War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jun 05, 2012 5:23 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:Having seen how the Stratfor sausage gets made, I would consider processing their output to be a net loss of knowledge.

That is an undeniably awesome graphic, though.


Given their level of ethics I would not be surprised if it were contracted directly by one of the Mexican/US government agencies involved in the drug war, or by one of the cartels, or otherwise skewed in a way Stratfor hopes will please a client.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby Jeff » Thu Jun 28, 2012 7:53 am

By Mark Karlin

How Can We Stop the Mexican Drug Insanity When Banks and Much of the Establishment Profit Big Time from Illegal Drugs?

Corruption in the drug war extends far beyond the hands of drug cartels - our own banks, businesses, and government profit from illegalization of drugs.

June 26, 2012

US Banks Love Real Dollars, and Illegal Drug Money Comes in Cash

A recent article in The Guardian UK offers evidence that "while cocaine production ravages countries in Central America, consumers in the US and Europe are helping developed economies grow rich from the profits."

According to The Guardian UK story, the study by two Colombian professors found that "2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country [Columbia], while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries."

One of the researchers, Alejandro Gaviria said: "We know that authorities in the US and UK know far more than they act upon. The authorities realize things about certain people they think are moving money for the drug trade - but the DEA [US Drug Enforcement Administration] only acts on a fraction of what it knows."

"It's taboo to go after the big banks," added Gaviria's co-researcher Daniel Mejía. "It's political suicide in this economic climate, because the amounts of money recycled are so high."

...



http://www.alternet.org/story/156048/ho ... 4&rd=1&t=6
User avatar
Jeff
Site Admin
 
Posts: 11134
Joined: Fri Oct 20, 2000 8:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jul 16, 2012 2:07 am


http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/13/ ... xico/print

Weekend Edition July 13-15, 2012

The Big Sham Continues
Summer of Rage in Mexico?


by PAUL IMISON



Mexico City.

If Mexican democracy means anything to you, then don’t look to the country’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) – the authority responsible for organizing fair and transparent elections – to defend it. For the second consecutive election, IFE has displayed its contempt for a fair vote by showing an enormous bias towards the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)/National Action Party (PAN) axis that will presumably always dominate Mexican politics.

The PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto is officially the president-elect. Despite evidence gathered by both defeated leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and the #YoSoy132 pro-democracy movement to show that vote-buying, threats and ballot-tampering were widespread on July 1, he will likely remain so – in large part thanks to IFE’s refusal to condemn what AMLO’s Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) has called “the dirtiest election in Mexico’s history.”

For the record, the official count (after the partial recount) by IFE goes like this: Enrique Peña Nieto with 38.21% (19.2 million votes), AMLO with 31.59% (15.9 million votes) and Josefina Vazquez Mota of the incumbent PAN with 25.41% (12.3 million votes).

IFE is trying to brush this whole nasty business under the carpet. International heavyweights from Barack Obama to the EU to Hugo Chavez have officially recognized the result. All that’s left is for the Mexican people to vent their frustration, and how.

Last weekend saw another anti-Peña Nieto march of approximately 70,000 people shake Mexico City and there’ll be yet another tomorrow. Rumors surfaced that the PRI was trying to infiltrate last Saturday’s protest in order to make trouble and discredit the pro-democracy movement, leading #YoSoy132 to distance itself from the march; thankfully, no such trouble emerged. Nor is there a great threat of police repression in Mexico City, which AMLO’s PRD has held for fifteen years and where peaceful protest is actually encouraged – unlike many other parts of the republic.

At the same time as the march took place, Televisa – the country’s largest television network and de facto PRI-TV – was broadcasting the fairytale wedding of soap actors Eugenio Derbez and Alessandra Rosaldo from a church in the capital’s wealthy Coyoacan district. Televisa has virtually ignored the pro-democracy demonstrations since they began in mid-May and has portrayed AMLO as a polarizing rabble-rouser – not to mention a “danger to Mexico” – for years.

Inevitably, a small group of protesters showed up at the church, occupying the quaint colonial streets as the telenovela glitterati pulled up in their Ferraris. Make no mistake; the pro-democracy protests in Mexico, as elsewhere in the world, are very much a case of the 1% versus the Rest.

The Resistance Gathers Steam

The same day, #YoSoy132 groups from around the country met in the state of Morelos to discuss how to move the struggle forward now that Peña Nieto’s victory is almost certain to stand. Initially, the movement was against what it called the “imposition” of the PRI candidate by the mainstream media; now, they want to prove to the world that the election was stolen.

Students from 25 universities around Mexico attended the meeting at the core of which was a proposal for a national student movement not only opposing the election result but also the neoliberal agenda that both the PRI and the right-wing PAN have been force-feeding Mexicans since the 1980s. In a sign o’ the times, the students discussed the experiences of the Occupy movement, Los Indignados of Spain, and the student movements in Canada and Chile as part of the debate.

Among its aims, #YoSoy132 is pushing the country’s Federal Commission on Competition (CFC) to allow it to oversee the bidding process for a third open television network to take place in November this year. Currently, Mexican television is dominated by Televisa and TV Azteca, networks owned by two of the richest men in the country and heavily-biased towards the PRI/PAN duopoly.

Yesterday AMLO gave his final word (for now) on the election result, presenting 500 pages’ worth of evidence including 300 videos and 400 citizen testimonies to the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF), along with a claim that the PRI spent some US$297 million on Peña Nieto’s campaign, vastly exceeding IFE’s official cap of $25 million.

AMLO cited a violation of Article 41 of the constitution relating to objective and fair elections, with accusations including the use of illegally obtained money by PRI governors, the use of opinion polls as propaganda, IFE’s inability (or unwillingness) to control campaign spending, and illegal expenditure on construction projects to sway voters in favor of Peña Nieto.

Throw in the use of $170 million on thousands of prepaid gift cards from supermarket chain Soriana and another $29 million on phone cards carrying Peña Nieto’s image to buy votes. In a reassuring display of karma, Soriana reportedly lost $414 million of business in just nine days as people boycotted the chain.

Tellingly, there was no talk of the kind of mobilization of AMLO’s support base that came in 2006 after the disputed election defeat to President Felipe Calderon. The Occupy-style protests by his supporters that summer led to much internal strife within the PRD, and Marcelo Ebrard, current Mexico City mayor, has already announced his intention to seek the party’s candidacy for 2018.

Yet as #YoSoy132 is showing through video and photographic evidence it has uploaded to its website, vote-buying was not the only cause for concern. Voters were turned away at booths around the country on the grounds that they had run out of ballots, while police in PRI-governed states were filmed harassing people who tried to denounce vote-buying and other kinds of fraud.

This is what IFE calls the “most transparent election in Mexican history” and a “fraud-proof electoral system” in which, according to IFE president Leonardo Valdes Zurita, the only mistakes were “human errors.”

The PRD has naturally requested support from the right-wing PAN, whose candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota came third, in denouncing the fraud and pushing for a thorough investigation. The PAN was decidedly coy at first, but in an effort to appear vaguely relevant – the party was trounced at the polls – has since come out to (timidly) condemn the evidence of vote-buying. In a radio interview on Monday, Felipe Calderon – AMLO’s nemesis in 2006 – called the foul play “unacceptable” but questioned whether it would be enough to annul the election.

The “International Community” Calls It

Despite the overwhelming evidence, the likelihood of anyone stopping Peña Nieto from taking office on December 1 is slim. Part of the blame must surely go to the “international community”, which moved fast to recognize the PRI candidate’s victory. In the past week, Peña Nieto has given a slew of interviews to the US media where he spoke of strong co-operation with Washington while maintaining the integrity of Mexican sovereignty (i.e. no US troops on Mexican soil) – basically the spiel of every Mexican government since the Revolution.

In fairness, Raul Castro also congratulated Peña Nieto, although that has been a standard tradition of the Cuban government since the 1960s given Mexico’s historical tolerance of Havana. There was greater surprise when Hugo Chavez officially recognized the victory on Saturday. At least that should dispel the myth propagated by the Mexican Right that Chavez funded AMLO’s campaign in 2006…

As for asking Washington to stand up for democracy in Latin America, forget about it. Besides supporting coups d’etat against the Left in Honduras and Paraguay – along with a close-run thing in Ecuador – the Barack Obama administration’s policy in the region has been to thwart progressive, independent governments at every turn.

Let’s recall, for example, how the Obama administration greeted the news of Vladimir Putin’s election in Russia in December: “Russian voters deserve a full investigation of all credible reports of electoral fraud and manipulation and we hope in particular that then Russian authorities will take action,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time.

Likewise, Daniel Ortega’s re-election victory in Nicaragua in October was described by Clinton as a “setback to democracy”, together with a vow of “aggressive scrutiny” of the future of US aid and loans to the country.

Compare this to Mexico. After Obama personally called Peña Nieto to congratulate him, a White House statement confirmed: “The President reiterated his commitment to working in partnership with Mexico [including] promoting democracy, economic prosperity, and security in the region and around the globe.” Peña good; Putin, Chavez, Ortega and Lugo bad.

$500 billion of trade (not including the drugs), the flow of oil, defense sales, the Merida Initiative security agreement – which is about far more than just the drugs – and Mexico’s support for the neoliberal model all ensure it will remain a close US ally under Peña Nieto.

What’s next? Nobody knows. The pro-democracy and anti-fraud protests look set to rage all summer along. If this were Nicaragua, Russia or Iran, you’d face a barrage of TV coverage and outright sympathy for the protesters “bravely” opposing an “illegitimate” regime. As it happens, you can expect the protesters in Mexico to receive as much love from the western media as those in Bahrain, Paraguay, Spain, or New York.


Paul Imison lives in Mexico. He can be reached at paulimison@hotmail.com

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jul 16, 2012 2:12 am

Another drug war article that could fit the Wall Street crime threads.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/0 ... 58943.html

July 16, 2012
The Huffington Post

Mexican Drug Cartel Laundered Money Through BofA, FBI Alleges

By Alexander Eichler
Posted: 07/09/2012 11:03 am Updated: 07/09/2012 2:51 pm

(photo)
Jose Trevino Morales, left, leads racehorse Mr Polito after his victory at the 2010 All American Futurity race. Morales is accused of helping launder money from the Los Zetas drug cartel through accounts at Bank of America.


