Coronavirus creates problems and opportunities for world's drug traffickers

Source: The Telegraph
May 7 2020
By Patrick Sawer

The coronavirus pandemic is having a dramatic if unintended impact on the global drugs trade, with closed borders making smuggling more difficult and pushing up the price of street narcotics.

A United Nations report has found that normal smuggling routes have been disrupted by nationwide lockdowns in countries hit by COVID-19, forcing drug traffickers to switch to less reliable methods.

At the same time production on the ground has been disrupted, with lockdowns robbing drug producers of the labour they need to harvest and process crops such as poppies and cocaine leaves and increasing the deadly competition between rival drug cartels.

The report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) also warns that shortages could lead to the use of "harmful domestically-produced substances" instead, especially among heroin addicts.

Following the introduction of flight bans and tighter border controls in the wake of the pandemic drug traffickers have been less able to exploit legal trade routes to “camouflage” their activities.

“The measures implemented by governments to counter the Covid-19 pandemic have thus inevitably affected all aspects of the illegal drug markets, from the production and trafficking of drugs to their consumption,” the report states.

According to the UN, traffickers anticipated the difficulties and have tried to make increasing use of sea traffic to keep their supply chains going (see photograph below).

Bob Van den Berghe, of UNODC’s Container Control Programme, said: “Based on seizures of bigger-than-usual shipments of cocaine, it would be fair to say that Europe was flooded with cocaine ahead of lockdowns.” 

Crew members of the vessel "MV Karar" are arrested by Spanish police officers in the port of Vigo, on April 28, 2020 after the vessel was seized carrying 4000 kgs of cocaine, amid a national lockdown to fight the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. - MIGUEL RIOPA/AFPMore

The report says that "a recent uptick in heroin seizures in the Indian Ocean could be interpreted as indication of an increase in the use of maritime routes for trafficking" towards Europe.

It adds: "There are indications that the reduction in air traffic to Europe resulting from the COVID-19 measures may already have led to an increase in direct cocaine shipments by sea cargo from South America to Europe".

UNODC confiscated 17.5 tonnes of cocaine bound for Europe from South America during the first three months of this year.

In Rotterdam alone drug seizures increased from 4.1 tonnes in the first quarter of last year to 6.6 tonnes in the same period this year.

In Antwerp a 5-tonnes of cocaine was found last month hidden in a refrigerator also containing squid from South America. Weeks earlier police in the Peruvian port of El Callao intercepted a shipment of cocaine hidden in surgical masks bound for China.

However the slow down in international trade has now also had an impact on the shipment of drugs by sea routes.

Mr Van den Berghe said lockdowns in Latin American countries have led to a drop off in global maritime trade and “a very substantive drop in the seizures”.

He said: “It has become more difficult for criminal organisations to get cocaine into the maritime ports because borders are closed, roads are closed, you have police officers everywhere.”

UNODC found that “reports emerging from different countries point to a shortage of drugs among end-consumers caused by reduction in imports of drugs and/or by strict lockdown measures, with reports of heroin shortages in Europe, South-West Asia and North America in particular".

There are also indications of a slow down in the flow of cocaine from countries such as Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, where the drug’s raw material, coca, is grown.

Brazilian gangs ship cocaine to Europe via west Africa, using Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Senegal as entry points, experts say, but UNODC said transit hubs such as Niger had reported “a cease” in trafficking.

But the report warns that the coronavirus crisis has also presented drug gangs with new opportunities, allowing them to pose as community benefactors in return for greater influence.

"There are indications that drug trafficking groups are adapting their strategies... and that some have started to exploit the situation so as to enhance their image among the population by providing services, in particular to the vulnerable," it states.

One effect of the disruption to smuggling networks has been to drive up the street price of drugs, with the wholesale price for a kilo of cocaine coming through Rotterdam going from €25,000 a kilo late last year to €32,000 a kilo now.

Jeremy McDermott, co-director of the Medellin-based think tank InSight Crime, said: “People are prepared to pay more money because it’s much harder to get your drugs than before when you could go out and meet your dealer. Now you have to use the drug delivery networks or the dark web. For the retail drug dealer it’s a dream scenario. For the drug producer it’s frustrating.”

The rise in street prices could also lead to users switching substances.

The report states: "Many countries across all regions have reported an overall shortage of numerous types of drugs at the retail level, as well as increases in prices, reductions in purity and that drug users have consequently been switching substance (for example, from heroin to synthetic opioids) and/or increasingly accessing drug treatment.”

An increase in the use of pharmaceutical products such as benzodiazepines has also been reported, already doubling their price in certain areas.

UNODC warns drug shortages could also lead to an increase in injecting drug use and the sharing of injecting equipment, carrying an increased risk of spreading diseases like HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and COVID-19 itself.

What coronavirus means for online fraud, forced sex, drug smuggling, and wildlife trafficking

Source: Brookings

April 3 2020

Possibly emerging as a result of wildlife trafficking and the consumption of wild animal meat, COVID-19 is influencing crime and illicit economies around the world. Some of the immediate effects are likely to be ephemeral; others will take longer to emerge but are likely to be lasting. How is the COVID-19 outbreak affecting criminal groups, both in the short and long term? In particular, how is it affecting trends across the illicit economies of drug smuggling and poaching, wildlife trafficking, and sexual slavery?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ROBBERS GONE?

As street life has decreased in Europe, North America, and much of South America, predatory street crime appears to have decreased considerably. There are simply no people on the streets to mug. And with people at home, burglaries and home invasions have become more difficult.

People are conducting more of their daily tasks online, particularly via shopping online. The already strong presence of crime in the electronic space will likely increase. Beyond typical efforts to hack bank accounts and online sites storing credit card information, as well as advance-fee (so-called “419”) scams, online loan sharking has a high chance of going up as COVID-related unemployment and global economic downturn leaves many indebted and impoverished. Countries that provide economic relief to those unemployed as a result of coronavirus can expect a rise in scams, with online thieves pretending to represent social security agencies and seek to obtain confidential information.

With more people in the West and Asia at home and bored and access to street prostitution severely curtailed, there is also a chance that online prostitution sites that feature trafficked and enslaved women (as opposed to those who give informed consent to sex work) may see a rise in online trafficking, perhaps stimulating efforts to entrap more women. More time online inevitably means more potential exposure to recruitment by nefarious entities, such as jihadi groups or doomsday cults, portraying COVID-19 as a portend of a forthcoming apocalypse and a justification to purify the land through violence, crime, and fraud.

Among poorer populations that don’t have the luxury to isolate at home, people will be forced to choose risking infection over their and their family’s starvation. In those areas — such as in poor urban areas of Kenya, Uganda, Pakistan, and India — predatory in-person crime may well increase, from robberies, to looting, to, worrisomely, pogroms against ethnic and religious minorities and migrants. In slums, few police are present to patrol.

Finally, wars are a great opportunity for profiteers (recall Orson Welles’ iconic Harry Lime). New “Third Men” hoarding goods in shortage, such as medical or cleaning supplies, and selling them at hiked-up prices, will spring up. Arrests for such criminality have already been made in the United States. Mexico’s most vicious criminal group, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CNJG), is reportedly hoarding hand sanitizer in Michoacán. It is not yet clear whether CJNG intends to sell it for a profit, keep it for its own members, or break with its pattern of ruling through brutality über alles and distribute it to local populations for political gain.

