Politics in the Zeros

The US government despite blusterings to the contrary is intent on insuring the flow of drugs continues from Mexico, along with  billions of  dollars of dirty money. As for Rule of Law, well, I guess that’s just for the little people. All that drug cartel money flowing into our financial is just too juicy to ignore. And if thousands get tortured to death each year because of it. oh well.  Keeping the banksters happy is the most important goal.

“Anxious to counterattack, the CIA proposed electronically emptying the bank accounts of drug kingpins, but was turned down by the Treasury Department and the White House, which feared unleashing chaos in the banking system.”

This happened under Bush. Obama is no better. Geithner has pointblank said big banks will not be criminally prosecuted for the very same reason, because it would hurt and upset all the corrupt banks and hedge funds.

Scholars Stage comments on the above quote:

This one sentence betrays Washington’s distorted foreign policy priorities. The CIA proposal had several clear benefits: drug lords forced to pull their investments would have less incentive to stay in the game, cartels would be robbed of operating funds, and most importantly of all, the proposal could be implemented with minimal American involvement. [2] There would be no need for more boots on the ground. The drawbacks were also clear: folks on Wall Street would lose money. The White House took Wall Street’s side in the debate, and favored a policy designed to kill or capture the “high value targets” whose bank accounts were not to be touched.

There is only one word that explains this and that is “corruption.”

Drug cartel penetration in the US. Click to view larger

Follow the money. Major US banks have been caught laundering money from drug cartels and received slap on the wrist fines and no criminal prosecutions. If that happened in Mexico, we’d call it corruption, wouldn’t we? There are plenty of dedicated law enforcement officials working hard to stop the cartels but the fix is in at the highest level.

If the US government really wanted to stop drug cartels expanding into the US it would crack down hard on money laundering by big banks and file criminal charges against those responsible. Put a few dozen of them in prison after seizing their assets and I’m guessing the banks would clean up fast. But they know they have Get Out of Jail Free cards.

“While Chicago is 1,500 miles from Mexico, the Sinaloa drug cartel is so deeply embedded in the city that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are on the border,” Jack Riley, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Chicago office, told CNN.

Rafael Cardenas Vela, an important member of the Gulf Cartel, is testifying in Brownsville TX, hoping to avoid decades in escape-proof US prisons. The organization structures of the drug cartels are like that of big businesses (which they surely are.) Thus, arrests of key members don’t cripple the organization because new people simply fill the roles.

The younger Cardenas testified that it cost him about $1 million a month when he ran the Rio Bravo plaza to cover payroll, rent, vehicles and bribes. He had to recruit, train and equip his own gunmen. When they were killed, he continued paying their salaries to their families.

Bribes went to every level of law enforcement, the press, members of the military and corrupted U.S. officials, he said.

In addition,drug cartels are known to be skilled at money laundering.

In The Money and the Power. The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, an FBI agent said 1950′s mobsters went’t smarter but that they would do things the rest of us won’t do. The same holds true of the drug cartels. It is a huge mistake to assume they are a bunch of street corner thugs. In reality, they have highly sophisticated drug and human smuggling operations and make money from extortion and kidnapping as well. They corrupt thousands on both sides of the borders and move billions around the planet.

And somehow our government seems strangely mute about the money laundering.

Tamaulipas, Mexico

Gulf Cartel boss Rafael Cardenas Vela doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison so he’s testifying  in Brownsville TX against everyone, including childhood friends and fellow cartel members. Prisons in Mexico are notoriously corrupt and magical “escapes” are common. However, this is not so in the US. Cartel leaders can and do get decades long-sentences in impregnable US super-max prisons, something which explains why they’ll sing like canaries to avoid dying in prison thirty years from now. You would too, probably.

In troubling testimony, Cardenas says the corruption reaches across the border into the US. This could be bravado but I doubt it. There is simply too much money involved as well as threats to loved ones if you don’t cooperate.”Our silver or our lead.” Emphasis added:

In continuing testimony Friday, Rafael “Junior” Cardenas Vela described how he ruled over the city in Tamaulipas, where even topless dancers were on the take, paid to spy on drunken players leaking drug-world secrets. As for U.S. authorities, there always was a Border Patrol agent or Customs officer to be bought, he said, adding: “All of them had to work for me.”