Drug money has a way of sprawling. And some of it may have reached Bank of America. [GASP!]

A federal probe into Los Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel, claims that the group has been laundering money through accounts at BofA, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal.

An FBI affidavit filed in Texas last month says that the Mexican drug cartel has been reportedly funneling cash through a Texas-based racehorse business with BofA accounts. The U.S. government has described Los Zetas in the past as "the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico." Tremor Enterprises LLC, the horse business, was for its part allegedly run by Jose Trevino Morales, a U.S. citizen with two brothers in Los Zetas.

In the past, Mexican drug syndicates have allegedly used BofA accounts to buy planes to transport cocaine, according to Bloomberg. Between 2004 and 2007, the bank was also the alleged destination for almost $10 million in illicit funds from an influential political family in Equatorial Guinea.

BofA has admitted such errors in the past. In 2006, officials acknowledged they'd failed to catch South American clients laundering $3 billion through one of its Manhattan branches, according to The New York Times.

Just to be clear, BofA hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing, and according to sources cited by the WSJ, the bank is cooperating with the FBI investigation.

Still, if Los Zetas has indeed been shifting a million dollars a month through accounts held at BofA, as the federal probe claims, it suggests the bank might still have some kinks to work out in its defenses against money laundering.



Oh please!

This article suggests nothing other than that BoA has for a change been caught doing business as usual, and is now scrambling to separate itself from its fellow criminals, the Zetas. Don't expect it to lead to any prosecution of the bank, especially thanks to the attitude that HuffPo also exemplifies in its exonerating last sentence. The cartels bloody well know why they prefer to do business with Bank of America.

Defenses against money laundering!
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby Luther Blissett » Mon Oct 22, 2012 1:28 pm

The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Nov 27, 2012 2:03 pm



http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/27/ ... rior/print
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.

November 27, 2012
The Nightmare’s Over
Goodnight to President Felipe Calderon, the Drug Warrior

by PAUL IMISON

Recall the classic scene in Scarface where a raging drunk Tony Montana tells a restaurant full of Miami’s 1%: “Say goodnight to the bad guy! It’s the last time you’re gonna see a bad guy like this again!”

Those are surely the words that Mexican President Felipe Calderon would like to cry as he metaphorically staggers out of office (rumors of his alcoholism are rife) on December 1. The cover of the country’s left-wing news weekly Proceso says it all: “The nightmare’s over”. In the last six years, the man’s been blamed for everything; he’ll go down as one of the worst presidents in Mexican history whether he truly deserves to or not.

So say goodnight to the bad guy; beloved amigo of two White House administrations, loyal defender of the IMF, “drug warrior” extraordinaire, and a man who tens of thousands of Mexicans have asked the International Criminal Court to investigate for war crimes.

Whatever else he may have achieved, Calderon’s term will ultimately be remembered for one thing: the 90,000 murders on his watch; the majority of them a result of his multi-billion dollar, fully-loaded “Drug War”, which has seen both the military and the country’s heavily-armed organized crime groups go for broke. Under the circumstances, poverty, unemployment and dire wages are just par for the NAFTA-era course.

The kiss-off is that Calderon’s “sexenio (six-year term) of doom” also led to the re-election of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) this past July as voters abandoned his National Action Party (PAN) in droves. The old guard – which ruled Mexico as a de facto dictatorship for 71 years – returns Saturday in the form of ultra-telegenic Enrique Peña Nieto, already a You Tube hit for his Bush-like gaffes, cruddy English and public appearances with drug-traffickers. The nightmare’s over? Fat chance.

In classic PRI style, Peña Nieto overspent the $25 million campaign limit by well over 1000% and was heavily supported by corporate media in what protest movements called an “imposition” on the electorate. Following a whitewash of an investigation into alleged coercion and vote-buying, the country’s Federal Electoral Tribunal ratified the election on September 6.

Despite Calderon telling everyone back in January that the PRI would return to power “over his dead body”, the transition has been unerringly smooth, prompting many to suspect a pact between the two to keep out the populist (i.e. chavista) left. Calderon even turned away from his own party in refusing to condemn the PRI’s foul play. Looks like bad guys stick together, after all.

Give War a Chance

These were six years of scandal and bloodshed from the get-go. On July 2, 2006, Calderon defeated leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) by just 0.56% of the vote and faced months of “Occupy”-style protests in Mexico City by those claiming his victory was a fraud. The protests followed Calderon all the way to his inauguration where he was ushered into congress at midnight under heavily-armed guard while PAN and PRD deputies literally brawled on the chamber floor.

A month after taking office, Calderon did a “George Dubya” and notoriously appeared in military garb at an Army base in Michoacan. Ready to officially declare his Washington-backed war on organized crime, he hyped the unstoppable might of the Mexican armed forces; many of whose highest-ranking officers have essentially administered drug-trafficking for years.

There was indeed a bloody rivalry among Mexico’s drug mafia but only 16% of citizens believe the country is safer since Calderon sent tens of thousands of troops onto the nation’s streets. Massacres and gun battles have become a daily occurrence; extortion, kidnapping and other crimes have soared as the “drug cartels” diversify. Calderon boasts that he has captured or killed 25 of the country’s most wanted drug lords (“the kingpin strategy”) but on the eve of his departure, organized crime looks stronger and more deeply-rooted than ever.


Eleven mayors or ex-mayors have been murdered this year. Tens of thousands of people have been murdered and dumped, death squad style, often in very large numbers of dead per incident. Units of the army are doing most of the killing on behalf of competing "kingpins."


The “war” has been nothing more than an attempt to unify the $40-60 billion Mexican drug trade under the umbrella of the Sinaloa Cartel, Calderon’s favorite narco group. The Sinaloa Cartel’s takeover of border cities like Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo backed by the military and federal police has simply led to brutal violence, but most shocking is the impunity. In 2010, Mexico’s Attorney General admitted that only 5% of the then-22,000 gang-related murders had been investigated while barely 28% of federal arrests even make it to trial.

With a weak judiciary, the strategy has been pure repression. Street-level gang members are cannon fodder; the wealthiest drug lords are left alone or handed some cushy protection deal. Any of them who might prove inconvenient usually wind up dead. As for the military’s role, official complaints against the Army for human right abuses are in the thousands.

Dirt will continue to emerge over just how deeply Calderon’s administration was penetrated by the Sinaloa Cartel. Contrary to the myth that Mexican journalists have been silenced by the country’s violence, there has been some absolutely outstanding work done on just how far the corruption goes. 60-70% of elections in Mexico show evidence of having been penetrated by organized crime and all three major parties – including the left – have been implicated in what former UN security advisor Edgardo Buscaglia calls a “pact of impunity” among the country’s political class.

It’s the Economy, Estupido

As for the economy, ignore the hype that Mexico is the next BRIC in the wall, or the ‘m’ in TIMBI – or whatever the latest fad among free trade gurus. Extreme poverty has risen to nearly 20% under twelve years of supposedly inclusive, “democratic” PAN governments. The country is officially the second most unequal among OECD states, with ineffective social programs and institutionalized corruption as key as NAFTA in Mexico’s sluggish and top-heavy growth.

Calderon’s term was all about “structural reforms” – energy, labor and fiscal reforms – that were repeatedly blocked by the leftist PRD and a faux-populist PRI (their very name, the “Institutional Revolutionary Party”, sums up the ideological paradox they represent). The PRI will nevertheless now pursue exactly the same reforms at the behest of Mexico’s elite; the party’s congressional head, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, has said such reforms are essential if the country wants to emerge from “mediocrity”.

By “mediocrity”, he means that as many as 70% of the country’s 115 million inhabitants live in poverty, eight million young people are without work or studies, and nearly half of the labor force toils away in the informal economy. The government’s response is simply to make life easier for foreign investors and hope that they mop up the mess: Wal-Mart is currently the country’s largest employer.

One of Calderon’s much-hyped achievements was expanding public health coverage to isolated rural communities via the Seguro Popular program; the very least the Mexican government owes its people. But without any genuine investment in the future, such programs don’t even begin to address the issues behind the country’s inequality. Earlier this year, for example, Raramuri Indians in the arid northern state of Chihuahua were dying of starvation. While countries like Brazil and Venezuela have been praised for reducing dire poverty, Mexico’s ostensibly similar social programs have had little meaningful effect.

Foreign capital, of course, has its own agenda. Part of the pact made between Calderon and Peña Nieto following this year’s election was clearly PRI support for a controversial labor reform that NAFTA hawks have been obsessing over since the 1990s. Designed to make the workforce as pliable and disposable as possible, the initiative was never going to pass without a deal being cut; the president overlooking evidence of electoral fraud in order to rush the bill through before the new left-heavy legislature could block it.

One unquestionable positive to come out of the Calderon administration was the passage of much-needed immigration reform (are you reading, Mr Obama?) designed to protect vulnerable migrants, most of whom come from Central America and use Mexico as a stepping stone on the way north. The reform passed unanimously owing to an appalling massacre in Tamaulipas two years ago that left 72 migrants dead. Yet activists and human rights campaigners remain sceptical; as many as 70,000 migrants have gone missing in Mexico since 2006. The change in the law – which will grant semi-legal status to such people – is a glimmer of hope rather than a victory.

Down the PAN

One big question is what comes next for the PAN; a smoldering wreck of a party after it took a decisive beating in the July 1 polls, largely on account of the “Drug War” fiasco. When it came time to select a candidate for this year’s presidential race, the party swung away from Calderon’s pick, Finance Minister Ernesto Cordero – probably the safer bet – and towards the lightweight Josefina Vazquez Mota whose campaign flopped big time.

