Friday May 16, 2008
A Further Blurring of the Terrorist-Criminal Lines, and the Emerging Role of DEA
It is interesting to note the first major conviction in the United States in a drug case tied to radical Islamist movements, in this case, the Taliban. (Many more case documents can be found here.)
"As an enemy of the United States, Khan Mohammed intended to ship heroin to the United States and use profits from that trade to assist the Taliban," said DEA Acting Administrator Michele M. Leonhart. "A dangerous double threat, Kahn Mohammed purchased rockets to attack American and coalition soldiers who were risking their lives to stabilize Afghanistan. The conviction of Kahn Mohammed puts an end to this source of poison and violence."
If there remained any doubt that Islamist militants are perfectly willing to engage in criminal activity to finance their military actions, this case should dispel them. As money from donations and charities becomes harder to acquire and move safely, the easy alternative is the drug trade.
Hezbollah learned this in its heroin trafficking days a decade ago, and continues to use a range of illicit activities to fund its operations.
In addition to showing how the lines between drug trafficking and terrorism are often blurred to the point of extinction, it is important to note the role of DEA in this.
Since 9/11, DEA has not been a major player in counter-terrorism issues, until recently. As the terrorism-crime nexus has become more clear, the DEA's long history of dealing with both money movements and criminal networks has become more relevant and useful.
It was also the DEA that rolled up weapons trafficker Viktor Bout, and before that, Monzar al Kassar, another trafficker with extraordinary talents, and also one that wanted to arm the FARC.
In Colombia, the DEA has been behind the extradition of leaders of two designated terrorist organizations, both involved in the drug trade-the right-wing paramilitary AUC and the Marxist FARC.
I believe this is the future. Religious/ideological radicalism and organized criminal groups will become less and less distinguishable in the pipelines of illicit activities we see more and more.
"As an enemy of the United States, Khan Mohammed intended to ship heroin to the United States and use profits from that trade to assist the Taliban," said DEA Acting Administrator Michele M. Leonhart. "A dangerous double threat, Kahn Mohammed purchased rockets to attack American and coalition soldiers who were risking their lives to stabilize Afghanistan. The conviction of Kahn Mohammed puts an end to this source of poison and violence."
If there remained any doubt that Islamist militants are perfectly willing to engage in criminal activity to finance their military actions, this case should dispel them. As money from donations and charities becomes harder to acquire and move safely, the easy alternative is the drug trade.
Hezbollah learned this in its heroin trafficking days a decade ago, and continues to use a range of illicit activities to fund its operations.
In addition to showing how the lines between drug trafficking and terrorism are often blurred to the point of extinction, it is important to note the role of DEA in this.
Since 9/11, DEA has not been a major player in counter-terrorism issues, until recently. As the terrorism-crime nexus has become more clear, the DEA's long history of dealing with both money movements and criminal networks has become more relevant and useful.
It was also the DEA that rolled up weapons trafficker Viktor Bout, and before that, Monzar al Kassar, another trafficker with extraordinary talents, and also one that wanted to arm the FARC.
In Colombia, the DEA has been behind the extradition of leaders of two designated terrorist organizations, both involved in the drug trade-the right-wing paramilitary AUC and the Marxist FARC.
I believe this is the future. Religious/ideological radicalism and organized criminal groups will become less and less distinguishable in the pipelines of illicit activities we see more and more.
POSTED BY DOUGLAS FARAH
Wednesday May 14, 2008
The Handover of the Paramilitary Terrorists in Colombia Could Be a Milestone
Colombian president Alvaro Uribe's decision to extradite 13 leaders of the paramilitary, terrorist-designated United Self Defense Forces (AUC) to the United States could be a milestone in Colombia's efforts to erradicate terrorism from all sides of the political spectrum.
Uribe's own past ties to paramilitary organizations, the political influence wielded by the groups and the alleged direct participation in the groups by his cousin and close adviser Mario Uribe, now jailed, have seriously undermined his government's credibility in the international arena, even as his administration successfully tackled the Marxist FARC forces.
