Note to readers: From time to time R.I.M.S.E provides analysis and information on wider security issues not directly related to the main scope of research which is “Radical Islamism in Southeastern Europe”. R.I.M.S.E, strongly adheres in a holistic review of security subjects, so it provides readers other spectrums of the security analysis such as organized crime and terrorism, in order to cover a wide range of illicit sectors which may possibly be related to each other and in any case are of much use both to the specialized researcher, and to the general public as well.
Ioannis Michaletos (RIMSE) - The present state of affairs in Albania regarding its impeding EU accession is far from rosy judging amongst other by the hesitation of countries such as UK, Germany, Netherlands and Czech Republic to accept an eventual inclusion of that country in the EU.
Concurrently Albania's neighbor, Greece which assumes the EU Presidency 1st of January 2014 and for the next 6 months, appears to be as one of the most fervent supports for the case of Tirana. Below the surface though, tension brews which is illustrated by a set of developments. These include defense developments and serious security concerns regarding organized crime activities.
Tirana-Ankara line and the mistrust
In December 2013, the head of the Albanian PDIU political party, which has a clear-cut line in its foreign policy proposals against Greece, visited Ankara and was hosted personally by the vice-President of the governing AKP party. The Albanian press noted that this visit marked an intense and long-term cooperation between PDIU and the Turkish AKP. What is more interesting though is that Turkey proposed and PDIU accepted for common stance in the relations between Albania and Greece, which in diplomatic terms can be considered as a "non-friendly" gesture towards the latter.
In addittion the Albanian Armed forces received a 3 million Euros donation of military vehicles from Turkey. Since the early 00's the Albanian Army has accepted a significant number of donations, whilst Albanian special forces regularly receive training by their Turkish counterparts, who in turn have as a basic doctrine the fight against Greek military targets in the event of an armed conflict between the two countries.
In fact the definite assessment that has been formed in the Greek defense and security power circles for some time is that the Albanian forces are becoming "satellite-like ones" of the Turkish Army, an assumption that leads Athens to eventually consider Albania as a non-friendly state in all practical terms, apart from naming it directly.
The aforementioned cover a very small part of the overall discussion regarding Greek-Albanian defense relations, which do not conclude with the involvement solemnly of Turkey.
Furthermore, in recent nationwide Gallop type surveys in both Greece and Albania which were conducted by the Albanian institute of international relations with the assistance of the Greek ELIAMEP foundation, interesting findings were laid down. 34% of the Greeks questioned consider the Albanian immigrants as a "threat" and 15% are worried about "Albanian nationalism". Also 32% do not want Albania into the EU.
The Albanians questioned, 18.5% of them consider Greece as the "prime external threat", more than the 17% which consider Serbia. Insignificant number mentioned also FYROM, Montenegro and Italy. These data further add to the general assumption that mistrust and a societal feeling of common opposition fills the bilateral relations between the two states.
Better safe than sorry
In Mid-December 2013 and in the midst of all the above culminations, the Greek Armed forces performed a military exercise in the Lake Prespes region close to the borders with Albania. The exercise was code named "Pyrpolytis 11/13" and constituted a 24-hour rapid movement of elite forces aiming in theory to disband and neutralize incoming "irregular forces" from Albania, which would be assisted by “terrorist cells”. Several units from the Greek Alpine Commando force were used, along with 4 Chinook and 2 Apache helicopters and various specially designed vehicles for mountainous war.
The Prespes region is over the past few years a crossroad for drug traffickers from Albania, while the Greek security apparatus strongly believes that elements belonging to veteran members of the UCK are "testing" for years the preparedness of the Greek armed forces, especially after the commence of the economic crisis in the country in 2010.
The information leaked so far by credible sources in the Greek media and amongst local stakeholders, talk about "loose cells" of UCK veteran members in Greece in the land axis between the lake Prespes and Tymfistros mountain in central Greece, along with a few dozen members in the outskirts of Athens. In total there are around 150 suspected persons that for the moment deal heavily with drug trafficking and arms contraband.
All the available information point out that ex-UCK members, which presently deal exclusively with the organized crime in the Balkans, have from time to time attempted to "test" the Greek border and domestic security system in a significant scale, nevertheless the attempts were thwarted so far. That has lead in a shift in strategy within the Greek Armed forces which now have developed a separate high-alert commando structure that will be aided by air force and heavily armed Police elements, exclusively dealing with the issue and fusing its operational aims with those of the border Police when in terms with organized criminal activities.
A distorted Balkan “Switzerland”
The small town of Lazarati, relatively close to the borders with Greece and FYROM, is the primal hashish production region in Europe. Lazarati’s 4,000 inhabitants are fully occupied with cannabis production, which reaches from 500 tons to 1,200 tons per year depending on the crop. It is estimated that the Lazarati region "pumps" 200-450 million Euros into the Albanian economy which is around 3% of its nominal GDP!
Moreover the total revenue for the Albanian organized crime and their associates in several countries in wholesale and retail sales value of the drug produced, reaches from 2 billion Euros to more than 4 billion Euros per annum.
Despite efforts by the Albanian police which has confiscated in its territory more than 100 tons in 2013, and the pressure exercised, especially by the Greek and Italian authorities, the Lazarati production is undisturbed and the whole town is armed to the teeth to protect its riches which produce an average 100,000 Euros per year for every person, making it one of the richest regions in Europe, bar several communities in Switzerland, Monaco and Lichtenstein.
The drug production in Lazarati is mostly exported to Greece, Italy, and to Central Europe (via FYROM and Kosovo and all the way through the Northern Balkan drug route). Apart from fuelling corruption in a social and political context in Albania it is also a major security concern for the whole of the region, due to the financial empowerment it boosts to the local criminal syndicates.
Further, the hashish production is being greatly assisted by the massive use of chemical agents for fast plant growth which in turn causes long-term health hazards to the "consumers", which in most part are EU citizens.
The Lazarati drug lords are also directly connected with arms trafficking of light weapons, especially machine guns and hand grenades which are being trafficked both to Greece and Italy, while it remains a mystery how money laundering takes place of such significant amounts of cash in a country with little developed financial sector services. Thus, it can be safely assumed that money laundering takes place outside the borders of Albania with likely territories, Montenegro, Istanbul, FYROM, Ukraine, Moldova, Kosovo and Bosnia.
Lastly great amounts of cash in the tube of tens of millions perhaps even greater would be "stashed" in the Lazarati town, literally hidden in mattresses and warehouses used as "safe deposits".
In overall, Greek-Albanian relations and the ongoing EU accession of Tirana are filtered through the prism of the security concerns of Athens which tend to grow over time. On the other hand, the Albanian society is increasingly urbanized and getting into tune with the rest of the EU, requiring the rule of Law to be implemented within its territory and relinquishing role models of "guerilla behavior" that still dominate large stratums of the society in the peripheries of the country.
The fight between the two worlds will ultimately decide the fate of the likely entrance of Albania into the EU. Concluding it can be safely estimated that in 2014 no Western Balkan countries (Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, and FYROM) will get the "green light" ahead from Brussels and security concerns play a decisive role, apart from economic considerations and bilateral differences.