The party’s now split between the calderonistas and current party chief Gustavo Madero who knows the PAN needs a face-lift before it can again do electoral battle with the PRI. As such, Madero wants a national conference to discuss the future of the party. The calderonistas wanted it to take place while their boss was still in office; the Madero faction successfully had it put back until Calderon and his goons are gone.

The PAN, founded in 1939 by right-wing Catholics and today a socially-conservative big business party, now risks sinking into irrelevancy and seeing the center-left PRD become the nation’s main opposition party. Indeed, the PRD and its allies will form the second biggest force in congress from December 1 and enjoy a sizable presence in the senate.

The PRD has everything to gain. Hugely popular in Mexico City, which it has governed since 1997, over the next six years the party will eschew the anti-imperialist rhetoric of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known to everyone as AMLO) and reposition itself as a “safe” centrist alternative through the candidacy of outgoing Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard. If the affable Ebrard can do what many expect and steal a chunk of the middle-class vote, they could overtake the PAN for good.

Things are never, ever simple on the Mexican left, however. On September 9, two-time presidential candidate AMLO announced he was finally severing ties with the PRD after 23 years and will turn his activist-based National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) into a fully-fledged political party. This will certainly divide the left vote and likely result in another victory for the PRI in 2018. AMLO remains an icon to millions.

Just don’t be surprised to see them kiss and make up before then. The interpersonal drama on the Mexican left blows away any telenovela you’ve seen; although this is the most serious split since the PRD was founded in 1989.

Harvard Awaits!

While he divides opinion like nobody else in Mexico, Felipe Calderon has been widely praised internationally; being exactly the kind of leader the bigwigs in Washington and Brussels like to see run the show down south. When Mexico hosted the G-20 summit in June, he stood side by side with Obama and other global heavyweights in backing market reforms and IMF bailouts as the keys to development and recovery. Given Latin America’s shift to the left in recent years, Calderon has closer allies in the US, Canada, Spain and Britain than he does in his own backyard.

His relationship with both the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations has been exemplary (in a neo-colonial sense), even if like any Mexican president he has to occasionally scold The Big Gringo for its rabid drug consumption, woefully lax gun laws and degrading treatment of immigrants. While the voto latino was crucial in the recent US election, Mexico itself was notable by its absence in the debates.

It should come as no surprise then that Calderon will shortly move his family to the US. With a citizens’ petition to the International Criminal Court accusing him of crimes against humanity for the 70,000-odd “Drug War” deaths, he’ll have been buoyed by the news that Washington granted immunity to former president (and Yale professor) Ernesto Zedillo, currently being sued in a civil case for his role in the 1997 Acteal massacre.

Calderon was linked to a teaching post in Austin until UT’s sizable Hispanic body fiercely protested the idea of him joining their faculty. Harvard now looks a safer bet, where he’ll no doubt preach the virtues of free trade and Colombian-style “democratic security”. Like most former LatAm “drug warriors”, he’ll also surely come out in favor of legalization at some point – six years too late.


Most of them slip my mind but Harvard/JFK and the rest are full of the disgraced former leaders pretending to be professors. A sinecure for Papandreou, Sanchez Gonzalez (Bolivia's "Goni"), even Gorbachev...


As for Mexico, those voters who turned away from calderonismo this July in the hope that the PRI will restore much-needed public security and growth are sure to be disappointed. The PRI, once defiantly nationalistic, is now just another neoliberal party and has thus far offered little of change in the fight against organized crime. Major protests by students, unions and other social movements are already planned for Peña Nieto’s inauguration on Saturday as yet another “bad guy” takes the helm.

Paul Imison lives in Mexico. He can be reached at: paulimison@hotmail.com

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby DrEvil » Wed Nov 28, 2012 5:21 pm

Looking at the recent moves towards legalization and decriminalization around the world, with people like Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan supporting it, I have to wonder what the cartels are thinking. According to the almighty wikipedia the global drug trade constitutes about 1% of global commerce (roughly $400 billion), about the same size as oil and guns.

One would think that the cartels would go to pretty extreme lengths to keep that cash flow.

On the other hand - I'm a bit surprised that the banks haven't jumped on the legalization bandwagon. Sure, they make plenty of money laundering for the cartels, but outright owning the whole drug trade would probably increase profits a lot. Maybe they're a bit vary of trying a hostile takeover of the cartels (But I would love to see them try :) ).

Edit: I just remembered reading something years ago. Apparently Philip Morris have had the designs, logos and packaging for various drugs ready for years, on the off chance that they might one day be able to use them. I have no idea where I originally saw this, and I can't be bothered to check. Facts so often get in the way of a good story.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
User avatar
DrEvil
 
Posts: 3972
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Jan 05, 2013 6:16 pm

Interesting perspective on drug war in Mexico.




Weekend Edition December 28-30, 2012

A Political Time Warp
The PRI and Loathing in Mexico City


by PAUL IMISON



Mexico City.


Welcome to a new era in Mexico – or so some would have you believe. Twelve years after finally losing power in the democratic transition of 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), aka “the dinosaur”, is back and attempting to rebrand itself as the medicine that Mexico needs in these blood-soaked neoliberal times. True to form, the T. Rex started making waves the day that party golden boy Enrique Peña Nieto took office on December 1st.

It’s a return of the party that governed Mexico for 71 consecutive years (1929-2000) and created the hugely corrupt and desperately undemocratic political system that prevails to this day. Blame former president Felipe Calderon of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) whose ill-advised, corruption-drenched “Drug War” took well over 60,000 lives in the past six years. Not to mention near-stagnant economic growth, rising poverty and the countryside devastated by US agricultural imports – all of which can, of course, be traced back to the PRI era and were merely reinforced by the “Christian democratic” PAN.

Welcome to Mexico’s political time warp.

Protests against Peña Nieto’s inauguration and the highly-manipulative, illegally-financed election campaign that brought him to power had been planned for months but nobody anticipated the controversy that ensued. As protesters clashed with police in Mexico City, over a hundred people were arrested (all but fourteen were soon released for lack of evidence). One protester lost an eye while a 67-year old theater director is still in a medically-induced coma after a near-fatal blow to the head from a tear gas canister.

The protesters, led by the vibrant #YoSoy132 pro-democracy movement, were overwhelmingly peaceful but a few isolated groups smashed windows and caused an alleged US$1.7 million of damage in the capital’s downtown, primarily targeting hotels, banks and businesses belonging to Citigroup, Wal-Mart and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

The heavy-handedness of the police was ultimately blamed on the power vacuum as the presidency changed hands. Fingers have been pointed at Mexico City’s center-left mayor (and likely presidential candidate in 2018) Marcelo Ebrard. Cops who were present that day told the media that orders came directly from Ebrard’s Chief of Police Manuel Mondragon y Kalb.

The #YoSoy132 movement, whose members diligently documented fraud during the electoral process and have remained resolutely non-partisan, has always stressed pacifism in its marches and naturally distanced itself from the riots. Evidence has emerged, however, that the PRI paid groups of thugs to carry out the violence with a view to defaming #YoSoy132 and other legitimate protesters. Such shenanigans, backed by a compliant media, were a classic party tactic to discredit social movements during its seven-decade regime.

Welcome to the PRI’s “soft” authoritarianism.

In an unexpected twist, the Zapatistas (also known as the EZLN) are back too, and how we’ve missed them. On December 21st, the Chiapas-based rebels-turned-social-activists came out in numbers not seen for years, marching silently on five cities in the impoverished southern state – the same cities they (briefly) occupied by force in January 1994. Their pre-Christmas comunicado to the Mexican people – on the day that the Mayan calendar entered a new era and also the fifteenth anniversary of the 1997 Acteal massacre – went as follows, and beautifully sums up the challenges ahead:

To Whom It May Concern:

Did you hear it?

It’s the sound of their world ending.

It’s that of ours resurging.

The day that was the day, was night.

The night will be the day that will be the day.

Democracy! Liberty! Justice!

The Man Behind the Quiff

So just who is this magnificent media creation, Enrique Peña Nieto? Debate still rages as to whether he’s “old PRI” or “new”. New in the sense that his mentor is Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the grand neoliberal president of the 1990s (a generation of Mexican power-brokers known as the technocrats) or old in that he hails from Mexico State, the most powerful party stronghold in the country. Enormous Estado de Mexico, which surrounds Mexico City on three sides, is home to some 15 million (mostly impoverished) souls and has long been a hotbed of corruption and organized crime.

Carlos Salinas was one of the most loathed presidents in Mexican history. This is a guy who doesn’t blame exploitative trade agreements like NAFTA for the country’s economic underperformance and grinding poverty; he blames the lack of further neoliberal reforms. And here they come: the tearing up of the worker-friendly 1970 Federal Labor Law is already in the bag thanks to a last-minute pact between the incoming administration and Felipe Calderon’s PAN in October.

On a visit to Washington shortly before his inauguration, Peña Nieto was described by US President Barack Obama as “a man who likes to get things done”. Tellingly, Mexico’s new president has hired the same PR firm as fellow Latin American right-wingers Alvaro Uribe and Porfirio Lobo with a view to polishing his international image. Cue articles everywhere from The Economist to Foreign Affairs hyping the promise of Mexico’s new era, “new PRI”, and new-found respect for democracy.

Peña Nieto followed in the footsteps of his uncle Arturo Montiel Rojas, winning the governorship of Mexico State in 2005, at which point he was immediately hyped by a PRI-friendly media as the country’s future president. At 46 years old, Peña is a housewife’s favorite and a glamorous antidote to the former ruling party’s “Jurassic PRI” image. A widower, his love life was splashed all over the society pages when he met actress Angelica Rivera in 2008. “The Seagull”, as she’s known, just happens to be a superstar for the dominant, PRI-sponsored Televisa network.

The president is personal friends with some of the most powerful business figures in the country, including Jorge Hank Rhon and World’s Richest Man Carlos Slim. As governor of Mexico State, he prided himself on eye-catching public works projects that saw multi-million dollar contracts handed out to his cronies in the Atlacomulco Group (the state’s ruling political-business elite) and Spanish construction firm OHL.