Perhaps this is a sign that the AUC leaders, despite their political and military patrons, will finally face justice in the same way the FARC is pursued.
The AUC, along with the FARC, was designated a terrorist entity by the US in 2001, a designation shared by the EU and other groups.
"Among those extradited were Salvatore Mancuso, Rodrigo Tovar, Diego Fernando Murillo, Hernán Giraldo and Ramiro Vanoy. Along with others, they have been accused of ordering the slayings of thousands of people over a generation, from poor peasants to leftist politicians, journalists to union activists."
That encapsulates one of the great tragedies of Colombia-the political violence has been endemic for generations. This group of paramilitary leaders, responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, as well as the export of tons of cocaine, reaches back decades in its criminal activity.
While I have spent much time on the FARC and its alliance with Venezuela (Hugo Chavez) and potential alliance because of that tie, to Iran, the AUC has been an equally destructive force inside Colombia.
While not posing the national security threat to the United States nor possessing the same explicitly anti-American agenda the FARC does, the AUC has been a larger drug trafficking force and wreaked havoc for years on the civilian population.
I was among the first to write about the alliance between the paramilitary organizations and the Ochoa clan after Pablo Escobar was arrested in 1989, and I tracked the bloody trajectory of brothers Fidel and Carlos Castaño as they formed the AUC.
The initial impetus for the formation of these groups was to protect the landlords who help property in areas where the FARC was active and often kidnapped the property owners. By the mid-1980s, many of the largest property holders were drug kingpins like Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodriquez Gacha, Carlos Lehder etc., and the paramilitary forces became their muscle. With the influx of drug money came a tremendous increase in the groups' armed capabilities.
When the cartel kingpins died, the paramilitary groups simply took over the trafficking routes, and, by the mid-1990s the war with the FARC had far more to do with the dispute over drug issues than ideology.
Like many wars that are more about money than ideology, several of the paramilitary and FARC fronts cut deals on side. Uribe was far more generous in his dealings with the AUC than with the FARC, offering essentially amnesty to the worst human rights offenders in exchange for the demobilization of their forces and cooperation with judicial investigations.
That didn't go so well, as the AUC leaders failed to comply with their part of the bargain. Many of the AUC members continued to traffic and kill, as Uribe himself was forced to acknowledge.
"The country has been generous with them, but the government cannot tolerate their return to crime, their failure to truly and efficiently collaborate with justice," Uribe said in a nationally televised speech.
There are legitimate human rights concerns that those extradited for drug trafficking charges will not have to account for their mass murders. That is a concern that should be addressed through information sharing and joint working groups.
But it is surely better to have the worst leaders of a terrorist/criminal organization standing trial far from home and separated from their ability to continue to operate, than it is to let them live in impunity.
Uribe has now begun in ernest to dismantle the FARC and decapitate the AUC. That is no small feat.
Uribe's own past ties to paramilitary organizations, the political influence wielded by the groups and the alleged direct participation in the groups by his cousin and close adviser Mario Uribe, now jailed, have seriously undermined his government's credibility in the international arena, even as his administration successfully tackled the Marxist FARC forces.
Perhaps this is a sign that the AUC leaders, despite their political and military patrons, will finally face justice in the same way the FARC is pursued.
The AUC, along with the FARC, was designated a terrorist entity by the US in 2001, a designation shared by the EU and other groups.
"Among those extradited were Salvatore Mancuso, Rodrigo Tovar, Diego Fernando Murillo, Hernán Giraldo and Ramiro Vanoy. Along with others, they have been accused of ordering the slayings of thousands of people over a generation, from poor peasants to leftist politicians, journalists to union activists."
That encapsulates one of the great tragedies of Colombia-the political violence has been endemic for generations. This group of paramilitary leaders, responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, as well as the export of tons of cocaine, reaches back decades in its criminal activity.
While I have spent much time on the FARC and its alliance with Venezuela (Hugo Chavez) and potential alliance because of that tie, to Iran, the AUC has been an equally destructive force inside Colombia.
While not posing the national security threat to the United States nor possessing the same explicitly anti-American agenda the FARC does, the AUC has been a larger drug trafficking force and wreaked havoc for years on the civilian population.