Dangerously, they can be profiteering not just from usury prices, but also from selling fake products. Of course, selling shoddy goods is not merely the domain of individual profiteers. China’s firms have long sold toys with poisonous colors and toothpaste with heavy metals to unwitting customers in Latin America and Africa. Its recent deliveries of COVID-19 testing kits and of other medical supplies have been marred by similarly dangerous poor-quality and fake products.

WHERE HAS ALL THE BOOTY GONE?

Border closures and the shutdown of much international air traffic means that smuggling illicit drugs long distances has become harder. Because people are not on the streets, so has street-level retail. Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) are reportedly facing shortages of precursor agents for the production of fentanyl, as traffic from China and India — which normally provide supply — has been disrupted. Since a large portion of drugs globally, including from Mexico to the United States, is hidden in legal cargo, a reduction in legal cross-border traffic also limits smuggling. Isolated countries, such as Australia, may in some months experience a particular drug drought. (Australia is also affected by the Myanmar military’s recent action to suppress a key militia’s meth production.)

But multiple adaptions will take place, some rapidly and some more slowly. In the short term, synthetic opioid production and its sale via the mail is likely to increase, especially in and from India, where law enforcement action has been minimal, and perhaps even from China where, as a result of U.S. pressure, enforcement against illicit production of synthetic opioids has taken place. Synthetic drug production may move closer to retail markets, perhaps even within the same country. But homemade illicit drug cocktails pose a particularly high risk of overdose and adverse health consequences.

In the medium term, DTOs will adapt by stockpiling more precursors, leaving them vulnerable to robberies by rivals or seizures by law enforcement. But the most interesting likely response will be to speed up the use of drones, submarines, and unmanned platforms to deliver drugs, both wholesale and retail. DTOs already use drones to smuggle drugs into prisons around the world and across the U.S.-Mexico border, to steal drug cargo from their rivals, and to monitor terrain for rivals and police.

They have also weaponized drones, using them to assassinate rivals and security forces personnel. Wholesale drug smuggling by drones has been limited by the constrained payload and battery capacities of off-the-shelf drones that drug traffickers mostly use. But with daily advances in payload capacities and drone battery life, those constraints will be decreasing rapidly. Moreover, the shift to the use of synthetic drugs with high potencies in very small amounts will make drone smuggling all the more feasible. Before long, drug users may have access to retail delivery of their daily hit to their windowsill by drone. As legal retail also moves into drone home delivery, hiding illicit drones and drones with illicit cargo will become easier.

Drugs are already smuggled wholesale by semi-submersibles and fully-operational submarines that DTOs build for themselves. Fast-forward 15 years and drug trafficking will also take place by marine drones. While the move to synthetic drugs and drones will reduce the need to control territory, the move to submarines and marine drones will privilege DTOs who control areas that are relatively close to retail.

Mexican drug gangs, an Argentinian tycoon and the illicit trade of uranium to China

Argentine-born Mexican businessman Carlos Ahumada (R), accompained by his wife Cecilia Gurza, is interviewed by reporters in Mexico City, 08 May 2007. Ahumada has been implicated in illegal trade of Uranium by the leader of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang. (ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images) (2007 AFP)

Πηγή: Fox News Latino
By Gardenia Mendoza
13 Nov 2015

MEXICO CITY – A gang-related arrest in Mexico took a surprising twist last week when a portion of the suspect's testimony was leaked, revealing that the criminal organization La Familia Michoacana is also involved in the illegal trade of uranium to China.

Sidronio Casarrubias – the head of the Guerreros Unidos crime gang who was arrested last year and interrogated about his alleged involvement in the disappearance of 43 college students from Iguala, in the state of Guerrero in September 2014 – said the uranium operation in Mexico is being carried out under the orders of mogul Carlos Ahumada, a prominent Argentinian-born businessman who spent a couple of years in jail in a bribery scandal.

Casarrubias said Ahumada, who holds a dual Mexican-Argentinian citizenship, owns two uranium mines in Guerrero.

“The cargo is moved by small boats,” said Casarrubias shortly after he was arrested, but whose testimony was released only recently and published by Milenio newspaper.

“Ahumada traffics uranium … hidden among other metals,” he said, according to a Ministry of Public Security agent quoted by Milenio. “[Familia Michoacana members] take it to the port in Lázaro Cárdenas, but the majority is taken to the port of Colima [both in Michoacán], where it’s handed over to the Chinese.”

The Mexican government considers Guerreros Unidos a regional splinter group of La Familia Michoacana.

Mexico has one of the world's biggest reserves of uranium, but very little is used by the country's only nuclear energy plant, Laguna Verde. Under existing laws, all sources of uranium can be exploited only by the Mexican government. When a private company finds uranium while mining for other metals, it is required to report it to the government and shut down the mine.

It's believed that the price of a kilo can hit $6 million.

Casarrubias' testimony is alarming in a couple of ways. That the destination of the ore is China is a potential point of friction with the United States, and the possible involvement of drug gangs in the trade of material that could be used in an atomic bomb is worrisome, to say the least.

Chinese and Mexican groups have been linked in the past. In April 2014, Mexican Marines seized 300,000 tons of illicitly-acquired iron on four ships at the port of Lázaro Cárdenas that was bound for Hong Kong.

José Fernández Santillán, a security expert at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM), explained to FNL that the transnational competition for illegally-trafficked substances and chemical elements has been boosted by the rise of small Asian companies that are "difficult to control" compared to bigger enterprises.

"These companies, what they do is take advantage of legally weak countries along the Asian coast to set up their illegal operations," Fernández Santillán said. "And on this side of the Pacific, Mexico is a key piece, because it's also part of a corrupt and weak legal state."

Mexico is a signatory to the 1969 Treaty of Tlatelolco, aimed at the denuclearization of all of Latin America, and 40 years later then-President Felipe Calderón signed onto an International Atomic Energy Agency treaty promising to wipe out all highly enriched uranium in the country.

"The trafficking of any substance or product [in Mexico] can't be understood without acknowledging corruption at three levels of government: the federal, which controls the ports and mines, and the state and municipal [levels] in Michoacán, through where the uranium supposedly circulates,” said Gerardo Rodríguez, an analyst at the University of the Americas in Mexico.

Besides Guerreros Unidos, drug cartels like La Familia Michoacana have also been implicated in the illegal trafficking of the radioactive ore.

Shortly before Casarrubias, drug trafficker José María "El Pony" Chávez testified that Ahumada had failed to report discovery of uranium at a METAL mine Campo Morado he co-owned in Guerrero. Chavez said Ahumada had members of Familia Michoacana cartel sell it quietly to the black market.

According to Casarrubias testimony, the Familia Michoacana leader, Jonny Hurtado, who goes by the nickname “El Pescado” or "The Fish," would get rides on helicopters provided by Ahumada – sometimes just to go watch a soccer game, or when federal police were closing in on him.

The Attorney General’s Office was sufficiently concerned to open an investigation of the businessman, who made his fortune from real estate, soccer teams and, most recently, mining.

Fox News Latino was unable to reach Ahumada for comment.

This is not the first time that the Mexican government has targeted the businessman. In 2004, the businessman got caught up in a Mexico City influence-peddling scandal that stemmed from a romantic affair he was having with the mayor’s cabinet chief, Rosario Robles.

Ahumada was taped with top aides to the leftist presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, handing out bundles of U.S. dollars.