* Note - More about the Kosovo Liberation Army - The Kosovo Liberation Army (abbreviated KLA; Albanian: Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës—UÇK) was an ethnic-Albanian paramilitary organization which sought the separation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Its campaign against Yugoslav (south Slavs) security forces precipitated a major Yugoslav military crackdown which led to the Kosovo War of 1998–1999. The Yugoslav authorities, under Slobodan Milošević, regarded the KLA a terrorist group. In February 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, described the KLA as, "without any questions, a terrorist group".UN resolution 1160 took a similar stance. But the 1997 US Department's terrorist list hadn't included the KLA.In March 1998, just one month later Gerbald had to modify his statements to say that KLA had not been classified legally by the U.S. government as a terrorist group, and the US government approached the KLA leaders to make them interlocutors with the Serbs. A Wall Street Journal article claimed later that the US government had in February 1998 removed the KLA from the list of terrorist organizations,but this has never been confirmed. France didn't delist the KLA until late 1998, after strong US and UK lobbying. KLA is still present in the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base list of terrorist groups, and is listed as an inactive terrorist organization by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism from the Homeland Security. During the war, the KLA collaborated with NATO and they were qsuddenly baptized as "freedom fighters". The KLA has also been connected to drugs and arms trafficking, with it being responsible for 70% of the heroin smuggled into Western Europe in the 1990s. KLA member Agim Gashi was prosecuted in Italy for drug trafficking. Interpol's report in the US Congress of 2000: “Albanian drug lords established elsewhere in Europe began contributing funds to the 'national cause' in the 80s. From 1993 on, these funds were to a large extent invested in arms and military equipment for the KLA (UÇK) which made its first appearance in 1993… Of the almost 900 million DM which reached Kosovo between 1996 and 1999, half was thought to be illegal drug money." Source Wikipedia
Police officials in the prefectures of Argolida and Arcadia (both located in the Peloponnese) are presently conducting a large-scale operation in Roma settlements as part of a crackdown on crime. Similar operations were launched earlier in the week in the prefecture of Messinia and according to what was reported some 84 people were arrested. Also, 71 people were remanded by police for questioning following operations carried out in Roma camps in Corinth and Argos at the beginning of the week.
According to the same reports, officers checked 943 people and 619 vehicles, while those arrested faced charges for being in possession of cannabis trees, narcotics and illegal weapons. Also many suspects were found stealing electricity and conducting sanitary violations.
(xaameriki) - Government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou received a petition from the residents of Exarchia denouncing illegal activities in the building IFJ on the road Zaimis 11 which has been essentially given to an Anarchist paramilitary group. In their letter, Greek citizens complained that the building was being used to store contraband cigarettes, a variety of weapons, and illegal drugs.
What is most shocking about this complaint is that only a few years ago, the Ministry of Culture spent 500,000 Euros for the restoration of this neo-classical building. The police in 2010 had raided the building and found gas masks, hoods, gloves, and materials for making Molotov cocktails. Today, the building’s interior has been literally wrecked by the Anarchist squatters.
During his campaign, premier Antonis Samaras had promised the Greek people that he would prosecute the Anarchist arsonists if elected Prime Minister, but as the frightened residents of Exarchia prove, the masked paramilitary groups are not only still alive and well, but have actually expanded into an enterprise of selling drugs and smuggled cigarettes, says the pro-Golden Dawn newsite xaameriki.
The consistent rule, according to this report, is wherever Anarchists take over a building, there is a “sudden” outbreak of lawlessness and destitution, with ordinary law-abiding citizens suffering the most. The “Anti-Fascists” and “humanitarians”, says the same report, even exploit the desperation of illegal immigrants by using them as drug-runners and enforcers against residents, making them do the dangerous work.
Editor's Note - There is a lot of truth in this article, much of this information is well known on the streets, but rarely reported. We here at HellasFrappe also believe that innocent illegal immigrants are being used by the "system" to distribute narcotics all over the country. Take a stroll in downtown Athens, and specifically around the area of Omonia, the only people openly selling drugs (without a care in the world) are illegal immigrants. HellasFrappe may not politically support the Golden Dawn party but we acknowledge good work and certainly this report deserves a round of applause. Bravo paidia. Hope to see a followup.
Greek police announced the dismantling of an international heroin-trafficking ring bringing drugs from Turkey into Greece and then into Italy. According to reports six people were placed under arrest (Greek nationals and four Albanian), during a sweeping police operation in three separate locations.
Nearly 23 kilos of heroin were found and confiscated during arrests in operations in the cities of Kavala, Karditsa and Thessaloniki.
The two Greek suspects, aged 53 and 43 years old, acted as intermediates in the trafficking chain, picking up the narcotics in order to turn them over to the Albanians, aged between 25 and 30 years old, so they may be transported to Italy.
Following police operations conducted in Trikala, Thessaloniki, Kozani, Katerini and Kastoria, police officers made 25 arrests -- 23 of those arrested were suspected of being members of the ring.
Police in Thessaly, central Greece, busted an international criminal ring, which allegedly imported drugs from Albania, Turkey and Bulgaria.
The drugs were subsequently distributed throughout Greece, the online edition of the Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported, citing a statement by the police.
Following police operations conducted in Trikala, Thessaloniki, Kozani, Katerini and Kastoria, police officers made 25 arrests -- 23 of those arrested were suspected of being members of the ring.
The large-scale operation was carried out on Monday by over 60 officers.
According to reports police have identified three of the ring’s alleged five leaders: a 51-year-old Greek who was arrested on Monday, a 38-year-old Bulgarian national currently in prison as well as a 38-year-old Bulgarian still at large.
Police estimated that the ring had so far distributed 18 kilos of heroin at an estimated street value of over 2 million euros.
The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club has been in Athens, Greece for many years now. They have opened a chapter in Thessaloniki, Northern Greece and they are also forming other chapters across the country in regions such as Chania, Crete.
Who are They?
The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club (HAMC) is a worldwide motorcycle club whose members typically ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles and is considered an organized crime syndicate by the U.S. Department of Justice. In the United States and Canada, the Hells Angels are incorporated as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation. Common nicknames for the club are the "H.A.", "Red & White", and "81" (H and A being the eighth and first letters of the alphabet).
As to why this gang is in Greece is indeed a mystery. One thing is for sure, the powers that be in Greece allowed this "Red & White Machine" to roll on into the country without any violence.
They are after all a gang and as we all know -and has been reported- most of its members all over the world are into a plethora of criminal activity such as narcotics, motorcycle theft, fraud, extortion, murder, assault, as well as many legal business' like tattoo shops, bars, motorcycle shops, etc.
But in some bizzare and twisted way they also do a lot of good. It is rumored that they do bike drives for various issues, and across the world we have seen them conduct these drives for kids with cancer. What's more they even apparently donate their long hair so that children who have cancer can once again gain the hair that they lost during chemotherapy.
If the "Godfathers of the Night" even dared to make a move against the club, then be certain that clubs from all over Europe would unite to back their brothers in Greece against this mafia. Of course, there is also a small chance that Greece would be evacuated to later be re-taken by the "Brotherhood." For now, their closest rival is probably their sworn enemies, the Mongols, who are quite a distance away, or in Italy.
We here at HellasFrappe have not really noted any criminal activity from the chapter in Greece. Quite the contrary, someone on our staff accidentally came face to face with one member in the summer of 2012 and described him as a pretty nice guy!
Any way you cut it, news about biker gangs making house in Greece, or any type of gangs is frightening, but as we stated earlier and as common sense dictates, these boys don't really bother anyone if they are not bothered first.
Besides, the Hells Angels have a history with the Greeks.
(Yes we were being sarcastic).
The Greeks in Canada, and more specifically in Calgary actually have a great relationship with the Hells Angels and a profound reputation of being involved with the trafficking of cocaine. According to the link posted below the Greeks in Calgary are well known in Western Canada for having shady dealings with that city's chapter of the notorious Hells Angels gang. In fact they were involved in smuggling cocaine and heroin. More precisely, the Hells Angels out of Calgary and Kelowna sanctioned Greeks in the area of Vernon to carry out their business and this Greek organization's activity involved homicides, high-echelon level drug trafficking as well as controlling street-level trafficking! Basically they were involved in just about every type of criminal activity imaginable.
Finally in Australia, Greek Australian Hells Angels associate, Peter Zervas, stood trial some time ago over a vicious airport brawl in Sydney’s airport. The brawl led to the murder of his brother Anthony Zervas. Not much information was given about this case, because Peter Zervas refused to give any details in the case, even though he was mysteriously shot -but survived- outside of a relatives home a little after his siblings murder.