I was among the first to write about the alliance between the paramilitary organizations and the Ochoa clan after Pablo Escobar was arrested in 1989, and I tracked the bloody trajectory of brothers Fidel and Carlos Castaño as they formed the AUC.
The initial impetus for the formation of these groups was to protect the landlords who help property in areas where the FARC was active and often kidnapped the property owners. By the mid-1980s, many of the largest property holders were drug kingpins like Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodriquez Gacha, Carlos Lehder etc., and the paramilitary forces became their muscle. With the influx of drug money came a tremendous increase in the groups' armed capabilities.
When the cartel kingpins died, the paramilitary groups simply took over the trafficking routes, and, by the mid-1990s the war with the FARC had far more to do with the dispute over drug issues than ideology.
Like many wars that are more about money than ideology, several of the paramilitary and FARC fronts cut deals on side. Uribe was far more generous in his dealings with the AUC than with the FARC, offering essentially amnesty to the worst human rights offenders in exchange for the demobilization of their forces and cooperation with judicial investigations.
That didn't go so well, as the AUC leaders failed to comply with their part of the bargain. Many of the AUC members continued to traffic and kill, as Uribe himself was forced to acknowledge.
"The country has been generous with them, but the government cannot tolerate their return to crime, their failure to truly and efficiently collaborate with justice," Uribe said in a nationally televised speech.
There are legitimate human rights concerns that those extradited for drug trafficking charges will not have to account for their mass murders. That is a concern that should be addressed through information sharing and joint working groups.
But it is surely better to have the worst leaders of a terrorist/criminal organization standing trial far from home and separated from their ability to continue to operate, than it is to let them live in impunity.
Uribe has now begun in ernest to dismantle the FARC and decapitate the AUC. That is no small feat.
POSTED BY DOUGLAS FARAH
Monday May 12, 2008
More on the FARC Documents
Little by little more of the thousands of documents captured from the FARC rebels in Colombia are coming to light and the picture is not pretty.
While INTERPOL is reportedly set to declare the contents of the computers captured after the March strike that killed FARC commander Raul Reyes, the Colombian government is quietly making use of the documents to inflict unprecedented damage on the guerrilla-criminal organization that is on the terror list of the United States, Canada and the European Union.
Police commander Oscar Naranjo, who has been in the war against drug trafficking organizations for years, says this is the first time in his career that the FARC is shrinking, rather than growing.
Another sign of the guerrilla's weakening are the numbers of desertions by combatants that had been with the FARC anywhere from five to 12 years, said Naranjo.
''It is their qualified combatants that are demobilizing,'' he said. ''What I'm seeing for the first time in the last 30 years is that the FARC are no longer growing -- to the contrary, '' they are shrinking.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the documents show Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in personally involved in helping the FARC, authorizing rest areas for their troops inside Venezuela, offering a $250 million loan to be repaid when the FARC takes power, and allowing senior Venezuelan officials provide weapons to the rebels.
A Venezuelan general, Hugo Carvajal, suggested piggy-backing weapons for the FARC on weapons shipments arriving from Russia, using containers that could then be passed on to the FARC in Colombia.
One of the weapons the FARC clearly wants, the documents show, are surface-to-air missiles, in order to better tackle the Colombian and U.S. use of aircraft, both for surveillance/communications monitoring and fumigation of coca fields.
El Pais, Spain's premier newspaper, contains another worrisome nugget: The FARC was aided in its contacts with international arms dealers by a leader of El Salvador's Communist Party, part of the FMLN alliance, the former guerrilla group now a leading political party.
The FMLN contact is identified in the computer files as "Ramiro," know to be Luis Merino, a member of the Central American parliament. While most of the FMLN has embraced the political process, the Communist party has maintained a clandestine paramilitary apparatus and has never cut its contacts with other armed movements.
El Pais also says the documents show that Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista rebel leader, former and current president of Nicaragua, also offered to send some old but useable weapons to the FARC.