He was arrested in Havana and extradited to Mexico as part of the subsequent investigation and was incarcerated until May 2007, when he was cleared of all charges.

Illicit trade is driving crime and instability in transitional Libya: USIP

The USIP report on the illicit trade in Libya concludes that it has negative effects on Libya’s stability (Photo: USIP).

Πηγή: Libya Herald
Feb 26 2014

A report on illicit trade in Libya published last Monday by the United States Institute of Peace concludes that illicit trade is driving crime and security and political instability, with regional ramifications, in transitional Libya.

This report, authored by Mark Shaw and Fiona Mangan, which draws from more than two hundred interviews across Libya, says it seeks to improve the understanding of the nature of illicit trafficking and smuggling in the country and to identify emerging patterns of organized crime and their impact on state consolidation and stability.

It goes on to say that its goal is to help define possible policy options, including ways the international community might support stability and development for the country and the region.

The study, which was supported by the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau of the U.S. State Department, is part of a portfolio of rule of law work that the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) is carrying out in Libya.

The report says that criminal activities are driving conflict in post revolutionary Libya and undermining state consolidation. The foundation of the illicit economy in Libya rests on four interconnected markets: weapons, migrants, drugs, and smuggled goods.

A widespread prevalence of weapons has completely changed the game in Libya and has led to an industry in criminal protection. The dynamics of criminal activity and the development of illicit markets have different trajectories in northern coastal cities and inland towns and border areas, USIP says.

Many local conflicts, it reports, are driven by competition over illicit resources, and the capacity to provide or guarantee protection for illicit trade has become a major lever of influence. Criminal control is consolidating into fewer hands, and groups with the most resources are best placed to leverage control and political influence, the report has discovered.

The report says that ironically, it is the criminal economy rather than joint and inclusive governance that binds the regions of Libya together. Organized criminal behavior, illicit trafficking and trade, and the armed groups that per­petrate them are harming the transition at a time when consolidating institutions of statehood is critical, it adds.

Offering possible solutions to these problems, the USIP report says that it is imperative to begin an effective response to organized crime now—with interventions in the political, economic, social, and security spheres.

It also adds that the international community must be sensitive to Libya’s regional and international vulnerabilities.

An appropriate response may rely less on justice and security interventions and more on carefully calibrated political management coupled with well-deployed development.

Equally, the report stresses that such a response also must undercut the market for protection and reestablish state control.

Such an approach, it explains, would include marginalized groups and border communities in the political process, educate the public about the costs and consequences of illegal activities, reinstate state institutions of security to replace criminal protection arrangements, and transition from cash payouts and commodity subsidies to sustainable economic opportunities.

Ultimately, the report says that as Libya emerges from forty years of autocratic rule, the criminal economy is undermining government efforts at state consolidation. The report maps the flow of weapons, migrants, drugs, and smuggled goods through Libya and details the interactions between armed groups who control illicit markets and local communities. The authors warn that efforts to beef up border control policing will not be sufficient.

Combating organized crime in Libya, it explains, requires a broader approach that will engage marginalized groups in a political process. Failure to do so will affect not only Libya but the region as well.

Download the full report  in pdf here.

Body of Mexico drugs kingpin Lazcano stolen

Πηγή: euronews
Oct 9 2012

The body of one of Mexico’s most wanted men who was killed in a shootout with marines has been stolen from a funeral home.

Heriberto Lazcano, the head of the Zetas drugs gang, was suspected of murdering hundreds of people.
Dubbed ‘The Executioner’, he was shot dead in the northern state of Coahuila on Sunday.

According to Homero Ramos, the state’s attorney general:

“Forensics experts carried out an comparative analysis of the body with the photos experts had of Lazcano, resulting in a positive match.”

His corpse was later taken by an armed gang.

Another Zetas leader known as “The Squirrel” was picked up on Saturday. Alfonso Martinez Escobedo was detained with a huge cache of weapons and ammunition in the city of Nuevo Laredo.

Zetas is one of the most deadly Mexican drug-cartels, with a membership of 10,000 gunmen. Its operations stretch from the Texas border deep into Central America.

More than 60,000 people have been killed during the Mexican government’s six-year war on drugs

With the Focus on Syria, Mexico Burns

On the U.S.-Mexico border, drug-related violence rivals immigration as a media fixation, projecting images of a so-called “failed state” and a “wave” of killings.

Πηγή: Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
March 28 2012

While the foreign policy elite in Washington focuses on the 8,000 deaths in a conflict in Syria -- half a world away from the United States -- more than 47,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 in Mexico. A deeply troubled state as well as a demographic and economic giant on the United States' southern border, Mexico will affect America's destiny in coming decades more than any state or combination of states in the Middle East. Indeed, Mexico may constitute the world's seventh-largest economy in the near future.

Certainly, while the Mexican violence is largely criminal, Syria is a more clear-cut moral issue, enhanced by its own strategic consequences. A calcified authoritarian regime in Damascus is stamping out dissent with guns and artillery barrages. Moreover, regime change in Syria, which the rebels demand, could deliver a pivotal blow to Iranian influence in the Middle East, an event that would be the best news to U.S. interests in the region in years or even decades.

Nevertheless, the Syrian rebels are divided and hold no territory, and the toppling of pro-Iranian dictator Bashar al Assad might conceivably bring to power an austere Sunni regime equally averse to U.S. interests -- if not lead to sectarian chaos. In other words, all military intervention scenarios in Syria are fraught with extreme risk. Precisely for that reason, that the U.S. foreign policy elite has continued for months to feverishly debate Syria, and in many cases advocate armed intervention, while utterly ignoring the vaster panorama of violence next door in Mexico, speaks volumes about Washington's own obsessions and interests, which are not always aligned with the country's geopolitical interests.

Syria matters and matters momentously to U.S. interests, but Mexico ultimately matters more, so one would think that there would be at least some degree of parity in the amount written on these subjects. I am not demanding a switch in news coverage from one country to the other, just a bit more balance. Of course, it is easy for pundits to have a fervently interventionist view on Syria precisely because it is so far away, whereas miscalculation in Mexico on America's part would carry far greater consequences. For example, what if the Mexican drug cartels took revenge on San Diego? Thus, one might even argue that the very noise in the media about Syria, coupled with the relative silence about Mexico, is proof that it is the latter issue that actually is too sensitive for loose talk.

It may also be that cartel-wracked Mexico -- at some rude subconscious level -- connotes for East Coast elites a south of the border, 7-Eleven store culture, reminiscent of the crime movie "Traffic," that holds no allure to people focused on ancient civilizations across the ocean. The concerns of Europe and the Middle East certainly seem closer to New York and Washington than does the southwestern United States. Indeed, Latin American bureaus and studies departments simply lack the cache of Middle East and Asian ones in government and universities. Yet, the fate of Mexico is the hinge on which the United States' cultural and demographic future rests.

U.S. foreign policy emanates from the domestic condition of its society, and nothing will affect its society more than the dramatic movement of Latin history northward. By 2050, as much as a third of the American population could be Hispanic. Mexico and Central America constitute a growing demographic and economic powerhouse with which the United States has an inextricable relationship. In recent years Mexico's economic growth has outpaced that of its northern neighbor. Mexico's population of 111 million plus Central America's of more than 40 million equates to half the population of the United States.