International Presence
On July the 30th. 1969 the first European Hells Angels charter was accepted in London, England and today there are more than 125 charters in Europe alone. In the end of the seventies Australian clubs were admitted and in 1984, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil became the first South American charter. In 1993 Hells Angels came to the African continent with a charter in Johannesburg, South Africa. Eastern Europe got its own Hells Angels charter in the new millennium and since then many more countries have been granted the now famous winged death head.
The admission of clubs all over the globe caused changes in the structure of Hells Angels. The small motorcycle club from Berdoo in the US was now mother charter of the world´s biggest motorcycle brotherhood HELLS ANGELS MOTORCYCLE CLUB WORLD.
Today Hells Angels MC World has charters in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bohemia (Czech Republic), Brazil, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, United States and Wales. Clubs from new countries seeking admission are to be found in Japan, Lithuania , Latvia and Romania.
With Greece suffering the biggest economic depression in decades, all so a few rich men can preserve their wealth and not have their EUR-denominated savings wiped out (even if the alternative means finally being able to re balance externally using the Drachma instead of forcing internal re balancing via unemployment and plunging wages), it was only a matter of time before we found out just how humiliating the conversion of the entire economy to a "gray", non-tax paying one would be for the citizens of Greece.
As the NYT reports, in just the past two years, the numbers of Greeks engaging in prostitution as a last course source of income has more than doubled: according to the National Center for Social Research, the number of people selling sex has surged 150 percent in the last two years.
Furthermore, with every business in which there is exploding "competition" and rich client scarcity, it is not just any prostitution, but very deflationary prostitution:
“Five euros only, just 5 euros,” whispered Maria, a young prostitute with sunken cheeks and bedraggled hair, as she pitched herself forward from the shadows of a graffiti-riddled alley in central Athens on a recent weeknight. Many prostitutes have been selling their services for as little as 10 to 15 euros, a price that has shrunk along with the income of clients afflicted by the crisis. Many more prostitutes are taking greater health risks by having unprotected sex, which sells for a premium. Still more are subject to violence and rape. Now a new menace has arisen: a type of crystal methamphetamine called shisha, after the Turkish water pipe, but otherwise known as poor man’s cocaine, brewed from barbiturates and other ingredients including alcohol, chlorine and even battery acid.
And with a surge in prostitution come the drugs, and the danger of an epidemic of blood-transmitted diseases, like HIV:
A hit of shisha, concocted in makeshift laboratories around Athens, costs 3 to 4 euros. Doses come in the form of a 0.01-gram ball, leaving many users reaching for hits throughout the day. They include prostitutes, whom Mr. Tzortzinis photographed in a seedy central neighborhood of Athens called Omonia, next to a large police station. Shisha is most often smoked. But it is increasingly being taken intravenously; because of the caustic chemicals it contains, a rising number of users are winding up in the emergency room. Health experts say the injections are also adding to an alarming rise in H.I.V. cases around Greece, which surged more than 50 percent last year from 2011 as more people turn to narcotics. For Mr. Tzortzinis, who grew up in the area, seeing women give themselves for as little as 5 euros underscores one of the many horrors of Greece’s drawn-out crisis.
Unfortunately for the country which is terrified to just say no to Europe due to the indoctrinated dread of what would happen if it left the Eurozone, this is only the beginning as the problem is far deeper, and it goes to the root of everything: an entire generation going to waste.
But while the Greek still soaring unemployment rate is no surprise to anyone, it is the youth unemployment that is the problem. And as the Telegraph reports, in some areas of Greece, youth unemployment has now hit a inconceivable 75%.
Western Macedonia in Greece had the highest level of youth unemployment in the European Union, with the number of 16 to 24 year-olds out of work jumping to 72.5pc in 2012 from 52.8pc in 2011, according to Eurostat. Total youth unemployment in Greece stood at 55.3pc last year, more than double the EU average of 22.9pc. The region, located in northern Greece, has been hit hard by the economic crisis, with total unemployment rising from 12.1pc in 2007 to almost 30pc in 2012 due to de-industrialisation and the migration of labour intensive industries to neighbouring countries, where wage demands are lower. According to a report by the European Commission in December, more than a fifth of firms stopped trading in the region between 2008 and 2011.
Europe's response to this pandemic of unemployment?
Europe's leaders have called for more action to tackle joblessness in Europe. Earlier this month, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso urged Europe's leaders to come up with "a more ambitious plan to fight youth unemployment" at a next month's EU summit. "We must give revive hope, specially for young people," he said. "We cannot wait for long, we are all aware this is urgent."
And when hope is not enough, and when these same young people end up as prostitutes, drug addicts or, worst, infected with HIV, maybe they should also hope that a cure for the disease is somehow discovered (and which they can afford).
Why? Just so the 0.001% uberwealthy can continue to get richer and richer courtesy of a year after year of flawed monetary and fiscal policy, even as the real world around them burns. - zerohedge
There is growing popularity of the "poor man's cocaine" in Athens, otherwise known as Shisha. If you talk to anyone on the street they will tell you that they are not quite clear on what came first, the economic crisis or Shisha.
"Addicts in the city center, faced with the climbing costs of heroin and benzodiazepines, suddenly switched to a drug they had never tried before: crystal meth. They call it Shisha, the same name the Turks use for the tobacco they smoke in Hookahs. Patsi said Eastern Europeans had introduced the drug to the streets. At five euros per fix, it cost half the price of heroin. “People were dying because they were shooting it and not smoking it, like they shoot heroin,” Patsi said. When the price went up, she added, they stopped using it. They also “got scared,” she said, when people started OD’ing.
From all the narcotics which are trafficked, bought and sold on city streets, certainly this new drug is the the worst. Shisha is either inhaled or injected and can be produced in home laboratories.
Helena Smith's report in The Guardian on the rise of Shisha the "cocaine of the poor," in Greece places a spotlight on the horrid realities of austerity. The reports say that the addict who consumes it feels a burning sensation, becomes very aggressive and he or she totally loses control of all his senses. Sounds quite alarming and certainly dangerous, but try explaining this to someone who has a serious addiction, and who is attracted to this drug because it is cheap and very easy to find.
So much so, that some describe it to be the new drug of choice for thousands of homeless Greeks who over the last three years have been forced into poverty and despair because of a deep economic crisis.
This new synthetic drug is not just dangerous, it is also a health hazard. It contains methamphetamine, (battery acid, motor oil and even shampoo) and can literally send users into a state of senseless brutal violence. Depression couple with an excessive abuse of drugs and alcohol, has increased significantly over the last few years and let us not even analyze how high crime has skyrocketed.
"Its basic components are car battery liquids, bleach and a type of crystalline methamphetamine, making it extremely dangerous."
Even more horrifying is the fact that it is easily obtainable, and certainly all those involved in the trafficking of narcotics are pushing it on the streets in order to rake in the big bucks. Some reports claim that many of the addicts who have already consumed it have committed atrocious crimes.
Young women are turning to prostitution because it is the easiest way to finance their addiction to Shisha, and according to some reports they are not even using protection (because the money is always more generous without a condom). This obviously puts them at a high risk of many sexual diseases one of which is the HIV epidemic. Also, once consumed the user does not think very clearly, and therefore many unwanted pregnancies are being recorded (with newborns who are born addicts).
"As reported by the Greek Monitoring Centre for Drugs ((EKTEPN), Shisha users smoke and, more often, shoot up the drug, which might be the reason for the 8 times higher HIV cases since 2011, as mentioned by the Head of Research Department of KETHEA."
While Greece is probably the most extreme example of the devastation wrought by governments trying to cut their way out of recession, other nations have also faced similar public health problems brought on by the failure of neoliberal economics. For example, middle-aged American men, particularly those with poor economic prospects, have seen their suicide rates increase as they become alienated from the social fabric.