This is precisely the pipeline I have written about before, and why it is dangerous. It is not just Chavez and the FARC in a bit regional hijinx. It is a continuum of bad actors that stretch from Iran to the FARC to Ecuador, Nicaragua and to our border.
The papers are receiving relatively little attention, to our great detriment. One could plausibly argue that this particular pipeline, because if flows across our border seamlessly and with little effort, is a vital national security threat.
While INTERPOL is reportedly set to declare the contents of the computers captured after the March strike that killed FARC commander Raul Reyes, the Colombian government is quietly making use of the documents to inflict unprecedented damage on the guerrilla-criminal organization that is on the terror list of the United States, Canada and the European Union.
Police commander Oscar Naranjo, who has been in the war against drug trafficking organizations for years, says this is the first time in his career that the FARC is shrinking, rather than growing.
Another sign of the guerrilla's weakening are the numbers of desertions by combatants that had been with the FARC anywhere from five to 12 years, said Naranjo.
''It is their qualified combatants that are demobilizing,'' he said. ''What I'm seeing for the first time in the last 30 years is that the FARC are no longer growing -- to the contrary, '' they are shrinking.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the documents show Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in personally involved in helping the FARC, authorizing rest areas for their troops inside Venezuela, offering a $250 million loan to be repaid when the FARC takes power, and allowing senior Venezuelan officials provide weapons to the rebels.
A Venezuelan general, Hugo Carvajal, suggested piggy-backing weapons for the FARC on weapons shipments arriving from Russia, using containers that could then be passed on to the FARC in Colombia.
One of the weapons the FARC clearly wants, the documents show, are surface-to-air missiles, in order to better tackle the Colombian and U.S. use of aircraft, both for surveillance/communications monitoring and fumigation of coca fields.
El Pais, Spain's premier newspaper, contains another worrisome nugget: The FARC was aided in its contacts with international arms dealers by a leader of El Salvador's Communist Party, part of the FMLN alliance, the former guerrilla group now a leading political party.
The FMLN contact is identified in the computer files as "Ramiro," know to be Luis Merino, a member of the Central American parliament. While most of the FMLN has embraced the political process, the Communist party has maintained a clandestine paramilitary apparatus and has never cut its contacts with other armed movements.
El Pais also says the documents show that Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista rebel leader, former and current president of Nicaragua, also offered to send some old but useable weapons to the FARC.
This is precisely the pipeline I have written about before, and why it is dangerous. It is not just Chavez and the FARC in a bit regional hijinx. It is a continuum of bad actors that stretch from Iran to the FARC to Ecuador, Nicaragua and to our border.
The papers are receiving relatively little attention, to our great detriment. One could plausibly argue that this particular pipeline, because if flows across our border seamlessly and with little effort, is a vital national security threat.
POSTED BY DOUGLAS FARAH
Friday May 9, 2008
A Murder in Mexico
The murder of Mexico's police chief signals just how serious the Mexican drug trafficking organizations are about taking on the Mexican state. And just how weak the Mexican state is.
"This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability," LuÃs Astorga, a Mexico City-based sociologist and drug expert, said in an interview. "It indicates terrible things, a level of weakness in our institutions -- they can't even protect themselves."
By most accounts the police chief, Edgar Eusebio Millan Gomez, was a good cop trying to do an impossible job-fighting drug organizations that have more resources, better weapons and the ability to buy or kill those that oppose them.
President Felipe Calderon also wins high praise for sharply ratcheting up the pressure on the trafficking organizations, who have responded in the most predictable and lethal fashion-murdering high-profile symbols of the enforcement effort.
It is worth remembering that the chaos the traffickers are wreaking in Mexico is not just aimed at the Mexican state, it is also aimed at undermining the already-battered viability of our southern border. The hundreds of dead across the border states of Mexico show where the battles are being fought.
The easier it is to cross dope, weapons, illegal aliens from around the world, the higher the profits for the traffickers.
And the FARC rebels in Colombia are now in a direct business relationship with Mexican trafficking organizations, according to the recently-captured FARC documents resulting from the raid that killed rebel leader Raul Reyes.
