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American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Mexico’s Attorney General: US Authorities Still Haven’t Found “A Single Dollar” of Drug Lord El Chapo

Who do you believe?

On the one hand, US Authorities Still Haven’t Found “A Single Dollar” of Drug Lord El Chapo Guzmán, says Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Cervantes Andrade,

The ex-leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, did not use the financial system, so thus far, no financial resources have been recovered, Mexican Attorney General Raúl Cervantes Andrade said Wednesday.

“To date US authorities have not found anything pertaining to the assets of el Chapo. We have realized that he did not use the financial system because we have not found any assets; they have not been able to find a single dollar,” the official said.

On the other hand, Jorge Ramos Hernández, a PAN congressman claims the assets total US$16 billion and belong to Mexico.

Clearly the guy from the PRI is not talking with the guy from the PAN.

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz proposes the El Chapo Act, enabling 14 billion dollars worth of assets from El Chapo and other drug lords to fund the border wall.

In fact, in 2014 the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)

issued a chart identifying 288 companies involved in Guzmán’s money laundering operations that had been blacklisted by OFAC between 2007 and 2014. The Guzman-linked companies, mostly located in Mexico, covered a broad range of areas including real estate, gas stations, construction and trucking companies, and furniture stores.

As I mentioned last month, one of El Chapo’s associates agreed not to contest the forfeiture of nearly $1.4 billion in assets and cash by U.S. authorities, and in 2012 the U.S. Treasury Department put financial sanctions on El Chapo’s wife and son.

Who do you believe?

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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El Salvador: Drug kingpin Chepe Diablo linked to vice-president

Not to be confused with Mexico’s El Chapo, El Salvador Arrests ‘Chepe Diablo,’ Investigates Ties with Vice President

El Salvador’s Attorney General’s Office arrested José Adán Salazar Umaña, alias “Chepe Diablo,” the alleged leader of the Texis Cartel, the most important drug trafficking and money laundering organization in the country. The arrest raises new questions about the links between Salazar Umaña and powerful politicians in El Salvador, including current Vice President Óscar Ortiz.

Salazar Umaña was arrested at noon on April 4 during a police operation that involved raids on some 50 properties, including hotels, gas stations and shops that either belong to Chepe Diablo or his associates. According to the authorities, the companies were used by the Texis Cartel to evade taxes or launder money that came from illegal activities.

According to InSight Crime’s report, Óscar Ortiz was allegedly laundering money through real estate transactions going back to 2000. Read the full article here.

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Money laundering in Miami: Pure gold!

Miami is unlike any other place in the USA, with stories like this, which go unnoticed by the national media:
Billions in drug dealers’ illegal Amazon gold ‘laundered’ through Miami refinery, feds say.

In brief, a Colombian guy named Juan P. Granda, working as director of operations NTR Metals, allegedly – with two other guys – was buying gold from illegal mines in Peru’s Amazonian rain forest, refining it, selling it, and then wiring the funds back to drug traffickers.

Things get complicated and at least seven countries are involved: Granda was born in Ecuador, is a U.S, citizen, the gold was coming from Peru, but was routed through Bolivia, and

At least one of the companies sending the gold to NTR was financed by a man identified as P.F. in the complaint. According to sources, he is “Peter Ferrari,” whose real name is Pedro Perez Miranda.

Ferrari was acquitted of narcotics money laundering in Peru. But he was later arrested on charges of illegal gold mining and laundering more than $500 million worth of gold.

After the Peruvian crackdown, smuggled gold was transported to Bolivia before it was shipped to NTR in Miami, the complaint said. Last year, Ecuadorean authorities made arrests involving about $400 million in gold from Peru bound for refineries in Miami, including NTR Metals, according to the complaint.

Federal agents said customs records show that NTR also participated in “highly suspicious gold imports” from Colombia, Chile, Guyana and the Caribbean.

How much money are we talking about? The federal prosecutor’s complaint states, “NTR sent billions of dollars in wire payments to Latin America from the United States.”
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Mexico: El Chapo does Manhattan

El País reports on The American ‘cage’ holding the world’s biggest drug lord. ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán awaits trial in solitary confinement inside a New York City correctional facility.

There is a television set in the room where Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is allowed to exercise for one hour a day, but it is never turned on: his guards, who aren’t allowed to talk to him, can’t decide what he should be allowed to watch. He spends the remaining 23 hours of each day in a small cell with a bed, a table, a chair, a lavatory and a sink. The light is turned on most of the time. The only time he sees daylight is through a small window in the passage between his cell and his exercise room.

Apparently the MCC is “worse than Guantánamo.” Play me the world’s smallest violin,

While El Chapo awaits trial, he is being kept in complete isolation, and can only talk to his lawyers from behind a glass screen. He has no contact with his wife, Emma Coronel, and she in turn is receiving no news about him. He is unaware of the increasingly bloody power struggle taking place within the Sinaloa cartel in the wake of his extradition, or that Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, with whom he wanted to make a movie about his own life, has a new television series.