Multiple recent arrests have cripple the already faltering Gulf Cartel, which controls a crucial part of northeast Mexico, the border state of Tamaulipas. Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel are expected to fight to control the area. Tamaulipas effectively has no law as we know it here in the US. You do not go to the police if a crime has been committed because they might have done it.

And now things there will get much worse, as other cartels move in to fill the void.

Guatemala – Mexico border. Credit: Google Maps

In a major escalation of the war against drug cartels, US Marines are now involved in the Guatemala drug war, aiming to stop drug shipments by airplane and boat. About 200 Marines are there with the express permission of the Guatemala government.

It’ll be the Marines vs Los Zetas drug smugglers. The Zetas are well-trained, possess serious weaponry, and are extremely violent. This will not be a cake walk for the Marines, who so far can only shoot in self-defense. But that can and probably will change. Mexico, home of the Zetas, is completely opposed to US troops being in their country.

More on IVN

Author Ioan Grillo wrote El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency after spending years researching the drug cartels in Mexico, often at great risk to himself. He traveled to opium-growing areas in the Sierra Madres, talked with assassins and smugglers, and explains how the various cartels grew. His central point is that the drug cartels are no longer just traditional crime organizations (like the Mafia) but instead are criminal insurgencies that threaten the entire legal and economic structure of Mexico.

Here in the States we occasionally have criminal gangs shooting at police. But in Mexico, drug cartels sometimes have six-hour battles with police using machine guns, grenade launchers, and AKs with 100 round clips. The cartels, especially the Zetas, are well-trained in military tactics. Indeed, the original Zetas were Mexican soldiers trained in special forces tactics. (Their training was in Mexico and in the US.) This is not some rag-tag street gang that can’t shoot straight but something more like professional soldiers.

The cartels had their start decades ago in the lawless Sierra Madres. The area is good for growing opium poppies, remote, and hostile to outsiders. From there the cartels grew. The PRI, the Mexican ruling party for decades, basically kept them in line with show trial arrests and the bribe money kept everyone happy, at least for a while. But when the PRI lost power in 2000, everything changed. The existing relationships, the institutionalized corruption, was no longer valid. The new president Vicente Fox, went after the cartels with a vengeance. But this didn’t wipe them out. Instead, they morphed, grew more powerful, and now threaten to become a shadow government.

In some areas the shakedown money extorted from innocent local businesses is sent to the drug cartels first who then dole it out to those in police departments and the government. Police officers often are working for a drug cartel. The level of corruption is far worse than anything in the US, where sure, we may have some dirty cops, but we don’t have entire police forces that are corrupt.

The level of violence is of course horrific. The blameless are just as likely to be brutally tortured and murdered as anyone else. Kidnapping is a growing source of income. The author recounts watching a video sent to the parent’s of a kidnapped 13 year old boy. It showed him being brutally beaten for a long time, this as a warning to the parents to get the ransom money quickly.

In God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre, author Richard Grant chronicles his travels through the Sierra Madre in the 1990′s. He predicted the current violence based on the hyper-machismo he found there.

At one point, a guide remarks that Mexico seems to be moving towards democracy. In a prescient comment, Grant said he thought Mexico was moving the other way, towards the lawlessness and blood feuds of the Sierra Madre. If you want to know where the insane and escalating violence in Mexico border towns now comes from, look to the code of machismo of the Sierra Madre.

Where does all this end? Mexico is in genuine danger of becoming a hollowed-out state. The only solution, it seems to me, is complete legalization of all drugs.

El Sicario killed and tortured hundreds of people for a Mexican drug cartel. After years of debauchery, violence, and unquestioned obedience to the cartel bosses he finally couldn’t do it any more, became a Christian, and left the life knowing one false move means he will be their prey and that he and his family will be horribly tortured then killed.