The FARC, in turn, is allied with Nicaragua (Ortega) and Venezuela (Chavez), who in turn are allied with Iran, which in turn runs Hezbollah, which in turn is actively working to expand its beach head in Latin America.
It is not a conspiracy to see all these developments as inter-connected. As I often tell military audiences and others, every piece of the mosaic, looked at individually, is serious but not alarming. But when the tiles of the mosaic are assembled into a picture, even if the picture is a bit blurry, it is astonishing and dangerous.
The Colombians have been through this (the assassination of an attorney general and three top-tier presidential candidates in the span of three years in the 1980s), and have paid a tremendous price for taking on the cartels and criminal/political groups like the FARC. The effort, however, has paid off in the destruction or significant weakening of the groups, to the point where they no longer represent a direct challenge to the state.
Mexico is at the beginning of a cycle that will likely get worse before it gets better. The allies of the Mexican cartels are stronger and more vicious than those of the Medellin and Cali cartels in Colombia.
If the spread of these lethal armies, now controlling territory from Colombia, through Central America, up the Caribbean coast to our borders, are not understood to be a tier-one security threat-both as organized crime and terrorist operations-we will pay a very heavy price indeed.
"This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability," LuÃs Astorga, a Mexico City-based sociologist and drug expert, said in an interview. "It indicates terrible things, a level of weakness in our institutions -- they can't even protect themselves."
By most accounts the police chief, Edgar Eusebio Millan Gomez, was a good cop trying to do an impossible job-fighting drug organizations that have more resources, better weapons and the ability to buy or kill those that oppose them.
President Felipe Calderon also wins high praise for sharply ratcheting up the pressure on the trafficking organizations, who have responded in the most predictable and lethal fashion-murdering high-profile symbols of the enforcement effort.
It is worth remembering that the chaos the traffickers are wreaking in Mexico is not just aimed at the Mexican state, it is also aimed at undermining the already-battered viability of our southern border. The hundreds of dead across the border states of Mexico show where the battles are being fought.
The easier it is to cross dope, weapons, illegal aliens from around the world, the higher the profits for the traffickers.
And the FARC rebels in Colombia are now in a direct business relationship with Mexican trafficking organizations, according to the recently-captured FARC documents resulting from the raid that killed rebel leader Raul Reyes.
The FARC, in turn, is allied with Nicaragua (Ortega) and Venezuela (Chavez), who in turn are allied with Iran, which in turn runs Hezbollah, which in turn is actively working to expand its beach head in Latin America.
It is not a conspiracy to see all these developments as inter-connected. As I often tell military audiences and others, every piece of the mosaic, looked at individually, is serious but not alarming. But when the tiles of the mosaic are assembled into a picture, even if the picture is a bit blurry, it is astonishing and dangerous.
The Colombians have been through this (the assassination of an attorney general and three top-tier presidential candidates in the span of three years in the 1980s), and have paid a tremendous price for taking on the cartels and criminal/political groups like the FARC. The effort, however, has paid off in the destruction or significant weakening of the groups, to the point where they no longer represent a direct challenge to the state.
Mexico is at the beginning of a cycle that will likely get worse before it gets better. The allies of the Mexican cartels are stronger and more vicious than those of the Medellin and Cali cartels in Colombia.
If the spread of these lethal armies, now controlling territory from Colombia, through Central America, up the Caribbean coast to our borders, are not understood to be a tier-one security threat-both as organized crime and terrorist operations-we will pay a very heavy price indeed.
POSTED BY DOUGLAS FARAH
Thursday May 8, 2008
Bad Omens in Latin America
The Associated Press today reports on how thinly spread U.S. Special Forces are in many parts of the world, including Latin America, at a crucial time.
"We're going to fewer countries, staying for shorter periods of time, with smaller numbers of people than historically we have done," Adm. Eric T. Olson said May 5 in his first interview since becoming commander of U.S. Special Operations Command last July.
To illustrate that point, Olson said that when the 7th Special Forces Group, which is based at Fort Bragg, N.C., and whose normal area of focus is Latin America, rotates into Afghanistan for seven-month tours, it takes two of its three battalions, leaving just one in Latin America.
