Offshore Islands
Page 55
The plantations that Ortega controlled were an important exporter of Colombian coffee to international markets. They were also another one of the many covers for his multiple illegal business activities, which included money laundering on behalf of the Farc.
The production of coca paste in the mountains of southern Colombia by the Farc and their supporters was worth many hundreds of millions of dollars and Ortega’s role was to legitimise the enormous wealth for the guerrillas.
The police, the army, political parties and the drug cartels were intertwined in a complex tangle of conflicting relationships. The civil authorities needed the money to fight drugs, but also accepted money from the drug cartels to fund election campaigns and buy arms to fight the guerrillas.
The Colombian authorities accepted the billions of dollars in aid given by the US government, in their fight against narcotics, as the principal source of funding the struggle against the Farc and other opposition movements.
The cocaine commenced its long journey from the mountains in the extreme south of the country to the Caribbean coast in the north. The paste was refined into the finished product in laboratories in Baranquilla and other coastal cities ready for export. From the cities of Baranquilla on the coast, or Santa Marta at the foot of Pico Cristobal Colon, 5,800 metres high, overlooking the southern flank of the Caribbean, the cocaine was shipped by sea to North America via the Caribbean islands or through Mexico.
Mexico was one of the main channels to the USA for drugs, accounting for over fifty percent of the drugs imported into the country. From Mexico the cocaine continued its voyage, overland into Texas and California.
The sea route used ‘gofasts’, high speed power boats, that made their runs at night in the international waters of the Caribbean at speeds of over eighty kilometres an hour, well beyond that of any coast guard vessel. They were refuelled by a variety of boats anchored at fixed points along their route in international waters. The trips normally took between five and eight bone breaking hours riding the waves.
They delivered their vile cargoes of pure cocaine for the rich North American and European markets. The merchandise was transhipped at night, outside of territorial waters, to different types of craft, sailing boats, motor cruisers, fishing boats, merchant vessels and even seaplanes.
A single trip was well worth the risk, a quarter of a million dollars for the skipper and a hundred thousand for a hand. A cargo of two tons of pure cocaine was worth twenty million dollars to the narco-traffickers in the Caribbean and worth two hundred million in New York to the dealers.
Heroine was a new product for the narco-traffickers and was worth ten times more than cocaine, as a consequence it was a highly prized diversification by the narco-industry.
Transit through the Caribbean islands accounted for two hundred tons of cocaine shipped to the USA yearly, having a market value of twenty billion dollars. Law enforcement authorities seized less than ten percent of the illegal contraband. The authorities were overwhelmed by the task and the impossibility of controlling the vast disparate armada of drug runners, from the ‘mules’ carrying small quantities to the professional well-equipped drug runners transporting thousands of kilos.
The professional drug runners, besides being criminals in international law, were dangerous mercenaries and smugglers of all sorts and origins, They were skilled navigators and could rendezvous with the precision of a few metres at any given point on the open sea in the darkest of nights. After a few trips certain could hope to settle their debts, others retire in comfort back in their hometowns, setting up a small business or buying a restaurant or a new fishing boat. Some lived for the sheer thrill of danger whilst others were hardened criminals. There was a never-ending stream of candidates willing to take the risk of prison or death, men of all nationalities Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Colombians. Some were professionals who owned their boats; others were hired mercenaries who captained the boats of the cartels.
The cocaine was transferred in international waters beyond the jurisdiction of the United States coast guards. The transfer was made to boats and craft of different types amongst the hundreds of thousands of boats that cruised in the coastal waters off Florida and the Keys, making control and detection an impossibly great task for the authorities. The narco-traffickers were equipped with the very latest navigation and radar equipment that enabled them to avoid the coast guard patrols and pinpoint their rendezvous, without the loss of precious time and avoiding the risk of detection.
The US government waged their long war on the drug cartels and Mafia, but the demand for narcotics grew at a faster rate than the means to combat the traffickers. Every single day over five thousand Americans tried cocaine for the first time. The government was slowly but surely losing the war.
The US Coast Guard patrolled their coastal waters and kept nearby international waters under constant surveillance and with its aircraft and helicopters noting the movements of all suspicious vessels. They had even started to get delivery of their own powerboats to match the speed of the drug runners. But their numbers were disproportionally small compared to the number of vessels smuggling drugs into the USA, without taking in account the traffic to Europe and other destinations.
The drug cartels, some of the most powerful criminal organisations in the world, controlled the shipment of narcotics from Baranquilla to Sint Maarten in the Windward Islands, which was a major transfer point for the drugs towards Europe. The Netherlands controlled the southern half of the island with a lax attitude to drugs, attracting narco-traffickers of all kinds. The island’s corrupt officials facilitated the criminal business and were in league with the drug traffickers, especially the Colombians.
The huge numbers of pleasure boats that visited the island, motor cruisers and sailing boats, made it almost impossible for the authorities to control all the comings and goings of all vessels, they had neither the means nor the will.
The traffickers shipped their goods to Europe through its soft underbelly. Tons of cocaine arrived in Spain via the Canary Islands by container and on pleasure boats. The drugs were then redistributed in smaller quantities to Spain and Italy or into Greece, Albania and the eastern Adriatic shore. The goods were then smuggled up to their final destinations, the markets of Northern Europe by road.
