Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Colombia: FARC using al-Qaeda for European drug trade

Via Álvaro Uribe’s tweet,

“FARC using al-Qaeda networks to bring in cocaine in Sahel FARC-coke-al-Qaeda”

The EFE article (in Spanish, my translation) FARC Using al-Qaeda Networks to Bring in Cocaine in Sahel

The FARC attempt to bring cocaine into Europe through the Sahel [note: a band of desert stretching across Africa – from Senegal in the West to Eritrea in the East], and are relying on Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) networks active on the Argelia, Mali and Mauritania border, according to Monday’s Al Massae Moroccan newspaper.

The newspaper, quoting an official report, explains that the FARC use the Sahel as springboard to Europe, after entering through Argelia and Morocco.

According to sources, AQIM charges the FARC a 15% “tax” on the cocaine value to guarantee a sage passage through the vast area it controls from the Western Sahara to north Mali, Mauritania y Argelia.

This alleged collusion between the FARC and AQIM translates into heavier weapons traffic in the zone, believed to be paid by the drug trade.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has gone on the record supporting the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

The Telegraph has an interactive Al-Qaeda map: Isis, Boko Haram and other affiliates’ strongholds across Africa and Asia

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb
Operates in the Saharan countries – mainly in southern Algeria and Libya, Mauritania, Mali and Niger. Formed from a hard-core of fighters involved in Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s, in which Islamist fighters took arms after a democratically-elected Islamic government was ousted. Briefly set up its own fiefdom in northern Mali in 2012, before being ousted by French-led security force in January 2013. Makes a living by kidnapping foreigners, earning an estimated $60m from ransoms in the last decade.

And Colombia’s president wants unelected FARC members in the Senate, and broadening the definition of “political crime” to include drug trafficking, but only for FARC members.

[Post corrected for more accurate translation.]



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Venezuela: Oil slide

From commenter Kermit,

Venezuela is importing oil as a direct result of its disastrous refinery fires a year ago. What is being imported is light sweet crude to act as diluent when blended with the very heavy crude oil so that it can be pumped from the fields to the terminals/refineries.

Without fully functioning refineries/upgraders, no diluent is being made (kind of like diesel)

Also being imported is diesel and gasoline.

There is severe ship congestion since terminals are not set up to receive the crude oil and refined products. Long waiting times (meaning a lot of extra cost in demmurage to shipowners)

Meanwhile, Venezuela Dollar Income Falls 30% on Lower Oil Prices

Venezuela’s average oil-export price last week fell to $72.80 a barrel, the lowest in four years, pushing the yield on the country’s benchmark bonds to almost 19 percent for the first time since the global financial crisis. Oil accounts for 97 percent of foreign exchange income, which the country needs to pay about $28.5 billion of bond principal due in 2016.

To defend oil prices, Maduro said he sent the country’s foreign minister to five oil producers, including Mexico and Russia, to drum up support ahead of the Nov. 27 meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which Venezuela co-founded. Back in the late 1990s, Venezuela ended a slump in oil prices by cutting production along with other OPEC and non-OPEC producers.

To rumors of selling refineries, Caracas Chronicles says, Go bold, go big

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South American drugs and Islamists

The article TRAFFICKING COCAINE IN THE NAME OF ALLAH highlights the terrorists’ sources of income,

But drug smuggling is not new to Africa. Latin American drug cartels have collaborated with Nigerian organized crime groups for decades; shipping heroin from Asia to the Europe and the U.S., and South American cocaine across the Sahara to Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and by air and sea to Europe.

Not to be dismissed is Hezbollah, which for decades used its drug trafficking operations in South America’s Tri-border region and Mexico, to purchase used cars in the U.S. then ship them to Western African countries with large Middle Eastern communities. While the criminal activities of these groups are no secret, stopping their money laundering operations is difficult. Last summer’s seizure of $150 million from the now defunct Montreal brunch of the Beirut based Lebanese Canadian Bank, is an exception.

Drug trafficking’s enormous revenues have corrupted many countries in the region, and helped al Qaeda to buy the loyalty of public officials and law enforcement. The destitution of the Sahel region makes it easier.

Read the whole thing.

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South American cocaine’s African routes

This will not come as a surprise to long-term readers of this blog: Al-Qaeda’s at the center of drug trafficking.

Revealed: how Saharan caravans of cocaine help to fund al-Qaeda in terrorists’ North African domain
The 37 foreign workers who died in the assault on an Algerian gas plant were victims of terrorists whose weapons may have been paid for by cocaine users of Britain and Europe, reports Colin Freeman.

Unlike their ancestors’ cargoes of spices, salts and silks, the contraband that Gao’s smugglers bring in today from Colombia is deemed strictly “haram”, or forbidden, by Islam.
Yet the city’s ever-zealous Islamist morality police have a good reason for turning a blind eye. For it is thanks to the trans-Saharan cocaine trade that Islamist groups like al-Qaeda have become a power in the region, building up formidable war chests to buy both arms and recruits.

The cocaine trade first exploded in this region five years ago, as Latino cartels, faced with a saturated market in the US, sought new routes to get their product to Europe’s borders. First the drug is shipped or flown across the Atlantic to lawless, corrupt coastal states like Guinea Bissau, then it is moved thousands of miles across the Sahara to Algeria, Morocco and Libya.
…
Now, though, the trade’s potential to wreak far wider havoc has become horrifyingly clear, in helping to bankroll the al-Qaeda movements behind both the Islamist take-over of northern Mali and the murder of western workers at the Algerian gas facility earlier this month.

