to show you... remember? Go to the airport, in the parking lot.You will find my friends there in half an hour… and don’t forget your camera!”

I don’t know what to do, I’m freaking scared and I don’t know what I'm about to see. I’m not sure accepting the invitation is wise but it could be maybe dangerous not to. A waltz of doubts and theories starts to dance in my mind, but after half an hour I'm at the airport.

When I arrive, nobody is there. I lock my car, wait for a few minutes, and then a four-wheel-drive arrives. They approach my car and, from the window, a guy tells me to jump on the front seat. Omar is not in the car but I recognize the guy who drives. I don’t know his name and I never talked with him before, but he’s always around at the parties. When I get in the car I see there are three other guys in the back seat. The one in the middle is blindfolded with the two guys at his sides holding a rifle each. One of them wears a SWAT hood, holding a pistol against the hostage.

That’s way too much for me; I want to leave. But I can’t. I wish I was in a movie and I feel ridiculous with my cameras. We drive toward Quinhamel, a little village 30 minutes from Bissau, when the car suddenly takes a secondary road, surrounded by cashew trees. Nobody in the car say a single word. I smoke two cigarettes. In a few minutes the car finally stops. The three guys get off, with their hostage.

“If you want to take pictures, do it. Just make sure not to take my face… I’ll check your camera later”. The driver seemed to be extremely relaxed.

I'm praying they won’t kill him, and I stay in the car. I nervously start to photograph, through the windshield, while outside the gangsters point their rifles at the hostage. They speak Creole, so I don’t understand a single word, but it was clear they were threatening this poor guy with death, asking questions that he never answered. He was so scared he didn’t even cry.

While two of the guys were questioning the hostage, the driver disappeared under a tree. He was comfortably smoking a cigarette. I get out of the car, with caution. I shoot two or three pictures before they force the hostage on his knee. They point a gun to his head and after more threats they kick him to the ground. The man is shaking. The driver suddenly says we must go, so we get into the car. The hostage is left in the middle of nowhere, at 2 in the morning and far from Bissau. But at least he’s alive.

“You knew we wouldn't have killed him, right? This guy talked too much … he should pay more attention. The next time he could have serious troubles…”

Africa's Narco State 4

May 4, 2014, 11:44 am

≫ Next: Africa's Narco State 3

≪ Previous: Africa's Narco State 5

$

0

0

The Latin American connection
Al Qaeda and Hezbollah’s long arms extend from West Africa to Latin America. The tri-border area where the frontiers of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet is considered a trafficker’s paradise. 

A number of drug cartels and terrorist groups affiliated with the Middle East operate in the frontier area, according to international agencies and the U.S. military, and it is viewed as a a nexus between South America and West Africa, especially Guinea Bissau and Nigeria.

This area is strategically critical for several criminal activities, as among them money laundering and smuggling, and it’s the drop-off for air travel between South America and West Africa. The Brazilian government estimates that $12 billion is laundered annually through the tri-boder area; the U.S. Southern Command puts the annual total much higher, at between $50 to $500 billion.

Since the majority of drugs leaving South America for Europe exit Brazil and travel through terrorist strongholds in West Africa, these established ties may increase. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has identified West Africa as a developing hub of narcoterrorism, and there is evidence that Latin American traffickers are collaborating with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Hezbollah to smuggle cocaine to Europe. In December 2009, the UNODC informed the UN Security Council that drugs were being traded by “terrorists and anti-government forces” to fund their operations. That same month, authorities arrested three individuals in Ghana for cocaine trafficking who reported that they were supporting al-Qaeda.

Drug trafficking is not new to either Brazil or West Africa, but the level of sophistication of today’s global drug traffickers has raised international concern. Several security agencies have reported that drug dealers have their own goods containers and their own jet aircraft network that links the cocaine-producing regions of South America and West Africa for eventual transport to Europe. It is estimated that the fleet includes twin-engine turboprops, executive jets and even a Boeing 727 (which can carry up to 10 tons of cargo). In 2009, drug traffickers landed a Boeing 727 on a makeshift runway in Mali and unloaded as much as 10 tons of cocaine before setting the plane ablaze when it failed to take off again. The transportation fleet gives terrorist groups like the FARC, al-Qaeda and AQIM the ability to move vast amounts of illicit materials back and forth between Brazil and West Africa

In West Africa, the rise of the drug trade has increased fears that weak states could become criminalized “narco-states.” The growing drug trade has also been blamed for increasing political instability and violence elsewhere in the region, including, in 2008, riots in Cote d’Ivoire, an attempted coup in Guinea-Bissau and an actual coup in Guinea. The number of West African organized crime groups involved in drug smuggling is growing; some even have their own armies and caches of weapons

The lack of domestic security architecture, along with insufficient equipment, corruption and poor training for police are common problem across the region. For example, until last year, Guinea did not have a single scanner at its international airports. Nigeria only began using body scanners at its airports in 2010.