Recently, the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that for the period 1999-2010, the U.S. saw a 28.4 percent increase in suicide for all Americans aged 35-64 and as psychologist Bruce Levine points out, the cause for the increase was likely economic hardship.
All of this is eerily similar to the stories that came out of Russia and the other post-communist societies in the 1990s. As David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu argue in the The New York Times, those countries that adopted the "shock therapy" approach of economists such as Jeffrey D. Sachs and Lawrence H. Summers saw the health of their people decline as poverty exploded following the abrupt dismantling of the central planning system.
Stuckler and Basu also refer to other historical case studies of failed austerity. For example, during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Thailand and Indonesia adopted harsh austerity policies that caused mass hunger and death from infectious disease.
A Mexican judge has ruled that an exiled
Argentinian torturer must be extradited to stand trial in Spain; a
Buenos Aires court has waived military immunity against criminal
charges. And evidence mounts of decades of war by Latin American
dictatorships, with the connivance of the United States, against
leftwing dissidents.
For the Common Defense ! was a quasi-documentary short in MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series. It was made in 1942 and featured a mysterious “Senor Castillo of the Chilean intelligence service”, who assured filmgoers that Chile was playing its part alongside the western democracies in the fight against the dictatorships and foreign agents that threatened the country. In the ruthless struggle, the main weapon, he said, was cooperation between police forces throughout North and South America.
The film was inspired by the FBI and designed as an attack on Nazi spies in Latin America and a demonstration of cooperation between police and intelligence services on a continental scale. There, in the middle of the second world war, are the seeds of Operation Condor, a continental campaign of repression waged by Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s against the new enemy – “international communism”.
The ramifications of Operation Condor were first revealed in December 1992 by several tonnes of documents from the Stroessner dictatorship, soon dubbed the “archives of terror”, discovered in a police station in Lambare, 15 miles from the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion. The tale they told was confirmed in detail by CIA documents declassified last November.
The United States had begun warning South American military commanders about the dangers of communism at the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace, held at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City in February 1945. Bilateral agreements on mutual military assistance followed in 1951. They covered the supply of US arms and funding to Latin American countries, the secondment of US military advisers, and the training of Latin American officers in the US and at the US army’s School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone.
The move towards “continental defence against communism” was speeded by the victory of Castro’s revolution in 1959. The following year General Theodore F Bogart, US Southern Command supremo, invited his Latin American colleagues to a “friendly meeting” at his base in the Canal Zone to discuss problems of common interest. The outcome was an annual Conference of American Armies (CAA), first held at Fort Amador in Panama. In 1964 it was transferred to West Point, and from 1965 it met every two years. The West Point venue, a secretive meeting place symptomatic of cold war paranoia, was the heart of the future Operation Condor.
Sharing intelligence
Apart from “international communism”, a convenient catchphrase for all political opponents, Latin American military commanders were obsessed with links between their intelligence services. At its second meeting, the CAA called for the creation of a standing committee in the Panama Canal Zone to exchange information and intelligence (1). In response, a continent-wide communication network was established and top-secret bilateral intelligence meetings were held between Argentina and Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, and others.
Files made available by those countries were circulated through a network of military attachés known as Agremil. Most were supplied by military intelligence services (G-2), but others came from security police or shadier bodies like the Organismo Coordinador de Operaciones Antisubversivas (Ocoa), a Uruguayan death squad that carried out interrogations, torture and executions, mainly in Argentina (2).
At the CAA’s 10th meeting, held in Caracas on 3 September 1973, General Breno Borges Fortes, commander-in-chief of the Brazilian army, agreed that the struggle against communism was exclusively a matter for the armed forces of the individual countries. As far as collective action was concerned, “the only effective methods are the exchange of experience and information, plus technical assistance when requested” (3). On this basis, the CAA decided to “strengthen information exchange in order to counter terrorism and control subversive elements in each country” (4).
From the time of Juan Domingo Peron’s return to power in 1973 to the 1976 putsch, when most of South America was gradually coming under the thumb of military regimes on the Brazilian model, Argentina lived through a curious transition period. Its police and armed forces stepped up repression and authorised the establishment of death squads like the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA). But, at the same time, it was the only country in the Southern Cone in which thousands of mainly Chilean and Uruguayan victims of political and social repression were able to take refuge.
In March 1974 Chilean, Uruguayan and Bolivian police leaders met with the deputy chief of the Argentinian federal police, Alberto Villar (joint founder of the AAA), to investigate ways of working together to destroy what they saw as the hotbed of subversion constituted by the presence of thousands of foreign political refugees in Argentina. The Chilean representative, a general of the carabinieri (military police), proposed that a police officer or member of the armed forces be accredited to every embassy as a security agent in order to coordinate operations with the police and security authorities of each country. He also called for the creation of “an intelligence centre where we can obtain information on individual Marxists and … exchange programmes and information about politicians. In addition,” he argued, “we must be able to move freely across the frontiers between Bolivia, Chile and Argentina and operate in all three countries without an official warrant” (5).
Villar promised that the Argentinian Federal Police’s Foreign Affairs Department (DAE) would deal with foreigners that neighbouring juntas wanted out of the way. In August 1974 the corpses of foreign, especially Bolivian, refugees started to appear on Buenos Aires refuse tips. On 30 September a bomb placed in Buenos Aires by a Chilean commando group led by CIA agent (or former agent) Michael Townley killed General Carlos Prats, commander-in-chief of the Chilean army under the Popular Unity government, who was the spearhead of opposition to Pinochet.
Police and military commando groups now crossed borders at will. In March and April 1975 more than two dozen Uruguayans were arrested in Buenos Aires by Argentinian and Uruguayan police officers, who interrogated them jointly in Argentinian police stations. Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcon, an Argentinian militant, was arrested on the Paraguayan border by Paraguayan police. As Chile’s National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (the Retting commission) subsequently established in its report of 8 February 1991 to President Patricio Aylwin (6), he was interrogated not only by Paraguayan police and Argentinian intelligence officers but also by officials of the US embassy in Buenos Aires, who passed information on to Chile’s National Intelligence Directorate (Dina).
State within a state
Meanwhile, Chile had put the finishing touches to its own system of repression. Following the putsch of 11 September 1973, for which US president Richard Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger bore direct responsibility, Pinochet gave Colonel Manuel Contreras full powers to “extirpate the cancer of communism” from the country. Dina soon became a state within the state.
The Chilean dictatorship was particularly exercised by the presence of large numbers of implacable opponents abroad. It had managed to kill General Prats, but in February 1975 the anti-Castro Cubans recruited for the purpose bungled the assassination of Carlos Altamirano and Volodia Teitelboim, the leaders of the exiled Chilean Socialist and Communist parties. In early April Contreras visited the Latin American capitals in order to persuade the security services of the whole continent to set up a special anti-exile force. On 25 August he was at CIA headquarters in Washington, where he met Vernon Walters, deputy director responsible for Latin America.
Two days later he had a meeting with Rafael Rivas Vasquez, assistant director of the Venezuelan intelligence agency (Disip), in Caracas: “He explained … that he wanted to place agents in all Chilean embassies abroad and that he was already training embassy officials who were prepared to act as intelligence agents if required. He said he had already made several successful trips to obtain the support of Latin American intelligence services. Everything was based on unwritten agreements” (7). According to Rivas, the Venezuelan government ordered the Disip to reject Contreras’ overtures. It was the only refusal. All the other countries (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia) agreed.
At the same time the order was given to set up an anti-subversion network in Europe based on Italian rightwing terrorist groups. Unable to get at Carlos Altamirano, who was living under armed guard in the Federal Republic of Germany, the assassins turned their attention to Bernardo Leighton, Chile’s former vice president and a founder member of the Christian Democratic Party. On 6 October 1975 Leighton and his wife were attacked by a fascist hit squad in Rome. They survived the shooting, but Mrs Leighton was left permanently paralysed. Despite this failure, Pinochet had a meeting with Stefano Delle Chiaie, leader of the Italian commando groups, who agreed to remain at Chile’s disposal.