He’s also friends with current and ex-PRI governors, generals and other figures closely linked to the country’s drug mafia. A cartel member enrolled in the previous administration’s controversial Protected Witness program recently testified that the Sinaloa-based Beltran Leyva drug cartel had free rein at Mexico State’s Toluca Airport.

Those who did vote for Peña Nieto (some 19 million people) mainly came from poor rural areas where the PRI are masters at coercing voters with handouts and flashy infrastructure projects. Mexico’s urbanized middle class split its vote between right-winger Josefina Vazquez Mota of the incumbent PAN and leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). The former was undone by a lackluster campaign and association with lame duck Calderon; the left, as usual, was attacked beyond reason.

The jury’s still out on whether the return of the PRI signifies a return to the authoritarian-style politics of the past. Ostensibly, no; Mexico now has autonomous electoral institutions and Peña Nieto himself has touted the formation of an anticorruption commission but this is a country where such institutions are often barely allowed to function and even the electoral authorities repeatedly bow to political pressure.

Mexico’s “transition to democracy” in 2000 was always a ruse. By the 1990s, there was really no difference between the neoliberal agenda of the PRI and that of the PAN. Both parties bought the Washington Consensus wholesale and the PAN soon became marred by the same kind of corruption, cronyism and narco-politics that tarnished the dinosaur for so long. Many Mexicans just call them the “PRIAN” – a two-headed oligarchy bent on serving the interests of the country’s billionaires and foreign investment giants.

Part of the appeal of the PRI for voters was undoubtedly that the economy grew faster and the country developed more substantially during its 71-year reign; growth averaged 3.5% in the 1990s compared to 1.6% under the PAN’s Felipe Calderon. But that was then and this is now. Thanks to Calderon’s “macroeconomic stability” during the financial crisis, analysts are again hyping Mexico as the next big thing in the global economy. But when have they done anything else?

Peña Nieto’s first move as president was to urge the signing of a Pact for Mexico incorporating all three major parties. The participation of the left-leaning PRD was controversial. The Pacto por Mexico is supposedly a means of informally committing all three parties to common goals for the country’s future – namely further neoliberal policies – and has been viewed as a means of marginalizing debate as fiscal, energy, education and labor reforms take shape.

Drug War Redux

One of the biggest myths about the PRI’s return is that they will “make peace with the narcos”, thus ending the so-called “drug war” (and parallel inter-gang rivalry) instigated by President Felipe Calderon in 2006. The old regime was well-known for its tolerance of organized crime. This argument conveniently leaves out the fact that the disintegration of the “drug cartels” occurred not under the PAN but rather the PRI administrations of Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo a decade earlier. The first major gang war began in Tijuana in 1992.

Peña Nieto has vowed to reduce the country’s murder rate by half within five years. Yet despite the intense media coverage of Mexico’s violence, the nation’s homicide rate is actually half that of Colombia’s, roughly on a par with Brazil and six times less than that of Honduras’ per capita rate. In Mexico, however, barely 5% of these murders are ever solved. The brutality of the killings has also been astonishing.

As of right now, Mexico’s “drug cartels” can be split into two factions – one headed by Joaquin El Chapo Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel and the other by the notorious Zetas (billed as “narco-terrorists” on both sides of the border). One dominates the Pacific Coast, the other the Gulf, with various territories, or plazas, disputed in between. Cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez (the latter the world’s “murder capital” in 2009-10) have calmed considerably since the Sinaloa Cartel took control but there are still potential flashpoints throughout the country.

The myth, of course, is that it’s all about drugs. According to the UN, Mexican mafia groups participate in twenty-two different kinds of organized crime, of which drug-trafficking is just one. The Zetas, in particular, have increasingly turned to extortion, kidnapping and human-trafficking to boost their earnings, and are estimated to make less than 50% of their income from drugs.

All the hype about marijuana legalization in the US states of Washington and Colorado hitting the Mexican cartels for six is thus nonsense; cocaine is actually their most lucrative market, which they now dominate over Colombian groups, while they rake in millions from plenty of other activities as well. The real problem is impunity.

Peña Nieto says that his anti-crime policy will focus on protecting ordinary citizens rather than pursuing major drug lords in showy, made-for-the-cameras busts (Felipe Calderon’s “kingpin strategy”). He wants a National Police force to replace the PAN-created Federal Police (itself a reboot of previous incarnations) and will keep the military on the nation’s streets for now. In what likely amounts to more than just PR, he’s also recruited former chief of the Colombian National Police Oscar Naranjo as a “special advisor”.


The investigative news site Narco News has already drawn potential parallels between Peña’s drug war policy and Colombia’s under Naranjo; draw the main groups into a “Devil’s cartel” and end violent rivalries by creating one unified drug-trafficking organization whose disputes are mediated by the state.

Welcome to the pax narco of old.

The mainstream Mexican media: pretty much silent. Huge chunks of it are owned by wealthy oligarchs perennially associated with the old ruling party. Only the likes of La Jornada, Proceso and Contralinea – constantly written off as muck-raking, left-wing rags – cover Mexico’s reality, along with a vibrant and growing community of online activists and bloggers. Facebook and Twitter are now heavily-utilized as political and social organizing tools as well.

It will be interesting to see where the #YoSoy132 pro-democracy movement goes from here. The stated goal of the group was to act as a de facto opposition to Peña Nieto’s administration. They’re the contemporary heirs of the legendary student movement of ’68, which saw hundreds of its members massacred by PRI government forces at Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City ahead of that year’s Olympic Games.

Back in May, as it became clear that Peña Nieto was going to steal the election, #YoSoy132 said it wanted to inspire a “Mexican Spring”; the country isn’t quite at its Tahrir Square moment just yet, but the policies that the new government aims to implement are only likely to antagonize an increasingly frustrated population.


Paul Imison lives in Mexico. He can be reached at: paulimison@hotmail.com
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby Freitag » Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:40 am

Zetas Leader Captured

MEXICO CITY — The top leader of Mexico's most feared and violent drug-trafficking paramilitary cartel, the Zetas, was captured Monday, Mexican authorities announced, the first significant blow to organized crime in the young government of President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Mexican naval special forces seized Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, alias Z-40, before dawn Monday in Nuevo Laredo, a border city across from Laredo, Texas, in the state of Tamaulipas, long a Zeta stronghold, government security spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said.

Sanchez said Treviño Morales was wanted for numerous serious crimes including the slaughter of more than 260 migrants who were dumped into mass graves in Tamaulipas.

"It's worth emphasizing the cruelty with which he committed these acts," Sanchez said in a news conference.

Sanchez said that the navy, long considered Mexico's most efficient crime-busting organization, had mounted an extensive intelligence operation to track Treviño Morales to his headquarters near Nuevo Laredo. At 3:45 a.m., they zeroed in on him and his pickup with a helicopter and ground personnel, executing the capture "without firing a single shot," Sanchez said.

A load of guns and ammunition was discovered in the pickup, along with $2 million.
User avatar
Freitag
 
Posts: 615
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2011 12:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Sep 10, 2013 12:23 am

Following posted first by conniption at viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37134


The Guardian

'Mexico's war on drugs is one big lie'

Anabel Hernández, journalist and author, accuses the Mexican state of complicity with the cartels, and says the 'war on drugs' is a sham. She's had headless animals left at her door and her family have been threatened by gunmen. Now her courageous bestseller, extracted below, is to be published in the UK

Ed Vulliamy

The Observer, Saturday 31 August 2013

Jump to comments (248)


Image
Journalist and author Anabel Hernández, photographed for the Observer in Parque Mexico, Mexico City. Photograph: Adam Wiseman for the Observer

During January 2011, Anabel Hernández's extended family held a party at a favourite cafe in the north of Mexico City. The gathering was to celebrate the birthday of Anabel's niece. As one of the country's leading journalists who rarely allows herself time off, she was especially happy because "the entire family was there. There are so many of us that it's extremely difficult to get everybody together in one place. It hardly ever happens."

Image
Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers
by Anabel Hernandez, Roberto Saviano


Anabel Hernández had to leave early, as so often, "to finish an article", and it was after she left that gunmen burst in. "Pointing rifles at my family, walking round the room – and taking wallets from people. But this was no robbery; no one tried to use any of the credit cards – it was pure intimidation, aimed at my family, and at me." It was more than a year before the authorities began looking for the assailants. And during that time the threats had continued: one afternoon last June, Hernández opened her front door to find decapitated animals in a box on the doorstep.

Hernández's offence was to write a book about the drug cartels that have wrought carnage across Mexico, taking some 80,000 lives, leaving a further 20,000 unaccounted for – and forging a new form of 21st-century warfare. But there have been other books about this bloodletting; what made Los Señores del Narco different was its relentless narrative linking the syndicate that has driven much of the violence – the Sinaloa cartel, the biggest criminal organisation in the world – to the leadership of the Mexican state.

Her further sin against the establishment and cartels was that the book became, and remains, a bestseller: more than 100,000 copies sold in Mexico. The success is impossible to overstate, a staggering figure for a non-fiction book in a country with indices of income and literacy incomparable to the American-European book-buying market. The wildfire interest delivers a clear message, says Hernández: "So many Mexicans do not believe the official version of this war. They do not believe the government are good guys, fighting the cartels. They know the government is lying, they don't carry their heads in the clouds."

Hernández's book will be published in English this month with the title Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers, so that we in the English-speaking world that consumes so much of what the cartels deal, and which banks their proceeds, might learn the lie of "cops and robbers", of "upright society versus the mafia" – the received wisdom that still contaminates coverage of drug wars and the "war on drugs".

Two writers in particular have been pioneering the struggle to counter this untruth: one is Hernández, and the other is Roberto Saviano – author of Gomorrah, about the Camorra of Naples – who writes in a foreword to Hernández's English edition: "Narcoland shows how contemporary capitalism is in no position to renounce the mafia. Because it is not the mafia that has transformed itself into a modern capitalist enterprise, it is capitalism that has transformed itself into a mafia. The rules of drug trafficking that Anabel Hernández describes are also the rules of capitalism."

