Western governments and organized crime have colluded together for centuries. European and yankee mass murdering wars of conquest in the Americas and Europe's genocidal colonization of Asia and Africa all veiled their colonial plunder with completely sham legality, mirrored today in the blatantly politicized International Criminal Court. That shameful history represents an enormous accumulation of sordid wholesale criminality and crimes against humanity.
It is a history that renders both malevolent and ridiculous European and North American pretensions to moral superiority. In essence, the fragile and superficial human rights advances in those regions have only taken place because European and North American elites historically externalized the catastrophic human, social and economic cost of those advances onto their colonies and vassal peoples. Now, the countries of Europe and North America face the slow motion collapse of their economic status relative to the rest of the world.
Their leaders' brazenly false affectation of commitment to global and domestic human rights is as gratuitously offensive as it is completely implausible. Events from Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Congo to Ivory Coast, Libya and Syria render absurd any claims to moral leadership by the leaders of the NATO countries of North America and Europe. Accompanying their bankrupt moral credibility on human rights is the continuing connivance of those same governments with organized crime, especially as regards money laundering.
Governments and money laundering
Western corporate propaganda media generally depict the intimate connections between NATO country governments and criminal money laundering as sporadic lapses in regulatory control. In fact, for decades Western elites have deliberately promoted systematic deregulation and fraud to increase their wealth and political dominance. Since at least the 1980s to the present day, corporate media reports have played down the facts involving numerous multinational banks in some version or other of laundering the proceeds of global organized crime and corruption.
The list of financial multinationals involved over the years in money laundering or fraud of some kind includes, among many others, US companies like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and its subsidiary Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, J.PMorgan, Wells Fargo and its subsidiary Wachovia, PNC, British companies like Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS), Lloyd's, HSBC and Standard Chartered, Switzerland's UBS and Credit Suisse, the Dutch ING conglomerate, Crédit Agricole and BNP Paribas in France and Banco Santander in Spain. What is consistent in all these reports is that the same financial corporations repeatedly break the law over long periods of time but almost never face criminal prosecution thanks to the political influence of their economic power.
Among these financial giants figure a large number of the elite group of gangster multinational financial institutions accepted by the US Federal Reserve as primary dealers. These primary dealers are essentially a cartel with which the Federal Reserve trades US government and other approved securities. This faux-respectable network is a fundamental component of the processes the US corporate elite use with their European and Pacific partners to dominate and fix global financial and commodities markets in their own interests.
The latest global financial crisis has demonstrated very explicitly that NATO country governments are completely dominated by criminal global corporate financial interests against the interests of the enormous majority, rendering irrelevant and fake the hollow processes of Western electoral democracy. Politically powerful multinational financial giants dominate global banking flows and financial markets. Beneath them operate a plethora of smaller institutions including non-banking financial institutions and the financial entities that make up the so-called shadow banking systems in the countries of North America and Europe.
In drugs producing regions like Central and South East Asia or South America regional financial systems imitate and collude with their Western counterparts. The notorious case of the Casa de Cambio Puebla in Mexico which laundered billions of narco-dollars into the United States over many years, indicates clearly how weak international and national controls really are. When regional money laundering players like that Mexican Casa de Cambio very occasionally suffer prosecution and are wound up, others quickly take their place
Reports by the International Monetary Fund and other prestigious international institutions estimate that the global financial system launders from one to one and a half trillion dollars generated by organized crime and corruption every year. That estimate certainly understates the reality of the global illicit economy driven by organized crime and official corruption. The spectacular profitability for multinational financial corporations of processing these enormous amounts of money makes the already ineffectual and often half-hearted attempts at government regulation almost completely futile.
Pillage and recolonization
This reality underlies the relentless drive by the world's corporate elites and their political puppets like, currently, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, David Cameron and François Hollande to promote “free markets” and corporate globalization. Political leader-stooges like Barack Obama and the rest come and go, but the continuity of corrupt Western political and economic systems remains unchanged. Mass money laundering and public sector bailouts rescued the giant multinational corporate financial institutions that dominate NATO country political systems from the economic crisis their own criminal speculative activities provoked. The crisis continues to this day, its costs paid for by the majority while the elites party.