But El Chapo will have seen the documents relating to his own case: that a police officer in the Mexico border city of Juárez is to give testimony about the bribes paid to release members of the Sinaloa cartel; that another witness will talk about a house used for killings, the walls of which were covered in plastic and where a special drain had to be installed for the blood to be washed down; that his stash of AK-47s was found, and that several leading Colombian cartel leaders will also be testifying.

No tunnel allowed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

RELATED:
The Successor to El Chapo: Dámaso López Núñez “El Licenciado”.

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Colombia: Coca production continues to rise

I was posting about this in July last year, and even then it was a two-year trend:

While the FARC peace travesty rolls right along, coca cultivation has surged over the past two years as growers are offered greater incentives at lower risk.

Now the Acreage under coca cultivation set to surpass levels before a U.S.-sponsored eradication program began (emphasis added),

The surge in the coca crop has come since 2013, as the U.S. was forced to reduce and ultimately end spraying from crop dusters because of health concerns over the use of a toxic defoliant and the Colombian government’s worries that the program was turning many rural residents against the state as it was negotiating a peace deal with Marxist rebels. On Tuesday, U.S. officials in Washington are expected to announce that coca is planted on about 695 square miles of land, or more than 10 times the area of the District of Columbia. The increase continues a rise in which planted acreage has more than doubled since its lowest point in 2012.

A year ago I also posted that Hezbollah was teaming up with Colombian cocaine lords due to Iran’s falling oil revenues.

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Mexico: Jalisco New Generation CJNG cartel expands into U.S.

InSight Crime reports,

American officials are reporting that the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation (CJNG) has expanded its trafficking operations in the United States, marking an important evolution in the modus operandi of the growing criminal organization.

As reported by Proceso, the CJNG has used its growing presence in Juárez to boost its participation in US markets for cocaine and heroin. This marks a change in direction for the group whose prominence in Mexico has risen sharply over the past five years, but whose international forays seemed to be mostly limited to trafficking to Europe.

The Proceso report squares with other recent indications from US authorities. In its 2016 National Drug Threat Assessment, published in November, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported that the CJNG was one of the six Mexican organizations with the greatest presence in the United States. It has set up distribution hubs in Los Angeles and Atlanta, and also operates in far-flung cities such as Miami, San Antonio, San Francisco, and even Roanoke, Virginia. The most recent assessment reflects an increased presence relative to prior DEA reports.

CJNG was founded in 2010 as an offshoot of the Sinaloa Cartel, distributing cocaine in Europe and, as InSight Crime points out, has a substantial operation in Asia.

In other Mexican cartel news, the manhunt for Gulf Cartel leader Julián “El Toro” (The Bull) Loisa Salinas has created infighting within the organization, leaving nine dead so far.

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Venezuela: US sanctions VP El Aissami over drug ties

U.S. Puts Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami on Sanctions List. Official, placed on Treasury’s kingpins list, allegedly aided drug traffickers (emphasis added)

Executive Vice President Tareck El Aissami and Venezuelan financier Samark Lopez were placed on the Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist, the Treasury Department said in a statement Monday. The list freezes their assets in the U.S. and blocks U.S. companies and individuals from doing business with them.

Mr. El Aissami “facilitated shipments of narcotics from Venezuela,” while serving as Venezuela’s Interior Minister and then governor of the central Aragua state, said the statement. “He oversaw or partially owned narcotics shipments of over 1,000 kilograms from Venezuela on multiple occasions.”

For the Zetas, among others,

The Treasury department on Monday said Mr. El Aissami, as Interior Minister, was paid for using his control of Venezuelan air bases, ports and highways to facilitate drug shipments from Venezuela and Colombian druglords as well as Mexico’s Los Zetas drug cartel.

Alek Boyd has been reporting on El Aissami for years,

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El Chapo’s lawyers want more access

The court-appointed, taxpayer-paid federal defenders want more time with him, and raised a conflict of interest question:

Mexican Drug Lord Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán’s Lawyers Ask for More Access. Since his extradition to U.S., he’s largely been in solitary confinement in a New York prison.

Adding to the complexity of the case, the government also raised concerns about Mr. Guzmán’s legal representation by the federal defenders, saying there was a potential conflict of interest because the defenders’ office has previously represented five potential witnesses with connections to Mr. Guzmán.

The judge appointed Matthew Fishbein, a partner at Manhattan law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, to help Mr. Guzmán determine whether there is a conflict of interest.

Mexican authorities rushed El Chapo out of the country – likely before the customary negotiations that would normally take place in such a prominent case were completed (emphasis added):

Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers have indicated they may challenge the grounds for his extradition. The extradition proceedings in Mexico were not based on the charges in Brooklyn, and “it was assumed” he would be brought to California or Texas, his lawyers said. Before his removal to the U.S., neither he nor his lawyers in Mexico knew the extradition would occur, according to a court filing.

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