It’s only the media–not a special, dedicated tunnel team–who might believe the identification of Guzman as the tunnel mastermind qualifies as breaking news.Any agent who’s worked the southwest border for a while already knows that if a tunnel or any other kind of operation is high-end, it’s almost certainly the work of “El Chapo”…
The discovery of a drug tunnel, no matter how long it may be or how lavishly outfitted–even the seizure of millions in coke or marijuana–means nothing, unless it leads authorities, in hot pursuit on both sides of the border, up the criminal hierarchies, to the drug lords, and their corrupt accomplices in the police, military, banks, business, and government. To everybody waiting, in Mexico and the US, for their ‘taste.’
Cartel-on-cartel violence may offer Felipe Calderon and Barack Obama the political solution they need in Mexico, and give international stakeholders in the Mexican drug industry the break they need to get back to ‘business as usual’–generating billions in drug dollars, cash that, as it ‘gets cleaner,’ is transformed into capital by ‘legitimate’ investors who create billions more.
Senator Lugar is right–as he said in his speech, the United States should undertake a broad review of further steps the U.S. military and the intelligence community could take to help combat the Mexican cartels in association with the Mexican government.
And one of the first steps should be to review the Brownsville Agreement, and the NAFTA-induced, “hands-off” treaty that currently prevents the US, not just from initiating investigations into the debacle inside Mexico, but from investigating the murders of our own citizens on US soil.
Bug Out Now, says Obama…
All of this follows on the heels of revelations–more ‘leaks’– from Woodward’s soon to be published best-seller, “Obama’s Wars,” especially a specific and ‘bizarre,’ as Woodward calls it, statement by the President about the nation’s ability to ‘absorb’ another 9/11 type attack, and by inference, the inability of the US government (or any government for that matter) to safequard its citizens from the bombs, bullets, and bacteria that are terrorism’s stock-in-trade.
This is the new face of global organized crime–a criminal smorgasbord in which players energized by shifting motives still cooperate at intersections in their operational journeys, ‘hooking up’ for a day or an extra dollar when there are benefits all around.
According to the Washington Times (March 2009), “Hezbollah is using the same southern narcotics routes that Mexican drug kingpins do to smuggle drugs and people into the United States, reaping money to finance its operations and threatening U.S. national security, current and former U.S. law enforcement, defense and counterterrorism officials say.” Now there are more recent […]
There is evidence that FARC has been trading cocaine for arms brokered by Venezuelan middlemen, entrepreneurs who are, at the same time, supplying weapons to Mexico.
What US policymakers also fear is that the steady sale of arms to Venezuela from Russia, Iran, China, and Cuba, and the willingness of both Venezuela (Russian and Chinese arms) and Nicaragua (US-manufactured weapons) to resell firepower to criminal or insurgent elements throughout South and Central America (Mexico being the prize) will someday allow Chavez and Ortega to realize a common dream — power over a Socialist Empire that encompasses most or all of Central and South America.
We know that the global banking system is riddled with corruption (‘vulnerable’ to corruption may be more polite), some authored by its own principals, some embraced opportunistically by financial insiders to snatch sudden profits, a great deal ushered into the world’s financial system by bankers in search of the commissions and corporate profits that ‘high net-worth customers’ (in many cases, money launderers) bring in. And sometimes the bad guys exploit legitimate financial service providers. But the question remains, and it turns on the distinction between deregulation and irregularity, between fair play and laissez-faire, between the right of the ‘haves’ to have still more, and the right of the people to real economic protection under the law.
At what point does financial entrepreneurship turn criminal, and how blind an eye is the US prepared to turn toward banking practices that clearly prosper the powerful and imperil the growing ranks of the poor, in the United States and across the world?
Maxine Waters and OneUnited Bank: Some Minority and Community-Owned Banks Fail to Pay Dividends to Treasury
How much more of the $378 billion transmitted via the casa de cambios and inserted into Wachovia accounts represents criminal revenue is anyone’s guess, because no further inquiries into the origin of these funds has been undertaken.
The bank, now a unit of Wells Fargo, leads a list of firms that have moved dirty money for Mexico’s narcotics cartels–helping a $39 billion trade that has killed more than 22,000 people since 2006. –Michael Smith, Bloomberg Markets Magazine, July7, 2010
“Transnational crime” suggests new answers to an old question: what is the relationship between organized crime and terrorist funding?
Antonio Maria Costa, the UN Drug Czar, is a modest man, so when he stands up, as he did on June 23, and tells an audience at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, in Washington, DC, that we have to start thinking about transnational crime in an entirely different way—it’s news. Costa, whose degrees, from UC-Berkeley and the University […]