By the year 2000, Anabel Hernández had made a name for herself in Mexican journalism, on the daily paper Reforma. But in December of that year, she found herself personally caught up in the murky crossover between state and criminals when her father was kidnapped: a crime the family believes to have been unconnected to his daughter's work.

The police in Mexico City said they would investigate only if they were paid; the family refused, figuring – as sometimes happens – that the police would take the money without taking any action. When Mr Hernández was murdered, Anabel Hernández's resolve to nurture her craft – fearless of, and without illusions about, the establishment – was deepened by the outrage.

Within a year, Hernández had broken a scandal about the extravagance with which the winning presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, had decorated his personal accommodation using public funds – while campaigning on a ticket of economic austerity. Two years later, she was honoured by Unicef for her work on slave labour and the exploitation of Mexican girls entrapped in agricultural work camps in southern California. Before long, Mexico's drug war erupted, and Hernández turned her attention to this most perilous of subjects, and the most powerful man involved: Joaquín "El Chapo'" Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa cartel. In the depth of its depiction of the world's richest and most influential criminal, Hernández's book leaves every other account far behind.

Image
puente grande 2 Puente Grande State prison in Mexico, in which El Chapo ("Shorty") Guzman, head of the Sinaloa cartel was nominally incarcerated, but which he actually ran. Photograph: Getty Images

When Zulema Hernández (no relation) entered Puente Grande prison, convicted of robbery, she cannot have thought herself in for a happy time. But she could never have imagined the consequences of attracting the attention of the jail's most famous inmate, Guzmán, and becoming one of his lovers. The attentions of El Chapo ("Shorty") led Zulema to have two abortions, to being prostituted around the warders like "a piece of meat" and – once released – to her corpse being found in the boot of a car with the letter Z, epigram of Guzmán's main rivals, Los Zetas, carved into her buttocks, breasts and back.

If this appalling tale, past midway through Hernández's narrative, captures the squalidness of Mexico's drug war, another passage illustrates the way Guzmán ran the jail in which he was supposedly incarcerated, inviting his extended family in for a five-day Christmas party. Hernández also recounts the mysterious murders of the one senior public official who tried to expose the corruption at the jail at government level and the only warder who testified to it. And, most important, the fact that Guzmán did not "escape" from Puente Grande, as the lore has it, in a laundry truck – he walked free in police uniform, with a police escort, long after the chief of the prison service and deputy minister for public security arrived in response to the "news" of his escape.

Image
Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman A 2001 photograph shows druglord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman in jail in Mexico. Photograph: Corbis

For this is a book about, to use one of Anabel Hernández's best words, the "mafiocracy", rather than the mafia – about the mafia state. It is about how the old Guadalajara cartel of the 1980s was protected by the Mexican government just as its heir, Guzmán's Sinaloa syndicate, is now. It is about the rise of Genaro García Luna, whom Hernández accuses of being El Chapo's protector at the apex of government. "At first, I thought it would be difficult," she says. "I didn't think people would be ready to believe that the government is lying. That this is all one big lie."

A character appears throughout the book, called simply "The Informant" – one among many Hernández found during her five-year odyssey through the criminal world, and those supposedly fighting it. "And he told me when I started this in 2005: 'Don't do this. You're a woman and it's too dangerous.' But I had to – because of what had happened in my life, and because only when people understand what is going on can they change it."

The threats began when Hernández's book was published in Mexico in 2010 – and their story is interwoven into the book she has since written, Mexico in Flames. By this time she had become a mother of two children. "I received initial warnings that someone in the government wanted to sanction me," she says. "Even that someone wanted to have me killed. I didn't want to believe it, but I was told this on good authority – 'they want to kill you'. I'd come to know official cars well over the years, and one day when I was fetching my little child from school, there it was, one of them, an official one."

Whatever the motive of this menace, "I reported it immediately to the government's human rights commission. They opened a file, and I was allocated 24-hour protection." But then, earlier this summer, a sinister move: the authorities announced their intention to remove the escort, forcing her to cancel a number of trips to afflicted areas of the country to promote the new book.

"I fought the decision," says Hernández, "and they gave me back the escort – but beheaded animals continued to appear on my doorstep even after this, as recently as last June."

Image
Rafael Caro Quintero A 2005 picture of Rafael Caro Quintero, who was released last month on a technicality. Photograph: Getty Images

When Hernández visits Britain this month, she will be drawing attention not only to the agony of her country, but to the intimidation she has suffered and the murder of scores of her colleagues. This pogrom against the press is no "sideshow" or media obsession with itself – it is strategically integral to Mexico's drug war, and the taking of territory by the cartels.

One of Hernández's friends is the veteran reporter Mike O'Connor, who spent much of his childhood in Mexico, has covered conflict since America's "dirty wars" in Central America during the 1980s and now works full-time on behalf of Mexico's menaced reporters, based in Mexico City for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

"The silencing of the press and killing of journalists is integral to the reality, the big story, of what is happening here," explains O'Connor. "The cartels are taking territory. The government and authorities are ceding territory to the cartels and, for the cartels to take territory, three things have to happen. One is to control the institutions with guns – basically, the police. The second is to control political power. And, for the first two to be effective, you have to control the press."

Furthermore, he says, underlining the theme of his friend's book, "The inability of the government to really solve any of the crimes against journalists during the four years I've been here is a metaphor for its inability to solve crimes against common citizens. They simply cannot do it. And you wonder: if they can't solve these crimes, why not? Is it because they don't want to?"

What does Hernández feel about her less prominent colleagues on local papers, often compromised and threatened by cartels? It is a problem, she says, that "our reporters are not united in the face of these threats and murders", and she intends to "form a federation of solidarity, to build a group, a community, to make us stronger against the cartels and authorities".

"Many of these murders of my colleagues have been hidden away, surrounded by silence – they received a threat, and told no one; no one knew what was happening," she says. "We have to make these threats public. We have to challenge the authorities to protect our press by making every threat public – so they have no excuse."

The timing of this English edition of the book is fortuitous, feeding into the current news like a hand into a glove. The release last month of the cartel boss Caro Quintero by a Mexican federal court made headlines across the world; Quintero had been convicted of a part in the torture to death of a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Enrique "Kiki" Camarena in 1985. It's a murder which, in Hernández's account, throws light on both Mexican government and CIA complicity in drug trafficking, a narrative that exposes a deep root of the present drug war.

The court released Quintero on a legal technicality, but Hernández says now: "Mexico's government did nothing to prevent his release. On the contrary, they contributed cover for the release. The one thing nobody wants is Quintero talking about the roles of the Institutional Revolutionary Party [returned to power, and in government during Camarena's murder] and the CIA in the origins of Chapo Guzmán's cartel."

Another major item of news was the capture in July of the Zetas leader Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, and the killing last year of the man he replaced, Heriberto Lazcano. These successes for the Mexican military speak to Hernández's theme: it has long been speculated that any Mexican government's best chance for peace is to return to the so-called "pax mafiosa", a conviviality with – a blind eye towards – the biggest cartel, Guzmán's, whereby the drugs keep flowing in exchange for a cessation of violence, while the official "war on drugs" is fought against his opponents. Of these, the Zetas are by far the most formidable.

"Sadly, I think this is what is happening," says Hernández. "Mexico is exhausted. People will pay anything to live in peace. And this is the strategy; a sponsorship of the Sinaloa cartel, which makes the so-called 'war on drugs' one big lie."

Señores del Narco is not flattered by its English translation, which is sometimes colloquial to the point of inelegance (agent Camarena is described as "a goner", and the mysterious killing of a compromised government official, Edgar Millán, is "a shocker"). That is a shame given the importance of the book and the availability of excellent translators from Spanish. The English edition is, furthermore, regrettably tardy (though hats off to Verso for publishing it), illustrating the Anglophone world's baffling detachment from the death toll of the drug-taking to which it feels entitled.

Hernández is "very pleased my book is being published in English, so it can be read in London and New York where drugs are being sold and taken on every corner, and people can know where every gram of cocaine comes from – corruption and death. I want it published in Britain and America, where the profits are laundered. In your country, where HSBC took Chapo Guzmán's money to 'look after it', and then said they didn't know where it came from. I have studied the laundering networks in depth, and I cannot believe them."

Hernández insists – and this is what places her among the political heretics with regard to the "war on drugs"– that "the violence and the cartels are not the disease. They're a symptom of the disease, which is corruption. The cartels cannot operate without the support of officials, bureaucrats, politicians and police officers – and bankers to launder their money. These people let the narcos do what they do and they are the issue, this is the cancer. I met these people, the narcos. They have no scruples, they're cruel – but in the end, they're just businessmen, all they can see is money. Life, they cannot see."

Anabel Hernández will be speaking at the Frontline Club, London, on 11 September and at Bristol festival of ideas on 13 September

EXTRACT

Image
puente grande 3 Mexican Federal Police patrol the surroundings of the Puente Grande State prison (background) in Zapotlanejo, Jalisco State, Mexico. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The passages below, extracted from Anabel Hernández's book, describe prison life for Mexican drug barons

El Chapo's women

During his detention in Puente Grande, Joaquín Guzmán killed time with sex, alcohol, drugs, volleyball, and push-ups. Like Hector "El Güero" Palma and Arturo "El Texas" Martínez [two other prisoners], he was well supplied with Viagra and other prowess-enhancing products. Given their age, it seems unlikely they would have been prescribed Viagra, unless of course they suffered from some dysfunction. Witnesses among the prison commanders and warders say the obsession with sex was so great that the three held competitions to see which of them could keep going the longest.

Prostitutes came and went from Puente Grande unimpeded; prison managers referred to them pejoratively as "las sin rostro," the faceless females. They would be brought in official cars, wearing blonde wigs. Prisoners received them in the psychological care section, in the conjugal visit rooms, or in their own cells. If ever there was a shortage, they would get their hands on female staff or inmates, with the connivance of warden Beltrán. These women didn't have much choice. Any who dared to resist the sexual demands of the drug barons had a rough time.