Because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, 85 percent of Mexico's exports go to the United States, even as half of Central America's trade is with the United States. While the median age of Americans is nearly 37, demonstrating the aging tendency of the U.S. population, the median age in Mexico is 25, and in Central America it is much lower (20 in Guatemala and Honduras, for example). In part because of young workers moving northward, the destiny of the United States could be north-south, rather than the east-west, sea-to-shining-sea of continental and patriotic myth. (This will be amplified by the scheduled 2014 widening of the Panama Canal, which will open the Greater Caribbean Basin to megaships from East Asia, leading to the further development of Gulf of Mexico port cities in the United States, from Texas to Florida.)

Since 1940, Mexico's population has increased more than five-fold. Between 1970 and 1995 it nearly doubled. Between 1985 and 2000 it rose by more than a third. Mexico's population is now more than a third that of the United States and growing at a faster rate. And it is northern Mexico that is crucial. That most of the drug-related homicides in this current wave of violence that so much dwarfs Syria's have occurred in only six of Mexico's 32 states, mostly in the north, is a key indicator of how northern Mexico is being distinguished from the rest of the country (though the violence in the city of Veracruz and the regions of Michoacan and Guerrero is also notable). If the military-led offensive to crush the drug cartels launched by conservative President Felipe Calderon falters, as it seems to be doing, and Mexico City goes back to cutting deals with the cartels, then the capital may in a functional sense lose even further control of the north, with concrete implications for the southwestern United States.

One might argue that with massive border controls, a functional and vibrantly nationalist United States can coexist with a dysfunctional and somewhat chaotic northern Mexico. But that is mainly true in the short run. Looking deeper into the 21st century, as Arnold Toynbee notes in A Study of History (1946), a border between a highly developed society and a less highly developed one will not attain an equilibrium but will advance in the more backward society's favor. Thus, helping to stabilize Mexico -- as limited as the United States' options may be, given the complexity and sensitivity of the relationship -- is a more urgent national interest than stabilizing societies in the Greater Middle East. If Mexico ever does reach coherent First World status, then it will become less of a threat, and the healthy melding of the two societies will quicken to the benefit of both.

Today, helping to thwart drug cartels in rugged and remote terrain in the vicinity of the Mexican frontier and reaching southward from Ciudad Juarez (across the border from El Paso, Texas) means a limited role for the U.S. military and other agencies -- working, of course, in full cooperation with the Mexican authorities. (Predator and Global Hawk drones fly deep over Mexico searching for drug production facilities.) But the legal framework for cooperation with Mexico remains problematic in some cases because of strict interpretation of 19th century posse comitatus laws on the U.S. side. While the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, its leaders and foreign policy mandarins are somewhat passive about what is happening to a country with which the United States shares a long land border, that verges on partial chaos in some of its northern sections, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Mexico, in addition to the obvious challenge of China as a rising great power, will help write the American story in the 21st century. Mexico will partly determine what kind of society America will become, and what exactly will be its demographic and geographic character, especially in the Southwest. The U.S. relationship with China will matter more than any other individual bilateral relationship in terms of determining the United States' place in the world, especially in the economically crucial Pacific. If policymakers in Washington calculate U.S. interests properly regarding those two critical countries, then the United States will have power to spare so that its elites can continue to focus on serious moral questions in places that matter less.

Afghanistan acts to curb flight of capital

Πηγή: FT
By Matthew Green
March 18 2012

Afghanistan has taken new steps to combat rampant capital flight after the central bank found that the amount of dollars flown out of Kabul doubled to $4.6bn last year.

Afghan officials believe many of the brick-sized stacks of $100 bills stuffed into boxes, bags and suitcases by Dubai-bound passengers belong to drug lords or criminal cartels.

Western allies, who have spent billions shoring up the Afghan state, fear such flows will encourage the kind of grand-scale corruption that has alienated people from the government of Hamid Karzai, the president, and boosted support for the Taliban.

The $4.6bn of declared dollar exports via Kabul airport last year was almost equivalent to Afghanistan’s 2010-11 state budget of $4.8bn.

The sum amounts to more than $150 for each Afghan citizen, in a country with average per capita income of only $1,100 (purchasing power parity) according to the World Health Organisation, or under $500 in gross income terms according to the UN.

Officials suspect that large quantities of cash also leave the country without being recorded.

Noorullah Delawari, the central bank governor, said he had imposed a new rule that restricts passengers to carrying a maximum of $20,000. Anyone wishing to move more money abroad will have to make a wire transfer through a bank.

Mr Delawari said the rule, introduced this month, closed a loophole in Afghan law that allowed passengers to carry as much money as they liked out of the country provided they filled in a form.

“It will have a major impact on financing terrorism as well as on money laundering,” he told the Financial Times.

A new class of war entrepreneurs enriched by an economic bubble fuelled by Nato contracts and aid money have become accustomed to stashing their cash in foreign accounts and real estate in Dubai.

Influential Afghans think nothing of carrying large quantities of cash out of the country. According to a cable from the US Embassy in Kabul that was later published on the website WikiLeaks, Zia Masood, the former vice-president, was once stopped entering Dubai carrying cash worth $52m and released without question.

A former vice-president of Lloyds Bank in California, Mr Delawari was appointed in November, replacing Abdul Qadir Fitrat. Mr Fitrat fled to the US in fear of his life in June after naming borrowers linked to a scandal that brought down Kabul Bank, the biggest private lender.

Mr Delawari said his suspicions were aroused when official records showed that SR1.5bn ($400m) left the country last year. Afghanistan has negligible trade with Saudi Arabia, although counter-terrorism officials suspect the Taliban raises significant funds from wealthy donors in the Gulf. Afghan officials believe some of the money laundered through Afghanistan is imported via Pakistan and Iran.

The measures have angered some Afghan currency traders, who say they will sharply increase the cost of legitimate transactions. Mr Delawari said he had received a call from a foreign exchange dealer who had claimed Afghan currency merchants would lose $250m a year as a result of the rule. The governor said he responded by hanging up his phone.

Mr Delawari said the central bank had placed monitors at the airport to help security forces enforce the new measures. But questions remain over whether criminal networks may find ways to circumvent Mr Delawari’s rule in a country where bribery is rife and where perpetrators of financial crimes are rarely punished.

Officials fear much of the money flowing out of the country is linked to the burgeoning heroin industry. The World Bank said last year that gross revenues from the opium trade were estimated to be equivalent to up to a third of Afghanistan’s measured gross domestic product.

Mr Delawari said the central bank was making progress in recovering funds from Kabul Bank, which suffered a run in 2010 that almost brought down the banking system. The bank, which has bad loans of more than $800m, has since been placed into receivership.

The governor said receivers had rescheduled some $400m of loans, and seized property and other assets worth $200m. The central bank is now conducting an audit of another 10 banks and looking at ways to tighten supervision. “We know there are some flaws, some loopholes in the law,” Mr Delawari said. “We have learnt a lot from Kabul Bank.”

China cracks down on online drug dealers

Πηγή: 13wham
By AP
Oct 30 2011

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese authorities have arrested more than 12,000 suspects and seized 600 pounds of illicit drugs in a nationwide crackdown on narcotics sold through online chat rooms.

The official Xinhua News Agency says police busted 144 drug rings involved in narcotics production and trafficking in a recent campaign. It did not say what drugs were being sold or had been seized.

Xinhua says police in the western cities of Lanzhou and Xi'an found that some people were selling and buying drugs through chat rooms that were not accessible to outsiders. It says newcomers could only join if they were introduced by existing users.