The attention to air smuggling is timely. When sea interdiction efforts increased, drug traffickers switched to air transport in Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, and Sierra Leone. It is well documented that the drug traffickers freely use abandoned airfields and landing strips in these countries where police have no presence. Authorities in Mali, where AQIM has now infiltrated, are so overburdened and under-resourced that they “lack the capacity to patrol the northern parts of their country.

Like Brazil, West African nations are beginning to recognize the value of regional cooperation. Last fall, Gambia hosted a regional forum on illegal drug trafficking and organized crime. In 2010, delegates from 34 countries gathered at the Fourth Session of the African Union Ministerial Conference on Crime Prevention and Drug Control to discuss harmonization of legislation across countries and the creation of a coordination, collection and data processing organization to assess the drug and crime threat


Out of this diverse criminal activity  emerged a terrorism-financing network, led by Lebanese clan of Assad Ahmad Barakat, who according to the FBI and the U.S. Treasury Department was a key financier to Hezbollah. Barakat was arrested by Brazilian and Paraguayan authorities working in cooperation with the U.S. Government but his clan kept on sending money to Lebanon and elsewhere in Africa.

The Lebanese network operating in Bissau is the next link in the chain. It acts to distribute the drugs but mostly provides the environmental conditions that keep the business alive. President Nino Vieira’s policy during the last three years focused on allowing the Lebanese to do their business. In return he reaped considerable personal benefits, and the country itself benefited from a surge in foreign investments, mostly from the Middle East, that in in 2006 totaled over $42 million.

Put those numbers together and Tarek Aretzki’s Palace Hotel starts to make a little more sense. But Guinea Bissau’s role and ties in Latin America drug trafficking dynamics is not limited to its connections with the Triple Frontier. During the last few months Buenos Aires has turned into one of the major points of shipment for the cocaine smuggled into Africa, in particular to Guinea Bissau and South Africa (where traffickers are stored big quantities for the 2010 World Championships). 

On March 12th, 10  days after Vieira was killed, the Argentinean Collection Agency declared that the Consulate of Guinea Bissau in Buenos Aires was involved in criminal activities related to money laundering, drug trafficking and illegal arms trade. What possible connection is there between Argentina and Guinea Bissau? Arms trafficked from Argentina to Bissau, but mostly the shipments consisted of the base ingredients to produce ephedrine and meth, trafficked from South America to West Africa and then smuggled through Mexico -- eventually to the U.S.. All supervised by the Lebanese network in the Triple Frontier and in Bissau with the cooperation of then President Nino Vieira, in partnership with South American and Mexican cartels.

The position of Consulate of Guinea Bissau in Buenos Aires was held by an unconventional Honorary Consul; Enrique Oscar Montinel, who according to the Argentinian army register had died on March 11th, 1997. When I met him in his office to get my visa, in January 2009, he was alive and well; he asked questions on the purpose of my trip for two hours. Montinel appeared a little concerned when I told him I was a journalist, so I explained that the intention of my trip was to write an article for a travel magazine, to promote tourism in his country. I’m not sure he believed my story, but he stamped a six months visa on my passport and gave me some local contacts, including the president’s phone number. 

The Argentinean authorities started to investigate this case by mid August 2008, when the corpses of Sebastián Forza, Damián Ferrón and Leopoldo Bina were found not far from Buenos Aires. The three had been killed in perfect mafia style, in mysterious circumstances and all of them were in, or connected to, the pharmaceutical business.

A few months later Nestor Lorenzo, owner of the pharmaceutical Multipharma and a strong supporter of Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández Kirchner, Esteban Pérez Corradi (investigated for supplying ephedrine), Martín Magallanes and Marcelo Abasto (pharmacy and drugstore owners) and Walter Pérez (arrested for illegal medicines trade) were all investigated for ephedrine trafficking and illegal trade of medicines, considered to be the base for ephedrine and crystal meth.

All these people were “clients” of the Consulate of Guinea Bissau, which used to change cash into checks or checks into cash. The Consulate received the checks, charged a fee, and made operations through ghost companies. All such companies were exempt from paying taxes on the checks and the entire business was held locally by a bunch of former military involved in arms trafficking.