At its meeting of 19-26 October 1975 in Montevideo, the CAA gave the go-ahead for a first “working meeting on national intelligence services”, prepared by Contreras. It took place from 25 November to 1 December in Santiago de Chile and was classified top secret. Contreras’ main proposal was the creation of a continental database “similar to the Interpol database in Paris, but specialising in subversion”. This was the beginning of the Chilean contribution to Operation Condor.
According to the CIA, which claims not to have heard of Condor until 1976 (8), three of the countries involved, namely Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, “extended cooperation on anti-subversion activities to the assassination of high-ranking terrorists living in exile in Europe”. Although it had been accepted for years that information was to be exchanged bilaterally, “a third, top-secret phase of Operation Condor apparently involved training special teams from member countries for joint operations that included the assassination of terrorists and terrorist sympathisers. When a terrorist or sympathiser from a member country was identified, a team would be sent to locate the target and keep him under surveillance. Then a hit squad would be despatched. The special teams were made up of people from one or several Condor states who were supplied with false identity papers issued by member countries.”
The CIA claims that the operation centre for phase three was in Buenos Aires, where a special team had been set up. Meanwhile, bilateral meetings between the countries of the Southern Cone continued as usual under the aegis of the CAA, and their effects were just as devastating (9).
Many Condor meetings took place in 1976. They were often attended by the same people who took part in CAA bilateral meetings. According to the CIA, “although cooperation between the various intelligence and security services had existed for some time, it was not formalised until late May 1976 at a Condor meeting in Santiago de Chile, where the main topic was long-term cooperation between the services of the participating countries going well beyond the exchange of information. The Condor member countries identified themselves by code numbers: Condor One, Condor Two, etc.
It was a bad year for their political opponents, who had taken refuge wherever they could. Under the pretext of attacking terrorists committed to armed resistance, the murderers struck out at anyone, crossing frontiers at will. Increasing numbers of political opponents were assassinated or “disappeared”. On 8 June, in the course of a friendly chat in Santiago, Kissinger assured Pinochet that “the people of the United States are wholeheartedly behind you … and wish you every success” (10).
Flying like a condor
But the scale of repression made the existence of Condor increasingly difficult to hide. The CIA itself became a source of embarrassing rumours as staff exchanged quips about colleagues sent abroad because they could “fly like a condor”. Finally, Contreras’ own policy of targeted assassinations put paid to the operation. On 21 September 1976 he had Chile’s former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, assassinated in Washington. It was a major blunder. The US investigators were determined to identify those responsible. The FBI’s chief officer in Buenos Aires filed a special report on phase three of Operation Condor, and extracts found their way into the American press. A Congressional committee of inquiry was quickly set up. The Chileans responded by disbanding Dina and replacing it by another organisation. Contreras was ditched.
The newly elected US president Jimmy Carter had made human rights part of his platform. He was not prepared to countenance Condor-type operations. At the very least, he did not want the US involved in them. The prevailing view is that the Carter administration pressured the Latin American countries to close Condor down.
Representatives of all the Condor member states met in Buenos Aires on 13-15 December 1976 to discuss future plans in the light of the new situation. The Argentinians, who had outstripped all the other dictatorships in the ferocity of their methods since the putsch of 23 March, took matters in hand. With help from Paraguay, they sought a more secure and discreet channel for anti-subversion operations in the form of the Latin American Anti-Communist Federation (CAL), an offshoot of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL).
The CAL held its third meeting in Asuncion in March 1977. It was attended by the top brass of the dictatorships, including General Gustavo Leigh, a member of the Chilean junta, and General Jorge Videla, the Argentinian president, together with an assortment of Latin America’s torturers and death squad members. Their main problems were the US’ new strategy of re-establishing democracy in Latin America, the spread of guerrilla movements in Central America, and the position of whole sections of the Catholic Church that appeared to be an integral part of the international communist movement.
A plan proposed by the Bolivians, named after the Bolivian dictator, was adopted. Its purpose was to “eradicate” proponents of liberation theology. Under the Banzer plan, which culminated in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in San Salvador, hundreds of priests, monks, nuns, lay members of religious communities and bishops were executed,
An end to formal restraints
Taking charge of repression throughout Latin America, the Argentinians discarded all formal restraints. The coordination of repression was entrusted to death squads. Even though some were composed of soldiers and policemen, this was tantamount to privatising anti-subversion operations. At the same time bilateral intelligence meetings of national security agencies, as well as meetings of the CAA, continued under the aegis of the US. In 1977 the CAA met in Managua, Nicaragua, and in 1979 in Bogota, Colombia. The Argentinians also sent several missions to Central America to assist local armed forces and political police. In the spring of 1979 they started anti-subversion training courses in Buenos Aires to reduce dependence on the US war schools. The fall of the Somoza regime in July 1979 encouraged the Latin American dictatorships to standardise their anti-subversion methods.
The CAL’s fourth meeting, chaired by Argentinian general Suarez Mason in Buenos Aires in September 1980, favoured the adoption of an “Argentinian solution” throughout Latin America. From April 1980 the US Department of Defence was aware that Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil were once again pursuing the idea of an “international anti-terrorist organisation” – Condor in a new guise. Meanwhile, the CAL was coordinating massacres carried out by death squads and security forces in Central America. The Agremil files continued to circulate in the general staffs, yielding a rich harvest of cross-border arrests, exchanges of prisoners and international torture squads.
In 1981 the CAA meeting was held in Washington, following the election of a Republican president, Ronald Reagan. Developments took a new turn as the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua gave fresh impetus to anti-subversion cooperation (11). The participants decided to renew their bilateral agreements on the exchange of information about so-called terrorists and to set up a permanent CAA secretariat. This came into being on 24 May 1984 in Santiago de Chile.
When Argentina returned to democracy in 1985, the Chilean military regime was left as the last rampart against communism in South America except for Paraguay. The Reagan administration entrusted its programme of secret war in Central America to the CIA , the CAL and the private sector. The CAA remained committed to an ideology of war against international communism, except that the term now included human rights activists as well as leftwing and clerical opponents. Judges and journalists calling for torturers to be brought to trial were gradually included, as were critics of corruption, in which the military were deeply implicated..
Operation Condor as such vanished in the jungles of Central America when the US took over the struggle against the Nicaraguan Sandanistas. But it was the end of the cold war and the accumulation of its own excesses that dealt it a fatal blow. Strictly speaking, it was directed against only a few dozen or few hundred targeted victims. But the overall toll of repression in the Southern Cone alone during the period of its existence totalled over 50,000 murdered, 35,000 disappeared and 400,000 imprisoned.
Although torture and executions are no longer institutionalised on a continental scale, there is no reason to believe these practices have ceased. The crimes of the Colombian paramilitaries linked to sections of the country’s armed forces are clear evidence to the contrary. On 8 May 2000 a report by the Committee on Hemispheric Security of the Organisation of American States (OAS) reviewed 10 years of anti-subversion cooperation among the various South and Central American states. While the designated enemy is now drugs-traffickers rather than communists and there are references to human rights, the message is still the same.
Numerous Latin American states have concluded agreements among themselves and with the US aimed at greater bilateral or multilateral cooperation against terrorism, money laundering and drug trafficking. These agreements confirm the role of the armed forces in social control.
Similarly, since the mid-1990s and under the aegis of the US, the Latin American countries have increased their bilateral exchange arrangements. In the intelligence field alone, dozens of arrangements are in force, in addition to the annual conference of the intelligence services of the armies of the OAS member states. The CAA still meets (in Argentina in 1995 and in Ecuador in 1997). A multilateral military conference on intelligence services, the first since the meeting set up by Contreras in 1975, was organised by the Bolivian army on 8-10 March 1999. It was attended by representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, the US (Southern Command), Uruguay and Venezuela.