Xinhua said in Sunday's report that about two-thirds of the 12,000 suspects arrested were people under 35 years old.

Mexican Drug Cartels Using Increasingly Brutal Tactics to Shock Rivals and Authorities

A decapitated body found with a placard referring to drugs and crime at the Santa Fe neighbordhood in Mexico City, on August 26, 2011. Some 40,000 people have been killed in mostly drug-related violence in Mexico since 2006, when the government launched a massive military crackdown on the powerful cartels, which also battle each other over territory. AFP PHOTO

Πηγή: Public Intelligence
By AP
Oct 9 2011

Killings grow more gruesome as Mexican drug cartels try to out-shock (AP):


Masked gunmen dump the bodies of 35 murder victims during rush hour as terrified motorists watch and tweet friends to avoid the avenue in a coastal city. A couple of weeks later, 32 more corpses are found nearby in three houses.

A woman’s decapitated body is left at a border city’s monument to Columbus, the head atop a computer keyboard with a sign saying she was killed for blogging about drug traffickers.

The severed heads of five men are dumped outside an elementary school in Acapulco, and two more near a military base in Mexico City days later.

That was just in the past three weeks.

The brutal public killings that began about five years ago have worsened as Mexican drug cartels try to outdo each other in their quest to scare off rivals, authorities and would-be informers – and still stun Mexicans increasingly numbed to the gory spectacles.

Clark McCauley, a psychology professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and an expert on terrorism, said: “These gangs have to keep escalating because they want the shock value, but the shock value wears off. Now, to get a headline you have to get more heads, or more bodies or do something more horrific.”

Latin American drug lords have long turned to grisly killings and torture. At the height of its powers in the 1990s, the Juarez cartel used to cut off the fingers of snitches and shove them down their throats, a practice that other cartels soon followed.

The current show of savagery began in April 2006 when two police officers were decapitated; their heads dripping blood were left in Acapulco, where four alleged members of the Zetas drug cartel had been killed in a shoot-out with police. Along with the heads was a sign that warned, “So that you learn to respect”. The Zetas are a gang of drug smugglers and hit men led by deserters from a Mexican army unit, who for many years were assassins for the cartel.

Five months later, the La Familia cartel rolled five human heads purportedly belonging to Zetas across a dance floor in the state of Michoacán. An attached note said La Familia “doesn’t kill for money, doesn’t kill women, doesn’t kill innocents, just those who should die,” an apparent warning for the particularly violent group.

Since then, drug traffickers have plunged into even more gruesome tactics. They have tied victims to overpasses and shot them to death during rush hour as sickened motorists watched. Some have decapitated people and then posted videos of it on the internet.

US Government Accused of Seeking to Conceal Deal Cut With Sinaloa “Cartel”

Πηγή: Narcospehre
By Bill Conroy

Oct 1 2011

Lawyers for Alleged Narco-Boss Zambada Niebla Claim Prosecutors Suppressing Evidence By Invoking National Security

The criminal case against accused Mexican narco-trafficker Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla now appears to be threatening to unravel the U.S. government’s ugly national-security interests in the drug war.

Zambada Niebla, son of one of the leaders of the Sinaloa “Cartel,” arguably the most powerful international narco-trafficking organization on the planet, argues in his criminal case, now pending in federal court in Chicago, that he and the leadership of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization, were, in effect, working for the U.S. government for years by providing US agents with intelligence about rival drug organizations.

In exchange for that cooperation, Zambada Niebla contends, the US government granted the leadership of the Sinaloa “Cartel” immunity from prosecution for their criminal activities — including the narco-trafficking charges he now faces in Chicago.

The government, in court pleadings filed last month, denies that claim but at the same time has filed a motion in the case seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), a measure designed to assure national security information does not become public during court proceedings.

To date, the US mainstream media has been completely silent on the US government’s effort to invoke CIPA in the Zambada Niebla case; so, kind readers, Narco News is the only authentic news publication providing you with the scoop.

In a motion filed with the court earier this week, on Sept. 29, Zambada Niebla’s attorneys argue that the government, in essence, is trying to suppress evidence critical to their client’s defense by seeking to invoke CIPA at a critical point in the court proceedings.

Zambada Niebla’s lawyers claim that the prosecution has, at this point, withheld evidence it is required to provide to the defense and is now attempting to cover its tracks and assure that evidence remains cloaked by arguing that it affects US national security.

Zambada Niebla’s attorneys, as part of their recent pleadings, are now asking the court for additional time to prepare their rebuttal to the government’s contention that Zambada Niebla was not operating under US-sanctioned immunity. The attorneys are asking the judge to delay the rebuttal deadline, now set for Oct. 17, until after the CIPA procedures are in place so that their client has access to the classified evidence necessary to prepare his defense.

CIPA, enacted some 30 years ago, is designed to keep a lid on the public disclosure in criminal cases of classified materials, such as details associated with clandestine FBI or CIA operations. The rule requires that notice be given to the judge in advance of any move to introduce classified evidence in a case so that the judge can determine if it is admissible, or if another suitable substitution can be arranged that preserves the defendants right to a fair trial.

From Zambada’s court pleadings filed on Sept. 29:

The defense cannot adequately respond to the government’s oppositions and support its motions without first understanding the nature, scope, and substance of the classified information in the possession of the government. The government’s obligation to produce documents is not limited to those in the possession of the DOJ [Department of Justice] and FBI, but includes documents in the possession, custody, and control other agencies, including the CIA, DEA, ATF, ICE, IRS, NSA [National Security Agency], and the Department of Justice OCDETF [Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force].

... These agencies alone have relevant and material information to establish that they had knowledge that the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel were allowed to engage in drug trafficking activity but did nothing to prevent the trafficking or to arrest those leaders.

The defense here will be disadvantaged if required to file replies before the CIPA process has been initiated, much less completed, because it will not have the benefit of the very information that supports its motions.

Colombia Redux?

At the heart of Zambada Niebla’s defense is a Mexican attorney named Humberto Loya Castro, who, both the US government and Zambada Niebla agree, has worked as a contracted cooperating source, an informant, for the US government since at least 2005.

Loya Castro, according to Zambada Niebla’s court pleadings, served as an intermediary between US government agents (including the DEA and FBI) and the leadership of the Sinaloa organization — which includes Zambada Niebla; his father Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia; and the top capo of the Sinaloa drug organization, Joaquin Guzman Loera (Chapo).

“The central contention of all of [Zambada Niebla’s] motions is that Humberto Loya Castro, a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel, entered into an agreement on behalf of the Cartel lincluding the defendant Zambada Niebla] with several agencies of the United States Government to serve as an informant against rival Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations,” Zambada Niebla’s recently filed court pleadings allege. “In return for the information he [Zambada Niebla] and others provided, the government agreed it would not share any of the information that it had about the Sinaloa Cartel and/or the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel with the Mexican government in order to ensure that the Cartel’s operations would not be disrupted and its leaders would not be apprehended.

“In addition, the government extended [Zambada Niebla and the leadership of the Sinaloa organization] immunity for [their] activities on behalf of the Cartel as a result of his cooperation. [As a result,] information related to the government’s use of sources, the methods implemented to combat international drug conspiracies, and inter-governmental cooperation regarding those efforts inevitably raises national security issues.”