The planes into Gao fly in directly from Venezuela, drugs’ #1 point of departure in Latin America.

In addition to the profiting, al-Qaeda terrorists use stimulants – cocaine, meth – during battle.

The war on terror and the war on drugs have joined into a new stage.

Read the whole report.


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Benghazi “sloppiness”

Yesterday on Meet the Press,

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Some individuals have been held accountable inside of the State Department and what I’ve said is that we are going to fix this to make sure that this does not happen again, because these are folks that I send into the field. We understand that there are dangers involved but, you know, when you read the report and it confirms what we had already seen, you know, based on some of our internal reviews; there was just some sloppiness, not intentional, in terms of how we secure embassies in areas where you essentially don’t have governments that have a lot of capacity to protect those embassies. So we’re doing a thorough-going review. Not only will we implement all the recommendations that were made, but we’ll try to do more than that. You know, with respect to who carried it out, that’s an ongoing investigation. The FBI has sent individuals to Libya repeatedly. We have some very good leads, but this is not something that, you know, I’m going to be at liberty to talk about right now.

Plweez.

The murders of four Americans during a seven-hour long attack, due to “sloppiness”?

Twitter users are rightfully outraged by President Obama’s callous dismissal of the incompetence that caused the tragic deaths of four Americans in Benghazi.

Wizbang:

Again, Mr. President — you’re trying to install an unsupported narrative here. This embassy was vulnerable for at least the 6 months prior to the attack on September 11th; it had been attacks twiceprior.  The security of this consulate was already at a dangerously low level.  There were warningsthree days before the attack, which were ignored. Even the Ambassador himself asked multiple times for more security. Instead of granting those requests, his security was actually cut back. (Related: State Department withdrew 16-member special forces team from Benghazi one month before 9/11/12 terrorist attack)

This is not about sloppiness. Sloppiness implies security was implemented, but did it in a manner leaving things in a state disarray. Mr. President, you didn’t implement anything, you removed it and in doing so, thereby leaving your Ambassador Stevens and his staff wide open to attacks. Attacks this administration was warned about from several sources. What transpired wasn’t sloppiness, it was criminal.

In other news, Al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen has offered to pay tens of thousands of dollars to anyone who kills the U.S. ambassador in Sanaa or an American soldier in the country.

UPDATE:
Linked by Hot Air (thank you!),

Ahem. Obama conducted an unauthorized war against Moammar Qaddafi that decapitated the regime the previous year, which gave free reign to networks of Islamist terrorists in eastern Libya. That was no secret; in fact, it was pretty well known that those “militias” participated in the uprising we enabled. There had been a series of attacks on Western interests by these networks in 2012 before the September 11th attack that killed four Americans, including a few attempts on Americans before that. Despite all this data, State deliberately dismissed military security for the consulate and insisted it could rely on local militias for security.

And this is “just some sloppiness, not intentional”?

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The Benghazi timelines

The Three Benghazi Timelines We Need Answers About
Every White House sooner or later succumbs to the temptation to cover up an embarrassment.

The Benghazi episode is best viewed as a series of three timelines. When fully exposed, the facts of the “pre” period before the attacks will tell us how high up the chain, and in which agencies, fateful decisions were made about security precautions for the consulate and annex in Benghazi. We also stand to learn how the planning for the attacks could have been put in motion without being detected until too late.

Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb, who oversees diplomatic security, testified before the House on Oct. 10 that she and her colleagues had placed “the correct number of assets in Benghazi at the time of 9/11 for what had been agreed upon.” While not the stuff of a perjury charge, this testimony cannot be true, given the known outcome of the Sept. 11 attack on the consulate and the pleas for enhanced security measures that we now know Foggy Bottom to have rebuffed.

The second Benghazi timeline encompasses the five or six hours on the evening of Sept. 11 when the attacks transpired. A State Department briefing on Oct. 9 offered an account that was riveting but incomplete. When all of the facts of these hours are compiled, we will have a truer picture of the tactical capabilities of al Qaeda and its affiliates in North Africa. We will also learn what really happened to Amb. Stevens that night, and better appreciate the vulnerabilities with which our diplomatic corps, bravely serving at 275 installations across the globe, must still contend.

The third and final Benghazi timeline is the one that has fostered charges of a coverup. It stretches eight days—from 3:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, when the consulate was first rocked by gunfire and explosions, through the morning of Sept. 19, when Matthew G. Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, publicly testified before the Senate that Benghazi was a terrorist attack.

On the day he was killed – Documents show Stevens worried about Libya security threats, Al Qaeda before consulate attack

On Sept. 11 — the day Stevens and three other Americans were killed — the ambassador signed a three-page cable, labeled “sensitive,” in which he noted “growing problems with security” in Benghazi and “growing frustration” on the part of local residents with Libyan police and security forces. These forces the ambassador characterized as “too weak to keep the country secure.”
In the document, Stevens also cited a meeting he had held two days earlier with local militia commanders. These men boasted to Stevens of exercising “control” over the Libyan Armed Forces, and threatened that if the U.S.-backed candidate for prime minister were to prevail in Libya’s internal political jockeying, “they would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi.”

Fox News sent a reporter to Benghazi,

Timeline of Benghazi terror attack, Part 1

Timeline of Benghazi terror attack, Part 2

BONUS,


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