Even mainstream journalists in the NATO country corporate media from time to time recognize the brutal facts of global economic life. For example Ed Vulliamy of the UK Guardian writes, “ The stark truth is that the cartels' best friends are those people in pin-stripes who, after a rap on the knuckles, return to their golf in Connecticut and drinks parties in Holland Park. The notion of any dichotomy between the global criminal economy and the "legal" one is fantasy. Worse, it is a lie. They are seamless, mutually interdependent – one and the same.” (Ed Vulliamy, “Global banks are the financial services wing of the drug cartels”.
Western political leaders offer farcical lectures to majority world countries about fighting the very corruption and money laundering on which the West's political and economic system depend. Mainstream corporate media never make explicit the connection between this fact and the resort by NATO countries to wars of colonial aggression to get what they want. The US sociologist James Petras has written eloquently on the issue of money laundering in the United States. He notes that the simple mechanisms by which it operates are only possible thanks to the deep complicity of the country's political and economic leadership.
“The increasing polarization of the world is embedded in this organized system of criminal and corrupt financial transactions. While speculation and foreign debt payments play a role in undermining living standards in the crisis regions, the multi-trillion dollar money laundering and bank servicing of corrupt officials is a much more significant factor, sustaining Western prosperity, U.S. empire building and financial stability. The scale, scope and time frame of transfers and money laundering, the centrality of the biggest banking enterprises and the complicity of the governments, strongly suggests that the dynamics of growth and stagnation, empire and re-colonization are intimately related to a new form of capitalism built around pillage, criminality, corruption and complicity.” (James Petras, “US Bank Money Laundering - Enormous By Any Measure)
The vicious colonial aggressions against Ivory Coast and Libya in 2011 provide devastating proof of Petras' argument. The dramatic increase in production of heroin from Afghanistan following NATO's invasion of that country gives yet more confirmation. The multi-billion profits from the Central and South East Asian heroin trade are welcomed by the corporate backers of cynical political leaders like Barack Obama and his European counterparts. Ivory Coast is now ruled by ex-World Bank gangster Alassane Ouatarra for the benefit of his Western cronies. Likewise the hundreds of billions of dollars looted from Libya's sovereign wealth fund remain in the possession of NATO country financial oligarchs.
In Latin America, US government policy follows the gangster dictum “never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”. The fake “war on drugs” guarantees the cash flow of the major US banks and also promotes the US security, armaments and incarceration industries. The US government has focused on Andean countries like Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela and on Mexico. But the complicity of US government agencies and personnel, principally but not only the CIA, in the regional narcotics trade was uncovered long ago during the inter-related Bank of Credit and Commerce International and Iran-Contra scandals of the late 1980s. Before that during the Vietnam war, complicity by US government agencies in narcotics and organized crime throughout South East Asia was commonplace.
That complicity continues now. In 2005, Venezuela suspended its cooperation with the DEA. In 2007, then Interior Minister Pedro Carreño declared that "the United States with its Drugs Enforcement Agency monopolizes drugs shipments like a cartel". Venezuela suspended its work with the DEA because, Carreño said, "they were making large transfers of drugs using the cover of handovers under surveillance " but did not carry out "arrests of citizens, the dismantling of a single cartel........We were able to determine that we were clearly in the presence of a new cartel." ("El gobierno de Hugo Chávez acusó a la DEA de ser un nuevo cartel." Associated Press, 8/5/2007).
Similarly, for that reason, among others, Bolivia expelled the Drugs Enforcement Agency in 2011. US government complicity in narcotics and money laundering is the reality behind John Kerry's ridiculous remarks to the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee about Colombia when he said, "Colombia is a model for the region. It's an example for the rest of Latin America about what they can expect if we can convince people to take better decisions.” This demented nonsense is what passes now for US foreign policy and explains why the United States people have been misled into one foreign affairs disaster after another by the militarist corporate elite – a fascist elite identified as such long ago by Vice President Henry Wallace - that controls the US government.