In this case, Zambada Niebla seems to have some history on his side that shows there is precedent for US law enforcement and intelligence agencies making use of an intermediary (the role allegedly played by Loya Castro) to negotiate quid-pro-quo deals with foreign narco-traffickers.

Baruch Vega is a colorful Colombian who has worked as an asset for the FBI, DEA and CIA, among other agencies, over the years.

Vega was very involved with a series of U.S. law enforcement operations carried out by the DEA and FBI between 1997 and 2000. Those operations, Vega claims, involved serving as an intermediary in brokering deals with Colombian narco-traffickers by offering them the bait of U.S.-government sanctioned sweetheart plea deals in return for their surrender or cooperation

.

The following is from a lawsuit Vega filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in which he alleges the government failed to pay him for his high-risk services, to the tune of some $28.5 million:

Once Mr. Vega introduced … American lawyers to the Colombian targets [the narco-traffickers], the lawyers would then get retained and then take over as legal representatives for the Colombian targets and further deal with a group of United States law enforcement agents and prosecutors, hand-picked to work out deals for the Colombian targets. A particular United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida became the coordinator of this “recruiting effort.”

According to Vega, who has spoken with Narco News numerous times over the past several years, between late 1997 and 2000, he traveled between South Florida and South America via a private jet for a total of some 25 to 30 confidential-source “recruiting” trips — some with FBI agents on board, some with DEA agents on board, and some transporting Colombian narco-traffickers who were being brought back to the United States to negotiate deals.

Vega adds that the FBI and DEA were each running their own separate operations at the time, so the FBI also was involved in some of the confidential source recruiting trips to South America as well, and he says the Bureau “even paid for the [leased] plane a few times.”

Narco News obtained an internal DEA PowerPoint presentation outlining one variation of Vega’s narco-trafficker recruiting scheme, which played out in the late 1980s but, according to law enforcement sources, was likely still in use as late as 2000. The DEA PowerPoint described the operation, called Gambit, as follows:

In an effort to gather intelligence in 1987, a FBI Special Agent was introduced as a corrupt FBI agent to Colombian Cartel traffickers by FBI confidential source Baruch Vega. The intent was to convince Cartel leadership that the “corrupt” agent could effect the early release of key Cartel members [light sentences] who would be incarcerated in the U.S.

Vega was allowed by FBI agents to keep “corruption scheme” fees that were collected from the traffickers. An important feature of this operation was that Vega’s expenses were funded by the traffickers, which defrayed the FBI’s investigative expenses. According to Vega, the element of substantial bribes enhanced the credibility of the “corruption scheme.”

A judge’s ruling in another legal case that is related to Vega’s lawsuit also confirms his role as a foreign counterintelligence source involved in high-level deal-making with narco-traffickers on behalf of multiple US agencies. It describes the CIA’s involvement in one flight in 1999 that departed from Panama for Florida that involved Vega, federal agents and an indicted, fugitive Colombian narco-trafficker:

Indeed, the appellant [a DEA supervisor] used the CIA to bring [Colombian narco-trafficker] Mr. Cristancho to the chartered aircraft surreptitiously, without going through Panamanian airport security or customs. … And, an Assistant U.S. Attorney and various DEA agents … were at the Fort Lauderdale airport to greet the plane.

… Both the DEA and FBI used Vega as a confidential source. The FBI specified that Vega would be a "non-testifier.” That is, he would never be used to testify in criminal trials. This status was necessary because Vega was called a “FCI-CI” or Foreign Counterintelligence Service Confidential Informant, who had been brought in by the CIA. As the appellant [a DEA supervisor] put it, “I'm having my agents cut him out every chance they can. I don't want him documented. I don't want him in our Case File any more than we have to."

The trips to Panama at issue here were confidential source recruiting trips. The plan was for Mr. Vega to “introduce” [a DEA agent working under the DEA supervisor] to drug traffickers and then to get out of there, so he would be in no position to have to testify regarding what conversations, if any, took place.

Vega’s lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims was ultimately dismissed on a technicality, with the judge ruling that the statute he invoked in his case “does not authorize compensation for information provided to the DEA or FBI concerning the drug or narcotics investigation alleged in the complaint.”

Still, it seems clear that Vega’s participation in the Colombian operations, essentially a government-sanction extortion scheme, is evidence that the US agencies have cut deals with narco-traffickers in the past similar to the pact Zambada Niebla now alleges exists between the US government and Sinaloa “Cartel” leadership.

Fast and Furious

But Vega’s extortion scheme is not the only point of nexus between Zambada Niebla’s claims and other government operations.

Zamada Niebla’s case also intersects with the recently imploded ATF operation dubbed Fast and Furious — in which the federal agency is accused of allowing gun-traffickers, primarily associated with the Sinaloa criminal organization, to smuggle some 2,000 high-power weapons into Mexico unimpeded. Multiple law enforcers who spoke with Narco News says there is no sane, what’s more justifiable, law-enforcement purpose for allowing thousands of deadly illegally-purchased weapons to freely move across the border into Mexico where they can no longer be tracked by US agents.

Zambada Niebla, who has been incarcerated in Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center since being extradited from Mexico in February 2010, raises the Fast and Furious debacle in his court pleadings, arguing, essentially, that the operation is proof of the US government’s cooperation deal with the Sinaloa “Cartel” leadership.

As a result of Operation Fast and Furious, Zambada Niebla's pleadings assert, about “three thousand people” in Mexico were killed, “including law enforcement officers in the sate of Sinaloa, Mexico, headquarters of the Sinaloa Cartel.”

Among those receiving weapons through the botched ATF operation, the pleadings continue, were DEA and FBI informants working for drug organizations, including the leadership of those groups.

“The evidence seems to indicate that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons, but that tax payers’ dollars in the form of informant payments, may have financed those engaging in such activities,” the pleadings allege. “… It is clear that some of the weapons were deliberately allowed by the FBI and other government representatives to end up in the hands of the Sinaloa Cartel and that among the people killed by those weapons were law enforcement officers.

“… Mr. Zambada Niebla believes that the documentation that he requests [from the US government] will confirm that the weapons received by Sinaloa Cartel members and its leaders in Operation ‘Fast & Furious’ were provided under the agreement entered into between the United States government and [Sinaloa organization lawyer] Mr. Loya Castro on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel….”

Earlier this week, information surfaced as part of an ongoing Congressional probe into Fast and Furious that indicates agents with the FBI’s Las Cruces, NM, office and with DEA’s office in Juarez, Mexico, were aware that an individual, now an FBI informant, was actually financing the purchase of many of the Fast and Furious weapons allowed to “walk,” or move freely, into Mexico by the ATF. However, those FBI and DEA agents, and their supervisors, allegedly failed to inform ATF of the informant’s role in the gun purchases – many of which involved the Sinaloa “Cartel.”

From a Sept. 27 letter drafted by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa and U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley and directed to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.:

The main target of Operation Fast and Furious from its inception … was Manuel Celis-Acosta.

… FBI personnel in its Las Cruces, New Mexico, office apparently knew that the subject of a separate DEA investigation was ordering weapons from Acosta in January 2010. Yet around the same time, the subject of that [DEA] investigation received more than $3,500 in official law enforcement funds as payment for illegal narcotics. That subject – apparently the financier for Acosta’s firearms trafficking ring – later began cooperating with the FBI and may have received additional payments as a confidential informant (CI#1).