The Argentinean Prosecutor, Javier López Biscayart , estimates that for these services the Consulate was able to change up to $2 million a day. On June 5th he brought that trade to at least a temporary halt, by ordering that the Consulate by seized, as well as other buildings that had been controlled by Enrique Oscar Montinel.

Africa's Narco State 3

May 4, 2014, 11:44 am

≫ Next: Africa's Narco State 2

≪ Previous: Africa's Narco State 4

$

0

0

Hezbollah, al Qaida and the Lebanese Connection
The night-life in Bissau is usually so boring that sleeping is probably more exciting. After spending too many nights in my room I headed out one evening to the Palace Hotel -- a huge, Chinese-quality building on the way to the airport surrounded by a series of luxury bungalows that are always closed and empty.

A place like this, in a city like Bissau, makes no sense. On the hotel’s website there’s a quote from its owner, Algerian entrepreneur Tarek Arezki, declaring that he “wanted to achieve one of his dreams: to build a hotel.“ But why Bissau, the city that always sleeps, where in two months I didn’t see a single tourist and where business is so depressed that TAP, the only airline that flies to the country, operates just one flight a week?

The answer is evident in the hotel’s European-style disco-bar. This is the place in Bissau where drug traffickers and friends hang out at night, drinking bottles of whiskey that cost $100 and smoking puros imported from Cuba.

I decide to jump into the beating heart of Bissau’s night life  when a drunken guy who speaks French drags me out of the bar. I realize the situation is tense when five other guys materialize out of the blue: they are all Lebanese, with few good intentions. They ask me what I was doing at the bar and what was the purpose of my visit to the country. They tell me they know I'm a journalist.

“We all know what the foreign journalists look for in this country and I know your name, so if I see anything published from you that mentions drug trafficking I will find you, wherever you are.”

When I tell him he can’t threaten me, he smiles and replies that this wasn’t a threat. It was simple advice. After that, he calls his friends to take a group-picture, all together, so he’d have a souvenir of the night. Of course I can’t refuse. When he holds me for the picture I feel his gun against my body.

The Palace Hotel became famous on Friday, January 11th 2008, when the French intelligence and the Judiciary Police arrested Ould Sinda and Ould Sidi Chabarnou, two al Qaida terrorists from the Maghreb wing of the organization, the Baqmi. They had killed a family of four French tourists in Mauritania and then fled to Bissau, with the aim of reaching Conakry. They spent some days at the Palace pretending to be businessmen and never left the hotel, probably waiting for a contact or for instructions.

The presence of the Lebanese community and the arrest of the two terrorists in Bissau are an alarming sign. Since the 9/11 attacks West Africa has been directly connected to the global anti-western jihadist ambitions of Osama Bin Laden. Al Qaida made logistical inroads into West Africa, seeking to radicalize regional Islamist sentiment and to benefit from the pervasive influence of organized crime.

Reports by Interpol and United Nations agencies detail evidence that cocaine traded through West Africa accounts for a considerable portion of the income of Hezbollah and Hamas, the Islamist movements based respectively in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. These reports say Hezbollah uses the Lebanese Shi’a expatriate population in South America and West Africa to guarantee an efficient connection between the two continents.

In Latin America, both Hezbollah and Hamas are particularly active in Ciudad del Este, on the “tri-border area” where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay converge. This freewheeling border town is famous for cocaine trafficking, piracy and contraband goods, which are often smuggled across the Parana River into Brazil. Guinea Bissau is a strategically unique trait d’union between Latin America and Europe.

Operatives and supporters of Hizbollah are accused of being deeply involved in drug trafficking, smuggling and money laundering operations throughout South America and Africa by US military and intelligence officials. The officials point to a series of intelligence reports and the arrests of accused Hizbollah members as evidence that the group wields an unprecedented international fund-raising and operations network.

Working with US intelligence and anti-drug officials, Colombian authorities last October announced the arrest of at least 36 members of a cocaine-smuggling ring that trafficked drugs from Colombia and Brazil through way-stations in poor West African states by air, before sending the cargo on to Europe and the Middle East.

More than 100 suspects were arrested in Colombia and overseas on charges they trafficked drugs and laundered cash for Colombia's Norte del Valle cartel and for outlawed paramilitaries in a network that stretched from South America to Asia, the attorney's general office said.
Among those arrested in Colombia were three people suspected of coordinating drug smuggling to send some of their profits to groups such as Hezbollah, the office said.