The case of Colombia
If one looks at Colombia one sees a society among the most unequal on the planet. That inequality has driven the country's civil war for fifty years. From the 1980s to the early 1990s, Colombian death squads murdered over 3000 left wing politicians to prevent the development of a progressive democratic electoral option. Colombia continues to be the world champion for murders of trades unionists. The country has around 4 million people internally displaced by the country's long running civil war. Covering up for the Colombian government, North American and European governments falsely accuse the FARC guerrilla movement of narcotics dealing.
In fact, it is elements of the NATO-country backed Colombian ruling elite, their military and their right wing paramilitary allies who dominate the Colombian narcotics business. Over the last few years, literally dozens of parliamentary deputies have been indicted for their links to paramilitaries and the paramilitary run narcotics business. That spate of prosecutions probably represents more a settling of political accounts rather than a serious attempt to unravel the Colombian ruling elite's endless complicity in paramilitary terror and narcotics dealing.
In the US, to date, only one member of the FARC has been sentenced on narcotics charges. Her conviction was based entirely on the suspicious evidence of a snitch who benefited from his dubious testimony. But dozens of right wing paramilitaries, most notoriously Salvatore Mancuso, have been convicted in the US on narcotics charges, extradited there by their former protector, narco-terror star Alvaro Uribe. Uribe himself was at one time number 82 on a US government list of Colombian individuals involved in narcotics. The US government report noted, "Álvaro Uribe, Colombian politician and Senator dedicated to collaborating with the Medellín Cartel at high government level”
These scandalous facts about Colombia render especially ironic John Kerry's praise of Colombia as a model for the region. But other facets are also of interest. A look at foreign direct investment in Colombia indicates how deeply Colombia's economy is mired in the money-laundering operations of global finance. The Colombian government has published this breakdown for the first nine month of the year 2010.
The combined foreign direct investment of tiny countries like Anguilla, Panama, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands with a total population of around 4 million people was 12% greater than that of the most powerful economy in the world, Colombia's main ally, with a population of over 260 million people. Tiny impoverished Anguilla's investment in Colombia was four times that of Britain. Anguilla, Panama, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands combined investment was three times the combined total of powerful OECD countries like Britain, Spain, Canada and Mexico.
This astonishing paradox only makes sense in terms of the criminality of the international global financial system. Very clearly North American and European financial interests are working together with the Colombian ruling elite to evade taxation and launder money through tax havens like Anguilla. This former British colony is still controlled by Britain and its allies, the United States and the wealthy feudal tyrannies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States . No other explanation makes sense in the regional and global context to explain how an impoverished country with a population of 13,000 people can generate 21% of foreign direct investment – over US$840m – in Colombia in just nine months.
While foreign direct investment may be a small component of Colombia's gross domestic product, the fact that over 40% is cycled through fiscal paradises like Anguilla, Panama, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands establishes a channel allowing the potential laundering through those small countries of narcotics funds in multiples of that amount – tens of billions of US dollars a year. Ever since the 1980s when the Colombian drugs cartels became truly multinational commercial and financial entities, the Colombian banking system has been thoroughly compromised.
Academics writing on the role of multinational businesses in Colombia stress the opaque networking nature of their operations that undercut and bypass formal structures which themselves have very diverse levels of transparency. This highlights the importance of the network of relationships between the major global multinational financial institutions and their smaller regional counterparts. A recent example of this kind of symbiotic relationship was the sale by disgraced money laundering giant HSBC of its operations in Peru, Colombia, Uruguay and Paraguay to Banco GNB Sudameris for US$400 million.
