Missed this:
Just before sunset on April 10, 2006, a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. As soldiers on the ground approached the plane, the crew tried to shoo them away, saying there was a dangerous oil leak. So the troops grew suspicious and searched the jet.
They found 128 black suitcases, packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100 million. The stash was supposed to have been delivered from Caracas to drug traffickers in Toluca, near Mexico City, Mexican prosecutors later found. Law enforcement officials also discovered something else.
The smugglers had bought the DC-9 with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp., Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August 2010 issue.
***Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history — a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.
“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.
Since 2006, more than 22,000 people have been killed in drug-related battles that have raged mostly along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border that Mexico shares with the U.S. In the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, 700 people had been murdered this year as of mid- June. Six Juarez police officers were slaughtered by automatic weapons fire in a midday ambush in April.
Of course, we could also decriminalize marijuana and institute some sensible policies that might drive down demand for the foreign drugs now fueling this narco-terrorism all across Mexico and points south. But that would make too much damned sense and wouldn’t be as profitable to big Pharm, the big banks, and everyone else cashing in on the drug war.
Chris
Soft on crime! Soft on crime!
/kneejerk
(ps: is there a way to get less-than and greater-than signs in? ampersand lt semicolon did not work)
Lee from NC
I feel such a sense of pride! Both those banks are based in my town. Or were, anyway, before Wachovia was bought by Wells Fargo.
And banks not paying much attention to banking laws! Hoocadanode?
burnspbesq
OK, you lost me there – how does Big Pharma benefit from the current state of affairs?
kdaug
@burnspbesq: Uh… because their, say, glaucoma, nausea, and anxiety medicines are less effective, more toxic, and have greater side effects than pot? Perhaps?
See also: Alcohol companies…
MattF
“Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007.”
I don’t aghast easily, but I’m aghast.
lahru
It’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. How much money was put into other accounts by the drug dealers that were somehow closed and the money kept by these banks?
Show me one area where millions are involved and where there is no corruption. I’ll wait right here.
burnspbesq
@kdaug:
Sorry, I live in California. Anyone who needs marijuana for a legitimate medical need can easily get it. Wanna try again?
Geeno
@burnspbesq: lucky you
b-psycho
Considering Wachovia collapsed anyway, they must really suck at laundering money…
kdaug
@lahru: Not quite – $378.4 billion.
kdaug
@burnspbesq: And anyone who lives in Amsterdam can smoke whether their sick or not. What’s your point?
Wapiti
The police can seize a house if it is used in drug-related activities*, why is a bank any different?
(* which I think is utter and unconstitutional garbage, but the Supreme Court apparently ruled otherwise.)
Brachiator
I strongly favor the legalization of marijuana, not just decriminalization. There will even be a California ballot initiative on this.
But legalizing weed is not going to do much to drive down the demand for foreign drugs, is certainly irrelevant to what happens with cocaine, and also has little to do with the feverish dreams of Big Pharma.
@burnspbesq:
It’s still not as easy as it should be. For example, this recent news story.
gwangung
I expect to see this in a Leverage episode next season.
Bill Murray
Is money laundering from drug operations a big secret? Drug trafficking made up about 8% of all international trade (the triumph of globalization) in 1998, and at least $500 billion a year was laundered then. Despite there being a supposed war on drugs, this hasn’t really gone down.
http://www.fpif.org/reports/drug_trafficking_and_money_laundering
wengler
It’s quite simple really. Drugs go north. Guns go south. And the banks get paid on both sides of the deal.
As for legalization it will be a cold day in hell before the US government gives up on the war on poor and minorities masquerading as the war on drugs.
russell
OK, when I read this, first I laughed.
Then I got depressed for a minute.
Then I figured, what, me worry? And I laughed again, even harder.
This shit is so deep and so far over our heads that outrage is almost beside the point. It’s like getting pissed off at an avalanche.
$378.4 billion, bitches. One third of Mexico’s economy.
The banksters would cut your balls off to have a piece of that. Hell, they’d cut their own balls off to have a piece of that, and smile while doing it.
When the rest of us take their money and toys away and make them do hard time, they’ll stop. Until then, it’s their world and we just live in it.
El Cid
One of the classic deceits of the so-called “war on drugs” was the purposeful government ignoring of the two largest US corporate support of the international narcotics trade: the massive transfer of these funds through Western banks, and the massive shipment of drug manufacture precursor chemicals to areas and fake companies whose actual purpose could only be narcotics manufacture.
We’d rather just spend billions on, say, funding the Colombian military so they and their narco-paramilitary buddies could focus on defeating leftist narco-guerrillas (who for the most part tax coca production than engage in narco-processing and shipment themselves, though that does take place) while the government’s narco-paramilitary buddies take over much of the narco-trafficking to Mexico and the Caribbean, and displace 3 million peasants from the land.
And we rush to condemn and raise suspicions of the neighboring nations — Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador — who are the victims of the by-far major producer of narcotics in South America, Colombia.
It’s all bullshit, it’s all deception, it’s all about trying to shoot and spray the producers and try to shoot and arrest the narco-traffickers, while ignoring (for the most part with occasional demonstration busts of too obvious shit) {a} banking laundering of billions in narco-funds, {b} manufacture and shipments of chemical narco-precursors, and {c} the massive US demand market whose high profits due to the ‘war on drugs’ is what creates the violent, nation-tearing drugs production and trafficking.
We’re not serious about solving the drugs trade, or we’d be dealing with those 3 points.
It’s more about increasing the repressive powers of law enforcement, throwing poor and black people in jail, to back up our preferred regimes, and preserving banking and manufacturing profits from the trade.