Those suspects -- Chekry Mahmoud Harb, Ali Mohamad Abdul Rahim and Zacaria Hussein Harb -- used front companies to send drug cash overseas, it said without providing further details.

Chekry Harb, a Lebanese national who uses the nickname “Taliban”, was arrested as the leader of the group and described by Colombian and US authorities as a “world-class money launderer” who cycled hundreds of millions of dollars a year in drug proceeds through banks from Panama to Hong Kong to Beirut.

“The profits from the sales of drugs went to finance Hizbollah,” Gladys Sanchez, the lead investigator in Bogota, told the Los Angeles Times in October. “This is an example of how narco-trafficking is of interest to all criminal organisations.”

In South America, businesses run by members of sizeable Shiite communities in Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina and other countries often serve as cover for Hizbollah fund-raising cells.

To maintain and expand its political-social activities in the Shiite community in Lebanon and elsewhere, Hezbollah needs money. The estimated $120 million given annually by Iran is just a little slice of the cake. The United Nations estimated that international drug trade generates $322 billion annual revenue, making drugs by far the most lucrative illicit activity.

Most of Hezbollah’s support comes from drug trafficking, a major moneymaker endorsed by the mullahs through a particular fatwa. In addition to the production and trade of heroin in the Middle East, Hezbollah facilitates, for a fee, the trafficking of other drug smuggling networks, such as the FARC, in the case of cocaine.

The main reason why Guinea-Bissau became a major drug trafficking hub is its location and geographic characteristics. It is an archipelago of 90 islands, an inviting staging point along the route from Latin America to Europe, where the Euro is stronger than the US currency and the voracious appetite for coke is growing. When shipments from Latin America reach the cost of Guinea Bissau, the cocaine is broken into smaller consignments that are then sent by fast boats to the cost of Morocco and Senegal or moved in trucks through Mauritania and across the Sahara to the Mediterranean cost.  A startling 50 tons of cocaine is transported through West Africa each year, according to the latest United Nations estimates. The value of this illicit trade dwarfs entire economies and has the potential to corrupt the region's fragile states, which are just pulling out of decades of bitter civil wars.

Convoys of heavily armed four-wheel-drive vehicles travel through the Sahel, across regions controlled by a network of terrorists associated with al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. The Lebanese network based in Bissau makes business at the source, directly with the FARC, on behalf of Hezbollah. The associated al Qaida cells, based in the Sahel, receive a sort of fee when the smugglers cross their territories, in Mauritania.

According to the 2008 annual report of the International Narcotics Control Board, another worrying narco-business that is growing in West Africa – and also controlled by the Lebanese, according to Interpol -- is methamphetamines. Criminal networks with ties to Mexico are setting up fake pharmaceutical companies to transit substances used to make methamphetamines. These companies use fake import-permits to illegally divert ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, which are found in cold and flu medications and are ingredients in the highly addictive crystal meth. They then ship the substances to Mexico to feed drug manufacturers.

Ronald Noble, secretary general of the Interpol, confirms that cocaine trafficking in West Africa supported several Hezbollah operations in Lebanon as well as al Qaida since at least 2006. Analysts and counter terrorism experts explain that the Lebanese network controls and administers several illegal activities in West Africa. Cocaine trafficking is the more profitable but they also specialize in oil trafficking and rough-diamonds smuggling. In Nigeria, for example, 80,000 barrels of oil a day are siphoned from illegally tapped pipelines, for an estimated $4 billion in annual cash flows. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, al Qaida and Hezbollah have begun investing in diamonds.

Africa's Narco State 2

May 4, 2014, 11:44 am

≫ Next: Africa's Narco State 1

≪ Previous: Africa's Narco State 3

$

0

0

A confidential source close to the Interpol, who spoke in condition of anonymity, tells me that a private jet arrived in Bissau on Thursday, February 26, three days before the assassination of army chief Tagme Na Wai. 

The plane landed and took off a few hours later from but strangely there is no record of such aircraft at the airport’s flight traffic office. This same day 200 kilos of cocaine disappeared from the Navy’s storage; some soldiers known to be loyal to President Joao Bernardo Vieira were spotted loading the flight, by the hangar where the plane was parked.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Spanish Police confirm that it was July 12th when the N351SE Gulfstream proceeding from Venezuela jet landed in Bissau, loaded with 500 kilos of cocaine. The Guinean police immediately surrounded the jet and arrested three Venezuelans; they were  identified as Carmelo Vásquez Guerra, Carlos Luis Justiniano Núñez and Daniel Aguedelo Acevedo. Three policemen and two air traffic-control agents were also arrested and charged with complicity with the traffickers.