Banco GNB Sudameris is part of the Gilinski Group led by Colombian business magnate Jaime Gilinski. Back in the early 1990s, this multinational business and financial services group similarly bought the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International operations in the Americas at a bargain basement price in the early 1990s, renamed it Banco Andino and sold it after just a few years. BCCI was the bank that helped facilitate the Iran-Contra transactions, among many other illicit deals, throughout the 1980s.
With the profits from the sale of Banco Andino, the Gilinski group took advantage of the privatization by the Colombian government of the narcotics-implicated Banco de Colombia. George Soros, global funder of NGOs working to destabilize countries targeted by the US government, helped the Gilinski group complete the purchase of Banco de Colombia with a personal loan of around US$50m in exchange for a 9% holding in the new bank. Among the Gilinski group's holdings is the Eagle National Bank of Miami, linked in the 1980s to Colombian drugs money.
As late as March 2005, the US Federal Reserve imposed a legal ban on transactions between Eagle National and other financial organizations controlled by Jaime Gilinski. The ban was lifted in 2009. Eagle National, now known as JGB Bank, remains part of the extremely influential Gilinski Group. This group is now coordinating the development of the US$700m real estate development of the former US Howard Air Base in Panama. That connection raises the interesting question of what relations exist between the Gilinsky Group and the US military's Southern Command.
Senator John Kerry is no stranger to the labyrinthine trails made by financial intermediaries like BCCI and HSBC and their regional counterparts. As head of the Kerry Commission in the late 1980s, he investigated the complicated web of transactions spun by BCCI to cover up the bank's corrupt dealings. For one reason or another Kerry and his colleagues never followed through on the numerous controversial leads his investigation threw up. In the United States, ambitious young senators, as John Kerry was at the time of the Kerry Commission and as Barack Obama was prior to becoming President in 2008, learn fast not to make any serious challenge to the powerful corporate business and financial lobbies that dominate US politics and media.
ALBA against corrupt global capitalism
It is in this context of global corporate corruption and government collusion with organized crime that the International Court of Justice on December 9th 2012 ruled in a dispute between Colombia and Nicaragua over maritime territory off Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast. The court awarded to Nicaragua an enormous maritime area of around 75,000 km2 previously usurped unilaterally by Colombia for over 80 years. The ICJ judgment is binding.
Colombia is now legally obliged to withdraw its warships from the area. The judgment also means that Nicaragua has exclusive rights to the marine and other resources in the sea and the continental platform in the area adjudicated to it by the ICJ ruling. Colombia has resolutely refused to withdraw its navy from Nicaragua's newly recovered maritime territory, although, so far, no incidents have been reported between Nicaraguan patrol boats and Colombian navy frigates in the area.
The multinational Colombian narcotics business clearly uses routes across the Caribbean to ship its product. The narcotics routes that cross waters now patrolled by the Nicaraguan armed forces are at risk of being cut off as Nicaragua consolidates its ability to control the area with help from Russia while the United States goes through the motions of pretending to fight drugs trafficking in the region. In fact, there is little doubt that the Colombian and US authorities collude to protect approved narcotics activity, only moving against rogue competitors. As Venezuelan Interior Minister put it in 2007, we are “clearly in the presence of a new cartel.”
This reality is one more aspect of the supreme importance for humanity of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA). The ALBA governments are building a new regional financial and commercial architecture to liberate their peoples' full potential for their countries' development. In doing so they are casting off centuries of colonial domination imposed by Europe and North America - what are now the member countries of NATO. But they are also challenging the profoundly corrupt and criminal system to which the ruling oligarchies of the NATO countries have resorted in order to sustain their now decrepit and degenerate global power and influence.
Nicaragua's role in liberating Latin America and the Caribbean from the criminal economic system dominated by the NATO powers is fundamental given its strategic position linking the world's two great oceans. More specifically, its decisive commitment to genuinely combat the international narcotics trade puts Nicaragua in the front line against the corrupt and politically powerful Western financial system. Over the next few years, the success of Nicaragua and its fellow ALBA countries in challenging organized crime in the Caribbean will be a crucial measure of the region's progress towards definitive autonomy and genuine sovereignty.