… According to confidential sources, over a two-year period CI#1 had contacted several DEA agents, including Juarez, Mexico Resident Agent in Charge Jim Roberts, and passed information to these agents about Mexican drug cartels. If the information we have obtained is accurate, DEA had knowledge of CI#1’s activities going back to at least early 2009 [some six months before the launch of Fast and Furious]. … [Due to] the apparent failure to share information about the source (CI#1), ATF was allegedly unaware that DEA and FBI knew CI#1 was ordering weapons from Acosta, the target of Operation Fast and Furious.

This failure to share vital information may have extended the use of gun walking [allowing weapons to flow into Mexico, resulting in as yet not tallied bloodshed] during Operation Fast and Furious, which sought to identify the higher-ups, like CI#1, who were paying for the weapons.…”

It is important to note again that most of the weapons allowed to cross from the US unimpeded into Mexico by ATF’s Fast and Furious were going to the Sinaloa "Cartel," according to a report issued in July by Issa and Grassley.

So, given Zambada Niebla's claim ithat “some of the [Fast and Furious] weapons were deliberately allowed by the FBI and other government representatives to end up in the hands of the Sinaloa "Cartel,” it seems his attorneys may want to pose some serious questions to witnesses suspected of having knowledge of that alleged act, including DEA’s Roberts, as well as the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Mexico operations, Carol K.O. Lee and the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico,Kenneth J. Gonzales.

Such a prospect can’t be very uplifting for the prosecution in Zambada Niebla’s case and might explain, in part, why there is an effort afoot by the US law-enforcement and intelligence officials to cloak the revelations, the evidence, that might surface in the case under the seal of national security.

The future of the for-profit prohibition industry and the drug-war pretense that props it up could well depend on assuring that the public remains in the dark.

Stay tuned…..

Woman decapitated in Mexico for web posting

Jesus Rejon Aguilar third in command of the Zetas drug cartel busted on 5 July 2011

Πηγή: msnbc
By MARK STEVENSON (AP)

Sep. 25 2011

MEXICO CITY — Police found a woman's decapitated body in a Mexican border city on Saturday, alongside a handwritten sign saying she was killed in retaliation for her postings on a social networking site.
Only on msnbc.com

The gruesome killing may be the third so far this month in which people in Nuevo Laredo were killed by a drug cartel for what they said on the internet.

Morelos Canseco, the interior secretary of northern Tamaulipas state, where Nuevo Laredo is located, identified the victim as Marisol Macias Castaneda, a newsroom manager for the Nuevo Laredo newspaper Primera Hora.

The newspaper has not confirmed that title, and an employee of the paper said Macias Castaneda held an administrative post, not a reporting job. The employee was not authorized to be quoted by name.

But it was apparently what the woman posted on the local social networking site, Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, or "Nuevo Laredo Live," rather than her role at the newspaper, that resulted in her killing.

The site prominently features tip hotlines for the Mexican army, navy and police, and includes a section for reporting the location of drug gang lookouts and drug sales points — possibly the information that angered the cartel.

The message found next to her body on the side of a main thoroughfare referred to the nickname the victim purportedly used on the site, "La Nena de Laredo," or "Laredo Girl." Her head was found placed on a large stone piling nearby.

"Nuevo Laredo en Vivo and social networking sites, I'm The Laredo Girl, and I'm here because of my reports, and yours," the message read. "For those who don't want to believe, this happened to me because of my actions, for believing in the army and the navy. Thank you for your attention, respectfully, Laredo Girl...ZZZZ."

The letter "Z" refers to the hyper-violent Zetas drug cartel, which is believed to dominate the city across from Laredo, Texas.

It was unclear how the killers found out her real identity.

By late Saturday, the chat room at Nuevo Laredo en Vivo was abuzz with fellow posters who said they knew the victim from her online postings, and railing against the Zetas, a gang founded by military deserters who have become known for mass killings and gruesome executions.

They described her as a frequent poster, who used a laptop or cell phone to send reports.

"Girl why didn't she buy a gun given that she was posting reports about the RatZZZ ... why didn't she buy a gun?" wrote one chat participant under the nickname "Gol."

Earlier this month, a man and a woman were found hanging dead from an overpass in Nuevo Laredo with a similar message threatening "this is what will happen" to internet users. However, it has not been clearly established whether the two had in fact ever posted any messages, or on what sites.

Residents of Mexican border cities often post under nicknames to report drug gang violence, because the posts allow a certain degree of anonymity.

Social media like local chat rooms and blogs, and networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, are often the only outlet for residents of violence-wracked cities to find out what areas to avoid because of ongoing drug cartel shootouts or attacks.

Local media outlets, whose journalists have been hit by killings, kidnappings and threats, are often too intimidated to report the violence.

Mexico's Human Rights Commission says eight journalists have been killed in Mexico this year and 74 since 2000. Other press groups cite lower numbers, and figures differ based on the definition of who is a journalist and whether the killings appeared to involve their professional work.

While helpful, social networking posts sometimes are inaccurate and can lead to chaotic situations in cities wracked by gang confrontations. In the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, just south of Tamaulipas, the state government dropped terrorism charges last week against two Twitter users for false posts that officials said caused panic and chaos in late August.

Report: Iran Hangs 22 Men For Drug Trafficking

Πηγή: Inteldaily
by RFE/R

September 19, 2011

An Iranian state-owned newspaper says 22 convicted drug traffickers have been hanged.

The Iran daily says the 22 men were executed on September 18 in Tehran’s Evin prison and in a prison in Karaj, some 45 kilometers west of Tehran.

Iranian authorities do not officially publish the number of executions in the country, but human rights groups say scores of people have been hanged in Iran since the start of the year.

Crimes that are punishable by the death penalty in Iran include drug trafficking, murder, rape, armed robbery and kidnapping.

The Buffer Between Mexican Cartels and the U.S. Government

Πηγή: Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
August 17, 2011, 1913 GMT


It is summer in Juarez, and again this year we find the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization (VCF), also known as the Juarez cartel, under pressure and making threats. At this time in 2010, La Linea, the VCF’s enforcer arm, detonated a small improvised explosive device (IED) inside a car in Juarez and killed two federal agents, one municipal police officer and an emergency medical technician and wounded nine other people. La Linea threatened to employ a far larger IED (100 kilograms) if the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) did not investigate the head of Chihuahua State Police intelligence, whom the VCF claimed was working for the Sinaloa Federation.
La Linea did attempt to employ another IED on Sept. 10, 2010, but this device, which failed to detonate, contained only 16 kilograms of explosives, far less than the 100 kilograms that the group had threatened to use.
Fast-forward a year, and we see the VCF still under unrelenting pressure from the Sinaloa Federation and still making threats. On July 15, the U.S. Consulate in Juarez released a message warning that, according to intelligence it had in hand, a cartel may be targeting the consulate or points of entry into the United States. On July 27, “narcomantas” — banners inscribed with messages from drug cartels — appeared in Juarez and Chihuahua signed by La Linea and including explicit threats against the DEA and employees of the U.S. Consulate in Juarez. Two days after the narcomantas appeared, Jose Antonio “El Diego” Acosta Hernandez, a senior La Linea leader whose name was mentioned in the messages, was arrested by Mexican authorities aided by intelligence from the U.S. government. Acosta is also believed to have been responsible for planning La Linea’s past IED attacks.
As we have discussed in our coverage of the drug war in Mexico, Mexican cartels, including the VCF, clearly possess the capability to construct and employ large vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) — truck bombs — and yet they have chosen not to. These groups are not averse to bloodshed, or even outright barbarity, when they believe it is useful. Their decision to abstain from certain activities, such as employing truck bombs or targeting a U.S. Consulate, indicates that there must be compelling strategic reasons for doing so. After all, groups in Lebanon, Pakistan and Iraq have demonstrated that truck bombs are a very effective means of killing perceived enemies and of sending strong messages.
Perhaps the most compelling reason for the Mexican cartels to abstain from such activities is that they do not consider them to be in their best interest. One important part of their calculation is that such activities would remove the main buffer that is currently insulating them from the full force of the U.S. government: the Mexican government.