Five days later, the Interpol, in cooperation with the DEA and FBI, inspected the flight with a drug-sniffing dog, confirming that cocaine had been transported on the jet. But the drug had vanished. Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the UNODC confirmed later that “hundred of boxes (containing cocaine) had been taken out from this jet” and opened an investigation on the case, with the FBI, Interpol and DEA.

The interesting issue in this case, which shows connections with the Mexican drug cartels, is that pilot Carmelo Vasquez Guerra was investigated by the Mexican Police (# PGR/SIEDO/UEIDCS/117/2006), for a DC-9 jet, N900SA, also proceeding from Venezuela and loaded with 5 tons of cocaine, that landed in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, Mexico, on April 10t, 2006. During this operation Miguel Vasquez Guerra, Carmelo’s brother, was arrested along with five other members of the jet’s crew. The crew is reputed to have been part of the Chapo Guzman criminal organization, the most powerful among the Mexican drug cartels.

Chapo Guzman Captured April 2014

He was later taken into custody by Mexican authorities, and charged with flying an airplane packed with 128 identical suitcases filled with cocaine. Getting caught with  5.5 tons of cocaine would seem to call for some serious jail time. Reporters in Mexico assumed he’d been sent to prison. So imagine reporter Francisco Gomez of Mexico City's El Universal  surprise when he made a startling discovery:  Carmelo Vasquez Guerra—amazingly and inexplicably—had been released from prison less than two years after being arrested. 

But news about Carmelo kept coming, and kept getting worse. Gomez discovered that Mexico was not the only country to arrest Vasquez Guerra for the presumably major offence of flying container sized loads of cocaine, only to let him go. It's happened in three. Caught and released under mysterious and unexplained circumstances. in Mexico, in Guinea Bissau, and in Mali, home of Timbuktu.

Mexico's most wanted man,"El Chapo", or Shorty, heads the Sinaloa cartel, one of the biggest suppliers of Cocaine to the U.S. In 1993 was arrested in Mexico on homicide and drug charges. Escaped from federal prison in 2001, reportedly through the laundry, and quickly regained control of his drug trafficking organization, which he still controls today.

The cartel’s tentacles stretch from New York City to Buenos Aires and almost every major city in between. It has successfully penetrated government and security forces wherever it operates. It often opts for the bribe over the bullet and alliances over fighting, but it is not above organizing its forces to overrun areas that it wants to control by force. Its central bond is blood: many of its members are related by blood or by marriage. 

However, the cartel also often acts more like a federation than a tightly knit organization. The core of the group, the Beltran Leyva Organization, split from the rest in 2008. The Sinaloa Cartel has since created new alliances with former enemies in the Gulf Cartel and the Familia Michoacana. More shifts are to be expected as these alliances, even those formed by blood, are tenuous.

The state of Sinaloa has long been a centre for contraband in Mexico, as well as a home for marijuana and poppy cultivation. Nearly all of the trafficking organizations in Mexico have their origins in the region. They were, in essence, a small group of farming families that lived in rural parts of the state. In the 1960s and 1970s, they moved from the contraband trade into drugs, particularly marijuana. One of the first to traffic marijuana in bulk was Pedro Aviles, who later brought his friend's son, Joaquin Guzman Loera, alias "El Chapo," into the business.

Aviles was killed in a shootout with police in 1978. In the latter part of the 1970s, the various families branched into moving cocaine for Colombian and Central American traffickers, and shifted their operations to Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco. Their leaders included Rafael Caro Quintero, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. Working closely with the Honduran Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, the men came into contact with Colombia's Medellin Cartel. Matta Ballesteros lived part-time in Colombia, where he operated as the main intermediary between Mexican and Colombian traffickers, particularly the Medellin and Guadalajara Cartels. They established the patterns that we see repeated today: movement of bulk shipments of cocaine via air plane and boat to Central America and Mexico, then by land routes into the United States. The boldness of the Mexican traffickers became evident when they murdered undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique Camarena in 1985.

The death of Camarena was the beginning of the end of the Guadalajara Cartel. U.S. pressure forced Mexican authorities to act, and the leaders of the cartel fled. The remaining factions established bases in various parts of Mexico. The Arellano Felix brothers set up camp in Tijuana. The Carrillo Fuentes family moved to Juarez. Guzman and his partner, Hector Luis Palma Salazar, remained in the Sinaloa area.