Of all the women El Chapo had at Puente Grande, three stood out: Zulema Yulia, Yves Eréndira and Diana Patricia. Each learned what a hell it is to be the current favourite of a gangster. Their desperate stories blow apart the myth of the "love-struck drug baron".

On 3 February, 2000, Zulema Yulia Hernández, a young woman just 23 years old, was incarcerated in Puente Grande for robbing a security van. Even if she deserved to go to jail, the maximum security facility seemed an excessive punishment. There was no separate wing for women. They were kept in the observation and classification centre, where they had neither the appropriate medical services nor adequate physical protection in the midst of an overwhelmingly male population.

Guzmán's family visits coincided with those of Zulema. She quickly caught El Chapo's eye. The drug trafficker's obsessive nature and the young woman's vulnerable situation were to shape their dark tale. Through one of the members of the Sinaloas, known as El Pollo, Guzmán sent "love" letters to Hernández. The almost illiterate drug trafficker dictated these letters to an unidentified scribe, who embellished them with a dose of drama. Of course, writing to a female inmate was one of the thousands of forbidden things that he was allowed to do quite freely. Very soon, Guzmán began to have intimate relations with the young delinquent barely more than half his age. Their meetings took place in the communications area, aided and abetted by female guards and by the prison management.

The last Christmas in Puente Grande

It was after 10pm on Christmas Eve. The silence hanging over the broad freeway between Guadalajara and Zapotlanejo was broken by the roar of a convoy of SUVs, speeding towards the prison. At the junction outside the gates, there was a temporary checkpoint where perimeter guard José Luis de la Cruz stood watch with a colleague. He'd had specific orders from the deputy director for perimeter security not to let anybody in; he'd even been told to park a pick-up truck across the road to block access to the jail.

When De la Cruz saw the vehicles approaching without switching off their lights, he nervously swivelled his weapon and chambered a round, thinking it could be an attack. The driver of the lead vehicle suddenly slammed on the brakes, opened the door and jumped out. The guard's fears vanished when he recognised the smiling face of prison commander Juan Raúl Sarmiento. "It's us," he shouted jovially, like someone arriving at a party. De la Cruz moved his truck to let the line of vehicles pass. Joaquín Guzmán's relatives were travelling in some of them; Héctor Palma's in others. There was also a big group of mariachis and 500 litres of alcohol for the Christmas party. The sumptuous feast arrived a few minutes later. It had been prepared at the last moment, but the menu was first-class: lobster bisque, filet mignon, roast potatoes, prawns, green salad, and trays of nibbles, with canned sauces to spice up the dishes after reheating.

El Chapo and El Güero had been planning the celebration for weeks. They sent for a brighter yellow paint than that usually used in the prison; the prison guards themselves worked overtime painting the walls. The corridors and cells of units three and four were hung with Christmas lights and decorations. Guzmán's outside gofer, El Chito, had been entrusted with organising the banquet and buying the family gifts, as well as getting special food and drink for the ordinary prison inmates.

Corruption had been rife in Puente Grande for the past two years, but this cynical display of power was unprecedented. The party went on for three days. El Chapo and El Güero's relatives stayed until 26 December, taking advantage of the authorities' extreme laxity. Although it had looked as if the change of government might mean the drug barons would lose their privileges, they were acting with extraordinary confidence. In fact, one of the guests at the party was the prison warden himself; Leonardo Beltrán never let go of the briefcase full of wads the traffickers had given him for Christmas.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby cptmarginal » Sun Nov 17, 2013 5:12 pm

http://www.madcowprod.com/2013/11/15/ns ... drug-ring/

NSA links to St Petersburg FL Drug Ring
Posted on November 15, 2013 by Daniel Hopsicker

Skyway Global LLC, the St. Petersburg, FL company that owned the DC-9 airline busted in Mexico carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, made its headquarters in a 79,000 sq ft building owned by Verint Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT), a foreign tele-communications company with a contract to wiretap the U.S. for the NSA through the communication lines of Verizon, which handles almost half of all landline and cell phone calls in the U.S.

Verint’s founder and CEO, Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, is a former Israeli intelligence officer who is today a fugitive from justice living in Namibia, where he has for several years been fighting extradition to the U.S.

On Verint’s Board of Directors is Lieutenant General Kenneth A. Minihan, former director of the NSA, which has led to speculation that the company today is a joint NSA-Mossad operation.

James Bamford’s 2008 expose of the NSA, “The Shadow Factory, The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America,” unearthed disturbing facts about how America’s two major telecom companies, AT & T and Verizon, had outsourced the bugging of their entire networks to what Bamford called “two mysterious companies with very troubling foreign connections.”

Verint is one of those two “mysterious companies.”

Definition of "making a start": Two recent convictions

In “The NSA, Drug Trafficking, & the Crash of Cocaine2,” I reported that I first learned of that Agency’s involvement in drug trafficking in 2000, more than a decade before the super-secret NSA became a household name. The source for that story, Russ Eakin, had been the NSA’s “man on the ground” in Bolivia during the Cocaine Coup in the early 1980’s.

The discovery of previously-undisclosed ties between SkyWay and the NSA came in a review of documents after two men implicated in the drug trafficking network were recently convicted.

Recently Douglas McClain Jr, was sentenced to 14 years for money laundering in Federal Court in San Diego. McClain was the president of Argyll Equities, the dodgy private bank in Texas which purchased the drug-running DC-9 for SkyWay.

Joining McClain in the Big House is Jonathon Curshen, who got twenty years for fraud and money laundering. Curshen, an American con man from Sarasota Florida, controlled a company in Costa Rica called Red Sea Management, which (at least on paper) generously provided— in return for 28,000,000 shares of common stock in SkyWay—the 1966 McDonald Douglas DC9 aircraft that shortly thereafter began carrying cargo which came to include 5.6 tons of cocaine worth several hundred million dollars.

SkyWay put out a press release announcing the deal: "The DuPont Investment Fund 57289, Inc. Satisfies $7 Million Funding Agreement with SkyWay Communications Holding Corp."
"Some guy in Costa Rica"

“They wrote it up in a press release, touting how they’d just received a big investment from the DuPont Foundation," explained a former SkyWay executive. "It turned out to be bogus. It was just some guy (Curshen) at a desk in Costa Rica.”

SkyWay’s twisted three-year history of unpunished financial fraud seems relatively well-known at this point. The company in deliberate fashion stole the life savings of thousands of investors, through the simple expedient of issuing barrages of press releases filled with utterly false statements to pump up the stock’s price before the company filed for bankruptcy.

SkyWay’s only other overt act of capitalism was its participation in the ownership of a plane hauling 5.5 tons of cocaine worth several hundred million dollars.

But what is known about SkyWay may also illustrate just how much we still don’t know about the NSA.

Musical chairs and the "known unknowns"

It has always struck some observers as odd that a fledgling start-up like SkyWay—with at the time just a few dozen employees—moved in to a huge 79,000 square foot facility in January of 2003, the recently-vacated American headquarters of Tadiran Tele-Communications, which had moved its U.S. operations to New York.

So I took a closer look at the Israeli telecom company which passed on its U.S. headquarters to a tiny start-up with no prospects and little money. According to a press release, Tadiran Tele-com (TTN) moved its U.S. headquarters to the newly-constructed facility in Clearwater in early 1997.

When I first learned of Tadiran, the company didn’t set off any alarm bells.

Now a little probing indicated that the Israeli entity housing itself in Clearwater Florida didn’t call itself “Tadiran” for long. In early 1999, Tadiran’s global surveillance division, housed in Clearwater, was sold to another Israeli telecom, ECI-Telecommunications (Nasdaq: ECTX).

The Israeli Government’s Clearwater-based Surveillance entity (whatever its name-of-the-moment) was finally sold to Verint Systems Inc. in early February 2004.

One possible explanation for the game of musical chairs is that Tadiran’s name had already become tarnished, after the company was accused of being involved in worldwide espionage.

In Guatemala, the company became infamous for having installed two intelligence computers which were reportedly used to select death squad victims, as well as pinpoint urban guerrilla safe houses.

Tadiran also funded an electronics school for the Guatemalan army. At the same time Israel was setting up a factory to manufacture ammunition and replacement parts for Guatemala’s Israeli-made rifles, and advising the Guatemalan military by providing military, counterinsurgency, and intelligence advisers for what human rights groups called a genocidal war which included forced resettlement schemes in the rural highlands against a largely Mayan Indian population.

Carlos Slim jumps the shark

The DC9 (N900SA) was the first of two drug planes with apparent ties to the U.S. Government caught carrying multi-ton loads of cocaine in Mexico over an 18-month period. The second, a Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA), was cited by European authorities for flying extraordinary renditions missions for the CIA.

In 2006, during the same year SkyWay’s drug plane was seized, the Bush Administration chose SkyWay landlord-partner-co-conspirator Verint to install a $3 million telephone and Internet wiretapping center in Mexico, allowing authorities there to eavesdrop on every landline and cell phone call made in the country.

“In 2006 the Bush Administration entered into a quiet agreement with the Mexican Government to fund and build an enormous $3 million telephone and Internet eavesdropping vendor that would reach into every town and village in the country,” reported James Bamford.

In fact, a press release suggests the program in Mexico probably began three years earlier. The headline read: “Comverse (which became Verint) Selected by Telefonos de Mexico to Implement a Widespread Expansion of Voicemail Services.”

Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) is owned by Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helú, whose own links to the drug trade have been the subject of rumors for years. And with some reason:

When Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known in Mexico as “Lord of the Skies" for his vast armada of planes, died in 1997 while undergoing plastic surgery, he was worth $25 billion, according to the AP.

If you do the math, that means that Drug Lord Amado Fuentes managed to salt away no more than $10 or $15 billion a decade… And HE was in the cocaine business, where counting your money can be a bigger problem than making it.