The Buffer

Despite their public manifestations of machismo, the cartel leaders clearly fear and respect the strength of the world’s only superpower. This is evidenced by the distinct change in cartel activities along the U.S.-Mexico border, where a certain operational downshift routinely occurs. In Mexico, the cartels have the freedom to operate far more brazenly than they can in the United States, in terms of both drug trafficking and acts of violence. Shipments of narcotics traveling through Mexico tend to be far larger than shipments moving into and through the United States. When these large shipments reach the border they are taken to stash houses on the Mexican side, where they are typically divided into smaller quantities for transport into and through the United States.
As for violence, while the cartels do kill people on the U.S. side of the border, their use of violence there tends to be far more discreet; it has certainly not yet incorporated the dramatic flair that is frequently seen on the Mexican side, where bodies are often dismembered or hung from pedestrian bridges over major thoroughfares. The cartels are also careful not to assassinate high-profile public figures such as police chiefs, mayors and reporters in the United States, as they frequently do in Mexico.
The border does more than just alter the activities of the cartels, however. It also constrains the activities of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. These agencies cannot pursue cartels on the Mexican side of the border with the same vigor that they exercise on the U.S. side. Occasionally, the U.S. government will succeed in luring a wanted Mexican cartel leader outside of Mexico, as it did in the August 2006 arrest of Javier Arellano Felix, or catch one operating in the United States like Javier’s oldest brother, Francisco Arellano Felix. By and large, however, most wanted cartel figures remain in Mexico, out of the reach of U.S. law.
One facet of this buffer is corruption, which is endemic in Mexico, reaching all the way from the lowest municipal police officer to the presidential palace. Over the years several senior Mexican anti-drug officials, including the nation’s drug czar, have been arrested and charged with corruption.
However, the money generated by the Mexican cartels has far greater effects than just promoting corruption. The billions of dollars that come into the Mexican economy via the drug trade are important to the Mexican banking sector and to the industries in which the funds are laundered, such as construction. Because of this, there are many powerful Mexican businessmen who profit either directly or indirectly from the narcotics trade, and it would not be in their best interest for the billions of drug dollars to stop flowing into Mexico. Such people can place heavy pressure on the political system by either supporting or withholding support from particular candidates or parties.
Because of this, sources in Mexico have been telling STRATFOR that they believe that Mexican politicians like President Filipe Calderon are far more interested in stopping drug violence than they are in stopping the flow of narcotics. This is a pragmatic approach. Clearly, as long as there is demand for drugs in the United States there will be people who will find ways to meet that demand. It is impossible to totally stop the flow of narcotics into the U.S. market.
In addition to corruption and the economic benefits Mexico realizes from the drug trade, there is another important element that causes the Mexican government to act as a buffer between the Mexican cartels and the U.S. government — geopolitics. The Mexico-U.S. relationship is a long one that has involved considerable competition and conflict. The United States has long meddled in the affairs of Mexico and other countries in Latin America. And from the Mexican perspective, American imperialist aggression, via the Texas War of Independence and the Mexican-American War, resulted in Mexico losing nearly half of its territory to its powerful northern neighbor. Less than a century ago, U.S. troops invaded northern Mexico in response to Pancho Villa’s incursions into the United States.
Because of this history, Mexico — as with most of the rest of Latin America — regards the United States as a threat to its sovereignty. The result of this perception is that the Mexican government and the Mexican people in general are very reluctant to allow the United States to become too involved in Mexican affairs. The idea of American troops or law enforcement agents with boots on the ground in Mexico is considered especially threatening from the Mexican perspective.

A Thin Barrier

While Mexican sovereignty and international law combine with corruption and economics to create a barrier to assertive U.S. intervention in Mexico’s drug war, this barrier is not inviolable. There are two distinct ways this type of barrier has been breached in the past: by force and by consent.
An example of the first was seen following the 1985 kidnapping, torture and murder of U.S. DEA special agent Enrique Camarena. The DEA was not able to get what it viewed as satisfactory assistance from the Mexican government in pursuing the case despite the tremendous pressure applied by the U.S. government. This prompted the DEA to unilaterally enter Mexico and snatch two Mexican citizens connected to the case. Because of his involvement in the Camarena case, Honduran drug kingpin Juan Matta-Ballesteros was also rendered from his home in Honduras by U.S. government agents.
As a result of the U.S. reaction to the Camarena murder, the Guadalajara Cartel, Mexico’s most powerful criminal organization at the time, was decapitated, its leaders — Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero — all arrested and convicted for their part in ordering the killing. The tremendous pressure applied to Mexican authorities by the U.S. government to arrest the trio, coupled with the fear that they too might be rendered, ultimately led to their detention, although they did maintain sufficient influence to ensure that they were not extradited to the United States.
The Guadalajara Cartel also lost its primary connection to the Medellin cartel (Matta-Ballesteros) as a result of the Camarena case, and the cartel was eventually fractured into smaller units that would become today’s Sinaloa, Juarez, Gulf and Tijuana cartels. The Camarena case taught the Mexican cartel bosses to be careful not to provoke the Americans to the point where it will bring the full power of the U.S. government to bear upon their organizations (a lesson recently demonstrated by the unilateral U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan).
But in addition to unilateral force, sometimes the U.S. government can be invited into a country despite concerns about sovereignty. This happens when the population has something it fears more than U.S. involvement, and this is what happened in Colombia in the late 1980s. In an effort to influence the Colombian government not to cooperate with the U.S. government and extradite him to the United States, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin Cartel, resorted to terrorism. In 1989 he launched a string of terrorist attacks that included the assassination of one presidential candidate, the bombing a civilian airliner in an attempt to kill a second presidential candidate and several large VBIED attacks, including the detonation of a 1,000-pound truck bomb in December 1989 targeting the Colombian Administrative Department of Security (DAS, Colombia’s primary national intelligence and security service) that caused massive damage in the area around the DAS building in downtown Bogota. These attacks had a powerful impact on the Colombian government and Colombian people and caused them to reach out to the United States for increased assistance despite their concern about U.S. power. The increased U.S. assistance eventually led to the death of Escobar and the systematic dismantling of his organization.
The lesson in the Escobar case was: Do not push your own government or population too far or they will turn on you and invite the Americans in.

Police Database abuse hugely intrusive

The Big Brother Watch finds 900 police officers and staff breached the Data Protection Act in the last three years.

Πηγή: ITPRO

By Tom Brewster, 8 Jul 2011 at 09:57

Police abuse of databases has been branded “hugely intrusive” after a report found hundreds had broken the law in accessing important information.

Over 900 police officers and staff in the UK were subject to internal disciplinary procedures for breaching the Data Protection Act (DPA) over the past three years, the Big Brother Watch revealed.