Respected crime writers Molly Molly and Charled Bowden edited El Sicario. Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin. It consists of interviews with El Sicario (who is never named, “El Sicario” is Spanish for “the assassin.”) They let him speak in his own voice. He was a mid-level killer for a cartel.  The book is difficult to read for many reasons. The violence is appalling. But what is much worse is his matter-of-fact documenting of corruption at all levels of Mexican government and military.

One reason the cartels are so good at tracking and killing people is because their members were often trained at military and police academies in Mexico and the US. When they graduate, many go directly to work for cartels while others stay in law enforcement to act as eyes and ears for the cartels. El Sicario did most of his killing and torturing while a member of law enforcement.

More recently though, the cartels been recruiting from gangs like Mara Salvatrucha since fewer in Mexico go to police academies because they know they will be offered “our silver or our lead” by the cartels. Take our money or we kill you. That police academies have been almostly completely infiltrated by the cartels indicates a complete breakdown of law and order.

I lived in Los Angeles for a while and have no love of LAPD. But if a dead body appeared on my doorstep there I could call LAPD and know they’d handle it in a professional manner. In Juarez most people in a similar situation probably wouldn’t call the police for fear the police might well be the killers.

The corruption reaches the highest levels of governments and the cartels start corrupting children barely in their teens. By the time the children are 20, the cartel is their family, it’s all they know.

The turning point for El Sicario came when cartels began using women to carry drugs and kill. Up until then, women and children were off limit. But no more. Once women started being in the game then they also became targets to be kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed. He says torturing men is bad enough but torturing women is far far worse. At about this time he stopped drinking and using drugs, found a church and Christians who helped him,and walked away from it all.

Now he lives in the United States as a fugitive. One cartel has a quarter million dollar contract on his head. Another cartel is trying to recruit him. He speaks as a free man and of his own free will – there are no charges against him. He is a lonely voice – no one with his background has ever come forward and talked. He is the future – there are thousands of men like him in Mexico and there will be more in other places. He is the truth no one wants to hear.

Jovana Deas was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. She looked up unauthorized information in ICE databases for a sister who had drug cartel ties who then passed some of it on to her husband.

Later, Brazilian police found the same information that Deas printed out on the laptop of [her sister's] ex-husband, Mendoza-Estrada, who was living in Brazil. Later yet, on Aug. 26, 2010, Chavez-Sagredo was killed execution style by men who burst into a restaurant in Ciudad Juárez

Deas was a huge success story. She learned English at college, graduated with honors, and became a ICE agent. But then she began funneling information to her crime-linked family. Illegally accessing databases as she did is indeed a criminal offense and not just in ICE but in most of the government as well. The government never claimed that her leaking information led directly to the murder.

ICE press release. Feb. 7 2012

At the hearing, Deas admitted that she illegally accessed, stole and transferred sensitive U.S. government documents to unauthorized individuals and obstructed HSI investigations. She admitted to abusing her position as a special agent to illegally obtain and disseminate government documents classified as “For Official Use Only.”

The big question is, did she do it as a favor to her family or was she allied with a drug cartel all along? She became a special agent in 2007 and was investigating drug traffickers. ICE is scrambling to determine just what she knew and how how much information she sent on.

Deas was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison on Friday. Her sister was also charged and is a fugitive believed to be in Mexico.

Hezbollah profits from US drug market via Mexico cartel

Beirut bank seen as a hub of Hezbollah’s drug money financing

What if we scrubbed Wachovia like we did the Lebanese Canadian Bank?

Indeed.

Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels

Sometimes the laundering goes on for years while DEA pretends to be doing something. Meanwhile, BATF has busy been running guns to the drug cartels.

I’m sure the drug cartels are pleased that Uncle Sam is helping them out so much. Meanwhile the rest of us ponder our increasingly useless and quite possibly corrupt federal law enforcement. Yes, corrupt. Unless you think that much drugs, guns, and money can be flying around without at least some of those involved going over to the dark side.