At that same time Carlos Slim was worth $6 billion, according to numerous published reports. For example, the May 7, 1999, Mexico City newspaper La Jornada fixed Slim's fortune at “something like $6 billion.” Latin Trade magazine pegged Slim as being worth $7.2 billon. After working hard for more than 40 years, Carlos Slim was worth a hefty $6 billion.

Yet, according to news reports in 2009, when Slim made a big investment in the New York Times, Slim was now worth between $57 billion and $60 billion dollars. Has anyone in history ever made $50 billion in just ten years? Did Carlos Slim? Not by doing anything legal, he didn’t.

Do the math. Mexico's richest man is dirty.

Did data mining lead to body dumping?

Bamford discovered a State Department document used to solicit vendors for the system, in which the U. S. was promising to provide Mexico ‘with the capability to intercept, analyze, and use intercepted information from all kinds of communications systems operating in Mexico.”

The communications intercept system, which the U.S. was paying for, included all necessary hardware, software, and equipment to provide a complete system to intercept, process analyze and store email, internet, chat, landline and cellular, including location and tracking, with the capability to scan millions of telephone calls with voice prints of their targets, to analyze calls and automatically generate links between them to bring under surveillance ever-widening circles of people.

The system the Bush Administration chose for Mexico was similar to the warrantless eavesdropping operation in the U.S. And it used one of the two “mysterious companies with very troubling foreign connections” that Bamford was warning about.

Calderon argued he needed the system and the freedom from court scrutiny to fight drugs and organized crime, many in Mexico, like former Mexico City prosecutor Renato Sales, weren’t buying it. “Suddenly anyone suspected of organized crime is presumed guilty and treated as someone without any constitutional rights. And who will determine who is an organized crime suspect? The State will.”

Define "unfair competitive advantage"

The vendor for the job, founded by veterans of Israel’s version of the NSA, the hyper-secret Unit 9200, was Verint, the same company that had somehow ended up owning the gleaming facility in Clearwater Florida that the drug traffickers at SkyWay Global called “home.”

Having your own countrywide bugging system to listen in on phone calls made by your indiscreet drug trafficking competitors is probably the very definition of an “unfair competitive advantage. “

Few think that sort of consideration slowed down anyone in this gang.

Data scraped through internet search queries, emails, Smartphone chatter and text messages may be intrusive; but the result may be nothing more serious than a few targeted ads in your browser.

But when the data mining is being done by bent officials from a major NSA contractor with a contract to wiretap and eavesdrop on both the U.S. and across the entire country of Mexico, the results can probably be measured, not in annoying pop-up ads, but in piles of corpses on one side of the road, and piles of heads on the other.
cptmarginal
 
Posts: 2741
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:32 pm
Location: Gordita Beach
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby American Dream » Fri Nov 22, 2013 9:51 am

The Disappeared and Mexico's New Dirty War

November 22, 2013

By Peter Watt
Source: NACLA


It is becoming increasingly difficult for Mexican officials to pretend that the massive number of murders and enforced disappearances is not part of a deliberate government strategy. Political rhetoric, unsurprisingly, points to drug cartels as the sole perpetrators of violent crime in Mexico. But the mantra that the Mexican state, supported with funds and military wherewithal by the U.S. government, is waging a genuine war on organized crime is a pervasive but totally false myth. The suggestion that the violence in Mexico is at least partially explained by a deliberate government strategy to eliminate sectors of the population may sound like hyperbole and conspiracy theory, but then how do we explain the repeated involvement of state authorities in the worst atrocities presently committed?

To give some perspective, the number of people forcibly disappeared in Mexico is probably now more than during the notorious Argentine military dictatorship, which developed a deliberate strategy of annihilating an entire layer of the population. The dirty war in Argentina, under the rubric of Operation Condor, targeted anyone the authorities deemed subversive. In the painful decades that have followed, relatives of the disappeared in Argentina have tried to reconstruct the country’s tragic history by attempting to bring those responsible to justice, much in the same way that many Chileans did after Augusto Pinochet seized power 40 years ago and engaged in a campaign of disappearing dissidents and opponents.

Over 26,000 people were classified “disappeared” during the six-year term of former President Felipe Calderón, who left Mexican politics for a lucrative Fellowship at The Harvard Kennedy School of Government last year. In each year of his presidency, more people were forcibly disappeared than during the entire duration of Pinochet’s infamous military dictatorship in Chile. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch conducted 250 case studies of forced disappearance in Mexico. The research found that in 149 of those 250 cases, “These crimes were committed by members of every security force involved in public security operations, sometimes acting in conjunction with organized crime.” In the remaining cases, the report noted, it was not possible to link state authorities directly to enforced disappearances, but, the authors indicate, they “were not able to determine based on available evidence whether state actors participated in the crime, though they may have.”

Unlike the años de plomo of Operation Condor in the Southern Cone, the new dirty war in Mexico seems less concerned with subversives than with unleashing the power of the state (in collaboration with organized crime) on the population. The leaders of every military dictatorship in modern history have understood perfectly the power of keeping the population afraid, terrorized, and vulnerable as a consummate means of social control. Why Mexico should be any different, despite its hollow democratic transition in 2000, remains to be explained, particularly in the current context of militarization and state complicity with criminal gangs. Amnesty International reports that during this past year, following patterns established over the last decade, “Members of the army, navy and the federal, state and municipal police were responsible for widespread and grave human rights violations in the context of anti-crime operations and when operating in collusion with criminal gangs. The government consistently refused to acknowledge the scale and seriousness of the abuses or the lack of credibility of official investigations. Impunity was widespread, leaving victims with little or no redress.” Investigators from the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances who researched forced disappearances in Mexico came to similar conclusions, noting that state authorities were primarily responsible for the upsurge in such disappearances in recent years. Reports by human rights organizations detail how families of victims are repeatedly told by law enforcement officials and investigators that the only explanation for their forced disappearance or murder is that they were involved in criminal behavior, thereby relinquishing their right to a fair trial—a curious interpretation of equality before the law.

Over 98 percent of homicides committed are neither investigated nor solved. Indeed, in 2012, of the 27,700 murders in Mexico, only 523 were solved and led to prosecution. Only a few days ago, investigators linked police forces working for organized crime in Michoacán to disappearances and the disposal of 18 bodies in a mass grave.

Such figures should cast serious doubt on the common assertion among liberals that the war on drugs has been a “failure.” That the governments of Felipe Calderón and now Enrique Peña Nieto continue to escalate the crisis with more militarization (the very thing which has contributed significantly to the rise in violence) is a signal of how seriously both administrations take the deaths of 100,000 and the forced disappearance of a further 26,000 people. The continued funding and heavy presence of the Mexican army in the streets and the increased security cooperation with Washington suggest that neither government views the drug war as a “failure.” Nor are the systematic human rights abuses much of a secret. Recently declassified internal U.S. government documents show that officials are well aware that organized criminal syndicates operate with "near total impunity in the face of compromised local security forces." And yet both the U.S. and Mexican governments continue to fund what is becoming one of the most vicious and violent assaults on civil society in the world. One assumes there must be a logic to the madness, but it does not fit within the narrow confines of typical debate of government versus criminals nor the “successes” and “failures” of a bilateral drug war strategy.

The scale of the intense violence and human rights abuses committed by police and military forces is clearly not the behavior of a ‘few bad apples’ operating outside the parameters of normal practice. The contradiction of a government fighting organized crime when every single one of its security forces directly charged with waging that war works in collaboration with the same criminals should give us pause to think about the real nature of the combat against narcotrafficking organizations. As elsewhere throughout the globe, the social consequences of political and economic control and privilege are of little or no concern to elites. Mexico’s levels of inequality are increasing rapidly, largely because recent governments have allowed the wholesale disposal of its land, resources, institutions and labor to the highest domestic and international bidders. U.S. military funding should be viewed in this light. Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Thomas Shannon, for example, summed up U.S. policy in Mexico thus: "To a certain extent, we're armoring NAFTA," the neoliberal trade pact between Mexico, Canada and the United States. Securing access to resources and land and repressing civil society is hardly restricted to Mexico. It is precisely how transnational capital—with the aid of publicly funded military forces—operates in Iraq, in Mali, in Colombia, and in Haiti. The dead and disappeared are merely collateral fodder for capitalism’s insatiable demand for profit and expansion of markets and control. Those who get in the way, like political opponents in Argentina and Chile, or the impoverished majority in Mexico, are externalities to the natural functioning of a “free” market increasingly defended by force and coercion.

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/the-disa ... peter-watt
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby hanshan » Mon Nov 25, 2013 7:46 pm

...

strange commentary:

http://www.constantinereport.com/deas-kiki-camarena-executed-on-orders-of-the-cia/


CIA Ordered Execution of DEA’s “Kiki” Camarena (Latin Press)

By Luis Chaparro and J. Jesus Esquivel / Salem-News.comOctober 16th, 2013






CIA Ordered Execution of DEA’s “Kiki” Camarena (Latin Press)
Photo: “Kiki” Camarena was not the only one nor was he the first to discover the perverse CIA-Caro Quintero-Contra triangle.

(El Diario de Coahuila (10-13-13) Proceso (10-12-13) By Luis Chaparro and J. Jesus Esquivel. Translated by un vato for Borderland Beat. By Borderland Beat Reporter un vato.)

(WASHINGTON DC) - A story that sounds like it was taken from a complex espionage novel has just exploded on U.S. television. Enrique Kiki Camarena, the DEA law enforcement officer murdered in Mexico in February, 1985, was apparently not the victim of the Mexican capo Rafael Caro Quintero, but rather, of a dark member of the CIA. This individual was the one charged with silencing the anti-narcotics agent for one serious reason: he had discovered that Washington was associated with the drug trafficker and was using the profits from the drug trafficking to finance the activities of the counterrevolution.

Three former U.S. federal agents decided to end a 28-year silence and simultaneously entrusted this journal and the U.S. Fox news services with an information “bomb”: Enrique Kiki Camarena was not murdered by Rafael Caro Quintero — the capo that served a sentence for that crime — but by an agent of the CIA. The reason: the DEA agent discovered that his own government was collaborating with the Mexican narco in his illegal business.