“Security in the Americas”, so dear to the US, does not necessarily give first place to democracy. It would not take much for Operation Condor to rise from the ashes.
Notes:
Permanent Executive Secretariat of the Conference of American Armies (PESCAA), Information Bulletin no. 1, Santiago, Chile, 1985
See Nunca Más (never again): a report by Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People, Faber in association with Index on Censorship, London, 1986.
See Diffusion de l’information sur l’Amérique Latine (DIAL), no. 125, Paris, 25 October 1973
PESCAA, Information Bulletin No.1, op. cit.
Stenographer’s record published by El Autentico, Buenos Aires, 10 December 1975.
The full text of the report is available in English translation at www.nd.edu/
Testimony given on 29 June 1979 to a Washington court during the trial of Orlando Letelier’s assassins.
Whether this claim is true or false, the fact remains that Contreras was a CIA informer from 1974 to 1977 and was on the agency’s payroll until 1975 (“by mistake”, the CIA claims), as revealed by a declassified document submitted to the US Congress at its request on 19 September 2000. See El Nuevo Herald, Miami, 20 September 2000.
The Argentinians alone did not rely entirely on the United States in their “dirty war”. In 1976 a French military mission was sent to Buenos Aires to train the Argentinian armed forces in anti-subversion operations.
Declassified document quoted in El Pais, 28 February 1999
On 1 December 1981 the US administration released $19m to fund the training of an initial contingent of 500 Contras (Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries) by Argentinian officers.
Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), translated by Barry Smerin, August 2001 link to the original version in French: Retour sur un terrorisme d’état béni par les Etats-Unis «Opération Condor », cauchemar de l’Amérique latine par Pierre Abramovici, Le Monde Diplomatique, Mai 2001
Russian anti-drug czar Victor Ivanov gave a lengthy interview on Jan. 17 to the Spanish-language edition of Russia Today TV. For years now, he has repeatedly denounced the major international banks for actively seeking drug money deposits, and has specified that a return to Glass-Steagall standard would put an end to this process.
In his latest remarks, Ivanov said: “... unfortunately, it has to be said that one of the major beneficiaries [of the drug trade] is the world financial system. Since the funds obtained from the yearly drug trade are estimated to be between 500 and 800 billion dollars, it goes without saying that those billions of dollars are not placed under the pillow, but become part of the financial system -- they are legalized, they are laundered, causing colossal damage to the country’s economy.’’
Ivanov also pointed to the role of the drug trade in the spreading terrorist war in northern Africa: “Recently there is a tendency to transport a significant quantity of drugs through the countries of Western Africa towards Europe. In the last five years, the market for cocaine sales in Europe grew by approximately 2 to 4 times; that is to say, there was a gigantic redistribution of flows.”
The traffickers are heavily armed, with RPGs, helicopters, transport aircraft, and even missiles. Ivanov countered the line that drugs are mainly a health problem, which is the classical argument of the legalization crowd. While there are certainly people who are dependent on drugs, he said, “there is financial demand, and financial demand is dictated by the stable profits of the cartels... That means that there is also the demand of the world banking system, which is also used to receiving these stable subsidies in a total amount of some 800 billion dollars.”
Behind the drive for legalization, he pointed out, “there are powerful financial groups.” In the case of the wave of referenda in favor of marijuana legalization in the United States, “my American colleagues said directly that, behind this fact, are big financiers, including some very famous ones who finance movements of this sort.” Although Ivanov did not mention George Soros by name, he is notorious as a funder of the drive. - E.I.R. Strategic Alert
A version of this article appeared January 9, 2013, on page A9 in the US edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Once-Lively Square Is a Center of Greek Ills.
Once the vibrant commercial heart of Athens, the capital's central Omonia Square now is ringed by shuttered hotels and vacant shops and haunted by drug dealers, addicts and prostitutes, making it a national symbol of despair and social collapse.
The square, whose name means harmony in Greek, and the neighborhoods that stretch out around it have been ravaged by the country's deep economic downturn, a flood of illegal immigrants and austerity measures that have severely undercut the government's ability to cope. The depth of the urban disintegration there shows the complexity of the problems Greece faces as the country heads into a sixth year of economic contraction, and it is a warning to other crisis-hit European countries about how swift the fall can be when a tipping point is reached.
"It used to be our Times Square. Now, it's like Baghdad," said Yiannis Politis, who owns a small hotel, the Achillion, near Omonia. "In the last three years, all the problems have come together."
With police struggling to control the chaos, street battles have erupted between groups of ultranationalists and anarchists who say they are fighting fascism and want to protect foreigners.
In the case of Omonia Square and surrounding areas, a massive inflow of illegal migrants desperate to get into the European Union has collided with a lack of jobs in Greece's moribund economy and diminished public and charitable resources to help them.
Some locals as well as migrants have turned to illicit means to earn a living, helping to drive the drug trade, authorities said. The supply of illegal drugs around Omonia is so plentiful that a dose of heroin or methamphetamine can be bought for less than $7. Dealers conceal drugs in small packets in their mouths and in their shoes.
For Athenians and other Greeks, the demise of Omonia, whose department stores, coffee shops and hotels were emblems of the country's economic progress since the 1960s, has exacted a psychic toll. The square was a traditional meeting place for people coming to Athens from other parts of Greece.
"This was the center of the Greek dream," said Eleftherios Skiadas, a writer and historian who is president of the Association of Athenians, a group that works on historic preservation. "But everything we've built over the years has crumbled in a very short time."
Police in body armor patrol on motorcycles, while groups of officers on foot, many fresh from the police academy, regularly stop and search immigrants, many from South Asia and Africa.
"It's dangerous. We're afraid of diseases," said a 19-year-old patrolman from northern Greece, who has been on the beat in Athens for about four months. "I was shocked. I've never seen conditions like this before. The drug use is awful." He added: "There are so many illegal immigrants we don't have time for anything else. It takes all our manpower just to round them up."
Since August, police said, they have stopped and checked more than 65,000 migrants, and arrested about 4,000 for not having proper papers. More than 6,000 people have been returned to their countries of origin.
The police said they don't tolerate abuses and thoroughly investigate allegations of official misconduct. "Our principal concern is to respect human rights and civil rights" of people in Greece, "regardless of color," said police spokesman Lt. Col. Christos D. Manouras.
"We don't have a magic wand to wave and make everything right, everywhere and all the time," said police spokesman Lt. Col. Christos D. Manouras, but, "progress is being made on illegal immigration. The inflow is slowing."
One recent night, Konstantina Karanika and Maria Dimitropoulou, outreach workers for the Organization Against Drugs, handed out clean needles and condoms to addicts from Greece, South Asia, the Middle East and Georgia and to a group of Bulgarian prostitutes outside the Hotel Aktion.
In a squalid alley, junkies complained that the needles on the syringes they were being given weren't long enough. They wanted to inject drugs into the femoral veins in their groins, a relatively common practice among long-term users.
"If we call an ambulance, would you go with us?" Ms. Karanika asked Mohamed Aziz, who said he was a heroin addict and had been injured in a traffic accident. Lying under a pile of blankets on wooden shipping pallets, Mr. Aziz declined, but accepted a bundle of syringes, some of which he said he resells.
The drug-abuse counselors try to see to the medical needs of addicts living on the streets. But most want to avoid contact with authorities. One Romanian woman, who Ms. Karanika knew as Amalia, died this autumn in an empty lot near Omonia, apparently of a blood infection.