The diversity of the transport ensured that the risk was spread, avoiding detection and loss of the valuable cargos. The narco-industry by experience had built into its calculation an average loss of ten percent of the goods shipped from Colombia.
Thierry Barton was one of a multitude of links in their chain. He used the Marie Galante as a tanker for refuelling stops in the Caribbean for the gofasts between Colombia and the islands of Santo Domingo, Sint Maarten and Puerto Rico. Others made their runs between Santa Marta in Colombia and Aruba in the Netherlands Antilles.
The Marie Galante with full tanks could supply several thousands of litres of fuel to the gofasts without difficulty. It provided Barton with a steady income with a minimum of risk. There were no suspicious tanks or cargo holds, the ketch required no extra fuel tanks which would have attracted the attention of coast guards in the case of it being boarded for inspection.
Fuelling took place at night taking no more than thirty minutes. The ketch’s radar had a range of several nautical miles and could detect any approaching vessel well in time to distance themselves from the gofast, both vessels keeping their engines running during the refuelling operation.
Barton never took the risk of carrying drugs on the ketch, the presence of which could have been detected, even after unloading, by dogs or sniffing instruments.
The narco-traffickers laundered their money by the purchase goods for dollars in the USA, which they then illegally imported into Colombia against payment in pesos.
Colombian exchange regulations made it complicated for those wanting to import goods purchased in dollars from the USA. The Colombian authorities imposed excessively high customs tariffs that encouraged individuals and businesse
s to smuggle in the goods they needed. The way around the regulations was simple, buyers paid brokers in Bogota in pesos. The US brokers then paid suppliers of the goods in dollars and the goods were delivered via a free trade zone in a third country such as Panama or Aruba. The Colombian broker then credited the account of the narco-traffickers with pesos.
The brokers ran a highly lucrative business working at discount rates of up to twenty percent on each side. The goods arrived illegally, smuggled through one of the many ports on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, without paying Colombian customs duties.
Another method was to smuggle goods into Colombia paid for in the same manner. The goods were then sold through sanandrecitos, illegal tax free markets, San Andres was a Colombian island with an official tax free zone in the Caribbean created to facilitate legal trade.
Goods such as cigarettes, alcohol, electronics, appliances and car spare parts were exported from the USA via tax free zones in Central American countries. The Colombian authorities were incapable of controlling the stream of smuggled goods; they were too corrupt and ill equipped to deal with the volume of customs documents through which they could have traced illegal operations.
The USA authorities estimated that money laundering through black market peso exchange was one of the most dangerous forms of money laundering. More than five billion US dollars were exchanged into Colombian pesos for the purchase and illegal import of US goods into the country every year.
The market for military equipment was a lucrative business for many American companies which did not look to closely at the source of payment for their wares. The payments, which in many cases came by wire transfer from unrelated sources and offshore tax havens, included laundered narco-dollars.
The US contributed billions of dollars to the Colombian state whilst the narco-traffickers contributed billions of dollars to the parallel economy. The narco-traffickers with their vast revenues made their own laws and ran their own economy.
The guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the Farc, from their base in the village of Los Pozos, controlled a swath of southern jungle, the size of Switzerland, or over three percent of the national territory.
The Farc and the government held sporadic discussions in Los Pozos which resulted in almost nothing concrete except for the government’s concession of that region to the rebels, based on the realisation that it was impossible and fruitless to try to recovery the territory.
The narco-industry held Colombia in its iron grip. It was composed of an unholy alliance between the coca growers, for the most part poor farmers, Marxist guerrillas, drug cartels, the military and the politicians
The Marxist guerrillas in league with the coca growers and drug traffickers controlled almost half of the country. The narco-industry was so lucrative that it had become the very reason for the guerrillas continued existence. It had enabled them to subvert the country’s fragile democratic system, buying politicians at the highest levels, military commanders, the judiciary system and undermining the country’s economic system.
The money generated by the narco-industry even attracted paramilitary movements linked to the local army units that wanted to muscle in on the huge profits.
The coca plantations were found mainly in two of the countries southern provinces, both controlled by the Marxist Farc the most powerful guerrilla organisation.
The state of lawlessness was so great and had lasted so long that the military had gone as far as protecting the Medelin drug cartel and even one of the country’s presidents had even accepted contributions from the Cali cartel.
On the other hand the guerrillas had fought for over forty years and their ideology was exhausted and no longer corresponded to the political reality of their country’s needs, a mere five percent of the population supported the guerrillas. The guerrillas refused to conclude a politically negotiated peace, preferring the hundreds of millions of dollars from the narco-industry and protection money that financed the comfortable status quo. They had become a well armed and well fed bandit organisation, that from its jungle stronghold held their country as a hostage to sustain their make-believe ideological existence, they were mere mercenaries to the narco-industry. Drugs had become their only raison d’être.
The huge quantities of monies generated gave them the incentive to continue their charade by all means possible within the triangle that was formed by the borders of Colombia, Brazil and Peru.
Chapter 56
Brel