"That leaves us underrepresented" in Latin America, the admiral said.
In Latin America, as in other areas of greatest interest to the Special Operations Command, Green Berets deploy to friendly countries like El Salvador or Colombia to train local military forces.
Special operations units that are designated mainly for use in Africa and Europe, Olson said, also are under strength for their normal role in those regions because they, too, are tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, about 80 percent of the overseas deployments of special operations forces have been to the Middle East and Afghanistan, Olson said. That compares with 20-25 percent before Sept. 11, 2001.
At the same time, the Reuters news agency reports on growing concerns about the Iranian presence in Latin America.
It noted the growing Iranian presence in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which I have discussed extensively before.
"We are worried that in the event of a conflict with Iran, that it would attempt to use its presence in the region to conduct such activities against us," Thomas Shannon, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, told Reuters.
Left-wing governments in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia have all become allies of Iran in recent years, and other countries in Latin America have diplomatic ties with the Islamic republic.
Shannon said Iran wants to ease its international isolation by showing it is able to win friends in Latin America, which has been historically in the United States' "sphere of influence."
The juxtaposition of these two points to some of the alarming gaps that have developed in our ability to deal with virtually anything beyond the immediate spheres of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In addition to having no hard power to deploy in the region, should it be necessary, we are being vastly outspent and out-flanked on the soft power side, leaving the field almost unchallenged to Iran, China and others who do not have the same geographic or historic ties to the region.
Latin America is in serious jeopardy of seeing years of democratic reforms sharply reversed, in ways that are detrimental both to the populations of the region and US strategic interests.
I lived through the bleak periods of military dictatorship in Bolivia and covered the wars in Central America, and have some understanding of how profoundly different the region is from those periods.
It will be a serious situation when those gains begin to erode to the point of collapse.
"We're going to fewer countries, staying for shorter periods of time, with smaller numbers of people than historically we have done," Adm. Eric T. Olson said May 5 in his first interview since becoming commander of U.S. Special Operations Command last July.
To illustrate that point, Olson said that when the 7th Special Forces Group, which is based at Fort Bragg, N.C., and whose normal area of focus is Latin America, rotates into Afghanistan for seven-month tours, it takes two of its three battalions, leaving just one in Latin America.
"That leaves us underrepresented" in Latin America, the admiral said.
In Latin America, as in other areas of greatest interest to the Special Operations Command, Green Berets deploy to friendly countries like El Salvador or Colombia to train local military forces.
Special operations units that are designated mainly for use in Africa and Europe, Olson said, also are under strength for their normal role in those regions because they, too, are tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, about 80 percent of the overseas deployments of special operations forces have been to the Middle East and Afghanistan, Olson said. That compares with 20-25 percent before Sept. 11, 2001.
At the same time, the Reuters news agency reports on growing concerns about the Iranian presence in Latin America.
It noted the growing Iranian presence in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which I have discussed extensively before.
"We are worried that in the event of a conflict with Iran, that it would attempt to use its presence in the region to conduct such activities against us," Thomas Shannon, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, told Reuters.
Left-wing governments in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia have all become allies of Iran in recent years, and other countries in Latin America have diplomatic ties with the Islamic republic.
Shannon said Iran wants to ease its international isolation by showing it is able to win friends in Latin America, which has been historically in the United States' "sphere of influence."
The juxtaposition of these two points to some of the alarming gaps that have developed in our ability to deal with virtually anything beyond the immediate spheres of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In addition to having no hard power to deploy in the region, should it be necessary, we are being vastly outspent and out-flanked on the soft power side, leaving the field almost unchallenged to Iran, China and others who do not have the same geographic or historic ties to the region.
Latin America is in serious jeopardy of seeing years of democratic reforms sharply reversed, in ways that are detrimental both to the populations of the region and US strategic interests.
I lived through the bleak periods of military dictatorship in Bolivia and covered the wars in Central America, and have some understanding of how profoundly different the region is from those periods.
It will be a serious situation when those gains begin to erode to the point of collapse.
POSTED BY DOUGLAS FARAH