"Where there isn't a stable social structure, these things happen. It's all related to the crisis," said Tasos Panopoulos, another Organization Against Drugs official. "This is what we live with every day now in the city center." atenecalling
"WARNING - OUR HOMES ARE IN DANGER NOW" - NARA - 516040 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The cities are listed from least dangerous to most dangerous. But it is recommended that travelers exercise extreme caution in any cities that find themselves on such a list. You might note that St. Louis, Mo., USA, has fallen off this top ten list. In 2011, St. Louis occupied the #3 spot.
10. Caracas, Venezuela Caracas is a city torn apart by drug trafficking and an abundance of petty crimes. Robbery is commonplace even in broad daylight, and the police have very little control over criminal activity. Many locals blame the government who is apathetic to these issues, much more protection is needed for many cities in Venezuela because it’s geological position makes it a drug running haven.
9. Mogadishu, Somalia The capitol of Somalia is still in turmoil and the outlook for 2012 is not bright. Civil war has torn apart the city (and the country) for two decades and political violence is very easily sparked. Accurate statistical data is almost impossible to obtain because of how belligerent local militias are, but it’s safe to say that Mogadishu is quite dangerous, an essentially lawless city with an abundance of bandits. A huge amount of it’s citizens abandoned the city three years ago leaving behind bombed out shells of buildings, but it remains as violent as ever.
8. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil While Rio de Janeiro has some fantastic beaches and beautiful landscapes, you should not be lulled into a false sense of security should you visit. There are many slum/shanty areas where about %20 of the population lives in economic turmoil, and this struggle has given way to an ongoing conflict between drug traffickers and the local police force. Tourists and travelers are advised to stay away from the mountainous regions and poor areas of the city, especially at night. The police are there to protect you, but be aware that bribery is commonplace with them and that you may need some money to get out of a bind.
7. Grozny, Chechnya, Russia In the mid 1990′s a very destructive conflict began between Chechnya and Russia. Grozny was left in shambles after a barrage of shells, missiles, and dynamite tore the city asunder- there were thousands dead and the toll on the city was massive. While the fighting apparently ended in 2006, it remains a very dangerous place full of crime both organized and petty. It’s especially dangerous for western tourists because of high kidnapping rates.
6. Ciudad Juarez, Mexico The drug cartels in Mexico show no signs of slowing down their business, and Ciudad Juarez is one of the worst affected areas. The drug trafficking groups in Mexico are notoriously violent and stop at absolutely nothing to move their product, they have control over the region and can do pretty much whatever they want. This city has been called one of the most violent places in the world outside of war zones, and the police force is known to be corrupt. The blame for this violence is often attributed to the Mexican government, but others blame the ongoing American war on drugs that facilitates the illegal drug trade.
5. Bogota, Colombia Bogota’s main problem lies in the drug trade and extremist political groups rebelling against the Colombian government, but fortunately there have been some improvements since the 90′s. The north side of the city is absolutely more safe that the southern regions, it’s advisable to stay in this area and no to wander past the city limits. Bogota is a great tourist destination with lots to see, just be careful and don’t stray too far from safe areas.
4. Baghdad, Iraq Baghdad suffers from a very unstable political climate with many different factions destroying the city in their own way. The infrastructure has been torn apart by bombings and the streets are filled with unpredictable violence. The invasion by the United States in 2003 further escalated violence in the city and it has been a hostile place ever since. A lack of organization and infrastructure further exacerbate tension among Iraqis.
3. Guatemala City, Guatemala Guatemala as a whole is riddled with crime because of a corrupt government and police force who are not at all equipped to deal with the abundance of criminal activity. The capitol has it the worst, the huge gap between the rich and poor is brought into stark contrast and robbery and violence are commonplace. It’s a shame because it’s such a beautiful city and country, but the corruption runs too deep for the streets to be safe.
2. San Pedro Sula, Honduras This city in Honduras has one of the highest murder rates in the world and is considered even more dangerous than areas of Iraq and Afghanistan. Robbery is a rampant problem and almost everyone must carry a weapon of some sort for protection. Even minor disputes are often settled with violence and walking the streets requires extreme caution. Tourists are especially warned, anyone appearing to be a foreigner are specific targets for criminals.
1. Cape Town, South Africa While Cape Town is a huge tourist attraction and a big city full of things to do, it also has extremely high crime rates and walking down the wrong street at the wrong time can put you in harms way. The disparity between socioeconomic classes is a major factor for criminal activity, and robbery is extremely common. Tourists are advised to do their research and stay in a relatively safe part of the city, don’t walk around unless the streets are well-lit with plenty of people out and be extra careful if you have to use an ATM.
These days, the drug mafia theme inexplicably attracts permanent media coverage. One of the aspects that cannot be avoided in the context is the involvement of the financial sector – for hefty risk premiums – in money laundering for the narcotics business.
Banks and the Drug – Business: Seamless Integration Rather Than Partnership
In the summer of 2011, The Guardian featured a remarkable account “Global Banks Are the Financial Services Wing of the Drug Cartels“[1] by Ed. Vulliamy. Contrary to the conclusions invited by the extremely informative paper, the title does sound as if the financial services play a secondary role in the tandem. There is a widespread tendency to believe that, while serious banks are occasionally caught red-handed, they engage in money-laundering as mere contractors rather than play key roles in the global drug business. It appears in this light that regulation and oversight in the financial sector may be implemented as background processes and need not be placed on the list of the anti-drug priorities.
The above approach is in fact adopted by countries and international organizations alike. They focus on the drug mafia which, from the perspective, is a conglomerate of groups producing, processing, storing, trafficking, and selling drugs in quantities or on an individual basis. Another common term to designate the groups is drug cartels. The budgets dedicated to fighting them have swelled to enormous proportions.
When, in 1972, US President R. Nixon declared a war on drugs, the total linked to the campaign was $110m, but Obama’s anti-drug plan for 2013 – a 1.6% hike compared to 2012 – weights slightly under $26b, with the multibillion state budgets serving the same purpose not included in the figure. The impression in the meantime is that the financial sector evades the part of the scrutiny it deserves, the assumption being that regulators should cope entirely with the job. Under the arrangement, the key monitoring mission rests with the US Federal Reserve but, paradoxically given the nature of what has to be done, the Fed is a private corporation, not a branch of the US executive authority.
The result attributable to the functional mismatch is that, according to Russian anti-narcotics agency chief V. Ivanov, only 10-15% of the global drug supplies end up being confiscated, and the interception level in the operations which target drug-related money-laundering stalls at 0.5% [2].
The truth to be kept in mind is that as of today the merger between the financial sector grands and the drug mafia in its classic forms – the cartels and syndicates – is an accomplished fact. No border exists any longer between global-scale banks and drug cartels and, consequently, between laundered and legally clean money – a lot of the funds believed to belong to the latter category actually fall within the former. The present alliance between banks and drug cartels is best described as the drug-banking mafia or the drug-banking business. This transnational force has a potential to exercise virtually unlimited influence over all aspects of the existence of modern societies such as the economy (industry, agriculture, services), the academia, culture, or domestic and foreign policies of various countries. The socioeconomic model currently materializing in the majority of the world’s countries can be interpreted as a hitherto unstudied brand of capitalism, namely, the drug-banking capitalism… Hierarchy of the Modern Drug Mafia
Broadly understood, the present-day drug mafia includes three hierarchic levels.
Level 1. The groups positioned at the initial point upstream and at the outlet point downstream the drug supply chain.
The groups organizing drug cultivation, performing the initial processing, or buying drugs from narcotics farmers.
The groups dealing drugs to individual users.
Level 2. Groups handling the wholesale drug supply. In the supply chain, they process, package, store, and traffic drugs (internationally as necessary), and organize wholesale supplies. The groups of this level are traditionally referred to as drug cartels and syndicates, and their heads – as drug lords.