The battles between these organizations began almost immediately. In November 1992, Guzman sent 40 gunmen to raid a Tijuana Cartel party in Puerto Vallarta, killing nine people. The Tijuana Cartel responded by trying to assassinate Guzman at the Guadalajara airport in 1993, killing a Mexican Cardinal instead. Guzman fled to Guatemala where he was arrested two weeks later. Palma Salazar was arrested in 1995.

The operations remained under the auspices of Joaquin's brother, Arturo Guzman Loera, Ramon Laija Serrano, and Hector, Alfredo and Arturo Beltran Leyva. Guzman maintained some control from prison, passing messages through his lawyers. He escaped in 2001, anticipating a decision to extradite him to the United States. He quickly resumed full control of the organization and assumed legendary status for constantly eluding capture.

In 2008 Mexican and Colombian traffickers laundered between $18 billion and $39 billion in proceeds from wholesale shipments to the U.S. Shorty, an alleged tunnels expert, is believed to have directed anywhere from a third to half of that during the past 8 years.


Business has boomed since Guzman's escape, especially following the incarceration and deaths of the Norte del Valle Cartel and Colombian paramilitary leaders, the two key suppliers of raw cocaine to the Sinaloa factions, and the incarceration and deaths of some of Guzman's Mexican rivals. Indeed, since his escape in 2001, Guzman implemented an ambitious plan. This began with a meeting Guzman organized in Monterrey with, among others, Ismael Zambada, alias "El Mayo," Arturo Beltran Leyva and Juan Jose Esparragoza Moreno, alias "El Azul." The four men are more than trafficking partners, they are of the same blood: cousins by marriage, brothers in law, or otherwise connected via the small communities they come from, which is why their group is often referred to as the "alianza de sangre" (blood alliance).

El Chapo Guzman

Together they planned the death in 2004 of Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, who was one of the heads of the Juarez Cartel. The group of traffickers, who authorities used to called the "Federation," now operates in 17 Mexican States, numerous cities in the United States, and from Guatemala to Argentina. By some estimates, it operates in as many as 50 countries.

In recent months the Sinaloa has suffered a number of blows, with rival groups eating into their territory. The Zetas may be trying to take Guadalajara, while Sinaloa breakaway groups Gente Nueva and Los Ms are struggling for control of Durango.


During the operation carried out in Bissau the Interpol was able to seize seven satellite phones. These were decrypted, providing important information about this net of drug traffickers. I meet Lucinda Barbosa in her office, at the Judiciary Police offices, to ask some questions about the jet that was seized in November.

“I’m fighting a war, alone, against someone that I will never defeat,” she said. “Look at our offices…We have nothing here. The international community keeps promising aid but we are working with just one car and most of our agents have had no salary for four months. Of course they are corrupted, they need to feed their families! How can we possibly compete with drug traffickers?” 

Then she locks the door, and picks up a folder from her desk. “I want to show you the situation we have here. If you want to investigate, you need a clear picture.” Lucinda opens the folders, and shows me a series of pictures taken with a mobile phone, by one of her informants, at the airport. They depict some soldiers, in uniform, unloading the private jet seized in November. Their faces aren't clearly visible, but a witness would be able to identify them.

“See? That’s how things work here. We had the flight, the pilot and the pictures. We also had the drugs but then it vanished… This would have been an easy trial in your country, but here nothing happened. The judge said the pictures don’t show any evidence and now that the drug has gone, the trial is dead. I’m really sick of that and I feel alone.” 

From the day this plane was seized, the equilibrium between the Army and President changed and Bissau streets turned more violent. Bubo Na Tchuto, former Chief of the Navy, was arrested in November and fled to Gambia a few hours after. The president’s compound was assaulted in December in what appeared to be more a settling of scores than an attempted coup d’etat. At least 15 people died in drug-related crimes. The assassination of the General and the President were just the last chapter of a series.

President Nino Viera was aware of the power that his generals were gradually gaining and began to feel isolated. The jet issue of November 2008 added more problems and so he decided, investigators believe, to eliminate all those who were putting at risk his business. They say the goal was to strengthen his position at home – and to regain control over the drug trafficking trade. He needed to show the Latin American drug cartels that Guinea Bissau was still a convenient place for their business.

Vieira, who was known for the brutality of his methods, decided to use his skills. The first to fall was the navy chief, who fled because he knew that if he stayed he would be killed. With Army chief Batista Tagme Na Wai the president knew there would be no room for mercy or for mistakes – which is why Tagme was blown to smithereens.