In interviews with Proceso, Phil Jordan, former director of the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC); Hector Berrellez, former DEA agent, and Tosh Plumlee, a former CIA pilot, claim that they have evidence that the U.S. government itself ordered the murder of Kiki Camarena in 1985. In addition, they point to a sinister Cuban character, Felix Ismael Rodriguez, as the murderer.

“It was I who directed the investigation into the death of Camarena”, says Berrellez, and he adds: “During this investigation, we discovered that some members of a U.S. intelligence agency, who had infiltrated the DFS (the Mexican Federal Security Directorate), also participated in the kidnapping of Camarena. Two witnesses identified Felix Ismael Rodriguez. They (witnesses) were with the DFS and they told us that, in addition, he (Rodriguez) had identified himself s “U.S. intelligence.”

The official story and the version that the DEA continues to assert is that Caro Quintero kidnapped, tortured and murdered Kiki Camarena in February of 1985, in retaliation for the U.S. agent having discovered his enormous marijuana farms and his processing center in the El Bufalo ranch.

Felix Ismael Rodriguez, “El Gato“, has one of the murkiest histories in the U.S. intervention in Central America, mainly in Nicaragua. To this Cuban — who participated in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and after that in the Vietnam War – is attributed the capture, and therefore the assassination, of Che Guevara in Bolivia on October 9, 1967.

Helping the capo

Interviewed separately, Jordan, Berrellez and Plumlee coincide on many details in the reconstruction of the events that led the CIA to decide to eliminate Camarena.

The story that the three former agents describe begins with pointing out that El Gato Rodriguez, in addition to having infiltrated the DFS, took a Honduran named Juan Mata Ballesteros, a person known to Colombian traffickers, with him to Mexico.

In Mexico, according to the interviewees, Matta’s mission was to obtain drugs in Colombia for the Guadalajara Cartel, led by Caro Quintero in the 1980′s. The U.S. government allowed the Mexican drug trafficker to sell cocaine, marijuana and other drugs wherever he wanted. Washington benefited, since it shared the profits.

The portion of the money received by the CIA — represented in Mexico by Rodriguez through Mata — was delivered to counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, La Contra, in the form of weapons and other military equipment. This is how the U.S. financed the guerrilla war against the Sandinista regimen, then led by the current president of the Central American country, Daniel Ortega.

Death sentence

In his investigations into the drug trafficking activities that Caro Quintero led, Camarena discovered the role that his government played in the illegal business to finance the Contras. And this, in the opinion of the interviewees, was his death sentence.

“The CIA ordered the kidnapping and torture of ‘Kiki’ Camarena, and when they killed him, they made us believe it was Caro Quintero in order to cover up all the illegal things they were doing (with drug trafficking) in Mexico” emphasizes Jordan. He adds: “The DEA is the only (federal agency) with the authority to authorize drug trafficking into the United States as part of an undercover operation”.

The former chief of EPIC, the largest espionage center in the United States dedicated to observing what happens in Mexico and the common border, and who was also a DEA agent and Camarena’s boss when he was murdered, sums up in a quote what the discovery of its involvement in Mexican drug trafficking represented to the CIA:

“The business with El Bufalo was nothing compared with the money from the cocaine that was being sold to buy weapons for the CIA”.

However, “Kiki” Camarena was not the only one nor was he the first to discover the perverse CIA-Caro Quintero-Contra triangle.

The Mexican judicial police officer

Berrellez and Jordan maintain that the first person to inform of this incredible U.S. undercover espionage operation in the early 1980′s was Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, who was then the chief of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police.

Gonzalez Calderoni fled from Mexico in 1993; he was accused of collaborating with the Juarez Cartel and he sought refuge in the United States, where the DEA turned him into a protected witness. In 2003, the former Mexican commander was murdered in McAllen, Texas.

– I helped him, I sent a jet and brought him to California. Over here, now under DEA protection, he became an informant and helped us a lot. The Mexican government wanted to extradite him, but I did all I could to prevent that because I knew they would kill him over there. After that, he was accused of corruption and illegal influences and things like that, but I’m telling you: it’s not true — Berrellez states.

– And that’s how he told you about the CIA? — he’s asked.

– Yes. He told me: ‘Hector, get out of this business because they’re going to fuck you over. The CIA is involved in that business about ‘Kiki’. It’s very dangerous for you to be in this.’ He gave me names, among them that of Felix, and details and everything, but when my bosses found out, they took me out of the investigation and sent me to Washington.

The twist to the story about the kidnapping, torture and murder of “Kiki” Camarena “is a bombshell”. What is not clear is why these three former U.S. agents waited 28 years to make it known. They refuse to explain it.

He doesn’t talk much

Plumlee, although he doesn’t talk much, recalls that in the early 1980′s he flew a C-130 airplane to take people from the Contras to receive training at a ranch that Caro Quintero owned in Veracruz.

– I flew drugs on CIA airplanes and I knew the pilot that took Caro Quintero out of the country when he was being persecuted by the government.

– Did you know “Kiki” Camarena? — Plumlee is asked.

– He flew, before he was kidnapped, from Guadalajara to California to inform about the CIA operations with narcos and the Nicaraguan Contras in Mexico, and I remember I said to him “We’re on the same team. Stay out of what I’m doing”.

– What else were you doing for the CIA at that time?

– The United States government was into everything. We smuggled drugs, weapons, and we used the money to finance the operation in Nicaragua.

– How was your contract in all of this?

– We were always subcontractors; that’s why the CIA now said we didn’t have those operations. But everything is there …

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/octo ... ameron.php


...
hanshan
 
Posts: 1673
Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2005 5:04 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jan 14, 2014 6:57 pm

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 14, 2014 9:24 am

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2014/02 ... onnection/

A Dark Narco-Alliance Reborn: The DEA-Sinaloa Connection

GUILLERMO JIMENEZ | FEBRUARY 9, 2014

US Involvement Affirms Economic Dependence on Drug Trade and “War”

In 1996, investigative reporter Gary Webb shocked readers of the San Jose Mercury News with a series of articles he titled, “Dark Alliance.” In it, he chronicled the relationship between the CIA, Nicaraguan Contras, and crack cocaine dealers in Los Angeles during the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s.

As would be expected with a story of this magnitude, the Dark Alliance series was received with a great deal of skepticism and resentment, as corporate media staples like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post swooped in to abscond the CIA’s sins.

With the passage of time, however, Webb’s claims — based on documented evidence and testimony from credible sources — have stood up to scrutiny. In many ways his courageous reporting and reputation as a journalist have been posthumously vindicated.

Still, almost 20 years after the series was published, the drug war rages on. Further, new evidence continues to surface, affirming an ongoing role for sections of the US government in the management of the drug trade through covert action.

Even the title of this column may not be entirely accurate in a technical sense. This alliance between narcotrafficking cartels and agencies like the CIA or DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) may not have been “reborn” so much as it has matured, or evolved.

The latest revelations in this enduring saga originate from statements given to the US District Court in Chicago relating to the case of Jesus Vincente Zambada-Niebla, son of Sinaloa Cartel capo “El Mayo.” Documents obtained by Mexican news outlet El Universal prove a reciprocal relationship between the DEA and the Sinaloa Cartel, further strengthening claims made by Zambada, and others, of an explicit agreement in place to consolidate the drug trade in Mexico in the hands of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and the Cartel de Sinaloa (CDS).

Skeptics have been quick to point out that while the statements provided by DEA agent Manuel Castañon and former Department of Justice prosecutor Patrick Hearn do establish Zambaba-Niebla’s role as a cooperative “informant,” they do not prove the broader conspiratorial designs of CDS as a government-sponsored cartel.

While accurate, it cannot be denied that the statements entered into the public record by the DEA in this case not only corroborate Zambada-Niebla’s “I am protected by the US government” defense, they add credence to a long-standing understanding of drug war reality in Mexico, and do absolutely nothing to weaken it.

As noted previously, world renowned Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández recently spent five years investigating the narcotics trade in Mexico, only to conclude that the collusion between the cartels and her government went all the way to the top. With regard to CDS and El Chapo Guzman specifically, Hernández contends they would be nothing if not for the concerted efforts of Mexico’s federal government and large business interests.

Those who caution against the “alarmism” raised by this DEA-Sinaloa alliance argue that these quid pro quo agreements between the two parties indicate nothing more than standard operating procedure and run-of-the-mill police work. After all, the use of confidential informants is a tactic that is routinely used; police cut deals with the bad guys all the time to target the “bigger and badder.” As Charles Parkinson of InSight Crime writes, if the “US operational focus has at times favored one cartel over another, it can quickly shift, making former collaborators the new priority.”

Indeed, within the black world of the narcotics trade, alliances can shift with the wind, and there may in fact not be anything at all inherently “special” about the current bond between the DEA and the Sinaloa cartel. Even the timing of the agreement, from 2000 to 2012 — correlating precisely to the government assisted prison escape of El Chapo and the growth in size and strength of his operation, may be entirely coincidental. To say that the “Sinaloa Cartel is aided and funded by the US government” is admittedly problematic on its face, as the mess created by the “war on drugs” pits the DEA and CIA almost perpetually at odds with each other.

Yet despite all the smoke and mirrors, shifting alliances, and questionable motives, the involvement of the US government in the drug trade through its many competing agencies assures a few constants: a destabilized, weakened, and dependent Latin America; increases in drug warrior budgets; and the sustained health of a nearly US$400 billion industry, without which banking systems and economies would falter severely. It is by exploring and understanding these relationships that the true dark alliance is revealed.
# # # #

Guillermo Jimenez- BFP Partner Producer & Analyst

Guillermo Jimenez is the owner and editor of Traces of Reality, host of TOR Radio and the De-Manufacturing Consent podcast on Boiling Frogs Post, and a regular columnist for the PanAmerican Post. He is based in South Texas, deep within the DHS “constitution-free zone.”
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 38 guests