According to expert on organized crime Misha Glenny, “The cartel is a holding company, an agglomeration of small, flexible mafia groups” boasting a considerable extent of decentralization [3]. In the XX century, the biggest drug cartels – notably, Medellín and Cali – were based in Columbia. A DEA survey gives a reasonable idea of the Cali cartel potential: the group has a budget of $4-8b annually and is managed like a smoothly running business with the help of an intricate system of phones, faxes, pagers, and computers. Moreover, Cali has an intelligence network in no way inferior to the intelligence services of most developing countries and controls the airport, the phone company, and the taxis in the city of Cali, thus knowing who comes to the place or leaves it, who works for the police, and who has been in touch with the US agencies”[4[.
Strictly speaking, the term drug cartel does not quite apply to formations like Cali. Rather, it would befit a concert of several drug groups entering into a market-sharing agreement. Columbian drug groups, for example, used to cut deals on their respective market niches for marijuana and cocaine in the US, with Cali getting New York City based on the accords [5]. Cali and Medellín are, upon scrutiny, drug syndicates, the type of organization implying the combination of the independence of the enterprises involved with coordinated market supply.Groups cultivating and pre-processing drugs exist in Columbia, Mexico, Afghanistan, the Golden Triangle countries, South Africa, etc. All of them deliver the narcotic output to the same “company” which markets it on a wholesale basis. Altogether, the arrangement can be regarded as a classic syndicate. Several syndicates of the type may sustain a market-sharing agreement, creating a cartel. Every major country – the US, Great Britain, Germany, France, and others – is a large market carved up by a number of syndicates with supply chains stretching from the cultivation to the destination countries. The bosses of the Afghan syndicates, therefore, run their operations from Turkey, Europe, or the US, staying thousands of miles away from the Afghan poppy farms. As a general rule, drug syndicates function internationally.
The present geographic distribution of the drug trafficking hubs and routes is profoundly different from the one known from the XX century. Nowadays, leadership in this underworld is exercised by Mexican and Afghan drug groups supplying cocaine or opium and heroin respectively. The criminal market-sharing agreements are frequently ignored, triggering bloody conflicts – sometimes, real wars – over the sales niches [6].
Level 3. The groups having no direct contact with drug supplies. Banks, secret services, and media are the main institutions comprising this level in the drug mafia hierarchy. All of them are completely legal from the standpoint of status. In this connection the present paper will touch upon the banks and secret services below. It should be noted that Level 3 also includes legislators and judiciaries along with other officials from the ranks of the executive authority. In an ensemble, they act as a tightly knit network spanning across national borders and projecting its capabilities globally. The massive liberalization of international transit – for individuals, products, finances, and information – which commenced three to four decades ago, the phenomenon dubbed globalization in the 1990ies, made it considerably easier for the worldwide drug mafia to come into being. Essentially, the drug mafia can be thought of as a global narcotics corporation with branches in many of the nation-states. The objectives pursued at Level 3 are strategic in character:
The whitewashing of the cash flows generated by drug sales;
Revenue investment in various sectors of the economy;
Organization and security of drug supply operations at Level 1 and Level 2;
The creation of the conditions favorable to the expansion of the drug business in various countries.
Notes
The Guardian, July 21, 2012
Global Drug Flows as a Factor Contributing to the World’s Deepening Economic Crisis. Talk by Russian Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency Director V.P. Ivanov. Washington, November 18, 2011.
Misha Glenny. The Secret Rulers. Who Runs the World. Moscow, Eksmo-Algoritm Publishers, 2010
Ibid.
Ibid.
A war between a large number of drug groups has been raging continuously in Mexico for decades. As of late, it spun into a de facto civil war with the death toll of around 50,000. V. Katasonov. Russia’s Joining the WTO: the Road Towards an Escalation of the Drug Problem in the Country. za-nauku.ru.
The folowing research is a review around the theme of Southeastern European organized crime, mainly in the period 1995-2007, highlighting the emergence of powerful regional “Mafias” with an actual global presence. The report has been conducted by Ioannis Michelatos from the rimse. The information documented by Mr. Michelatos is shocking. The main focus of his research is based on the Albanian criminal syndicates centered in Kosovo. According to him, the research presented is composed by some of his previous material, some of which was presented in international workshops. Here are just a few excerpts, please follow the link at the top of the page to read the entire article.
Narcotics and the emergence of crime syndicates in the Balkans
The main threat to the Balkans nowadays, is the existence of well organized criminal groups that to an extent are an integral part of the world wide “Crime Syndicates” that for the most part control the narcotics trade in our époque. The infamous Balkan drugs route is the main path by which narcotics and specifically heroin; are smuggled to European countries. It is actually a network of contrabands, corrupted public officials and war lords that make sure that the heroin produced in Afghanistan is smoothly transferred to the European addicts. There are mainly two organized ethnic groups that deal most of the arrangements concerning the organized crime in the Balkans. The so-called Albanian mafia and the Turkish crime syndicates. The Albanian organized crime is very active since the collapse of the Communist rule in this country that opened the way for various indigenous gangs to spread their wings further and take part in one of the most profitable commerce of all times, namely drugs. A leading French criminologist Xavier Raufer has extensively dealt with the issue of the Albanian mafia. He considers the Albanians as the only true “Mafia” in the Balkans due to the peculiar social structure of their society in the Northern parts of the country “The land of the Genghis”. rimse
Islamic terrorism and the Balkans: The perfect training ground
The emergence of radical – militant Islam during the 90’s is a very complicated issue that involves worldwide actors, social dynamics and a deep knowledge of the religious realm of the Islamic world. This article aims to present and inform for the events that shaped Islamic terrorism in the Balkans. In this corner of Europe, the past 15 years, the roots of Islamic radicalism have deepened and it is of the outermost importance to comprehend this phenomenon, so as to be able to combat it. rimse
Albanian nationalism and the Islamic terrorism
As in the case of Bosnia, the Albanian Muslims (70% of the population) proved to be a magnet for the Islamists that sought to regain a foothold in Europe. The conditions by which Albania was freed by the Communist regime in the early 90’s, revealed the existence of a backward isolated country with no interaction with the rest of the world. The transition from a central command structure to that of a free market; ensured the development of multiple societal forces within the much repressed Albanian society. In early 1994 the infamous Osama Bin Laden, paid a visit to Tirana, presumably to oversight the networking of his activities there. He came back in 1998 to oversight Al-Qaeda training camps in the Northern part of Albania, just across the borders with Kosovo[9]. The trainers –of Arabic origin mostly- were assigned to train the newly recruits of the Usthria Climirtare e Kosoves –U.C.K- units for the forthcoming guerilla warfare against the Yugoslav forces in Kosovo. rimse
The “White Al-Qaeda” in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Information available to experts on international terrorism indicate that B-H is at this time one of the most dangerous countries in Europe, as it represents a nursery for potential Islamic terrorists – the so called “white” or “European” Al-Qaeda. Money from Islamic countries that is laundered through “humanitarian” organizations finances the religious education of at least 100,000 young Bosnian Muslims. In addition to such education, which follows the interpretations of Wahhabi Islam, there is another type of “training” in various officially registered camps throughout the B-H Federation. There, the young and carefully selected Wahhabis attend “additional courses” in marksmanship, explosives and martial arts. rimse
Foreign intelligence involvement in the Balkans
Since the early 1990s, Bonn and Washington have joined hands in establishing their respective spheres of influence in the Balkans. Their intelligence agencies have also collaborated. According to intelligence analyst John Whitley, covert support to the Kosovo rebel army was established as a joint endeavor between the CIA and Germany’s Bundes Nachrichten Dienst (BND) (which previously played a key role in installing a right wing nationalist government under Franjo Tudjman in Croatia). The task to create and finance the KLA was initially given to Germany: “They used German uniforms, East German weapons and were financed, in part, with drug money”. According to Whitley, the CIA was, subsequently instrumental in training and equipping the KLA in Albania. rimse
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