Colombia’s public enemy #1 are the mafia bosses
Colombia is about as close to a mafia state as it ever has
been, which makes catching the bad guys more dangerous than ever.
Organized crime has metastasized to the highest realms of
the state system, which means fighting the cancer can get you in jail if you’re
lucky and killed if you’re not.
Drug trafficking is for the disposables
If you think Colombia’s mafia is into drug trafficking,
you’re decades behind. It may be an industry worth at least $6 billion and may
get you your own Netflix series, but it’s only one of the mafia’s many rackets
and one only few insiders would touch.
Clever bosses don’t get involved in criminal activity that
attracts the attention of US authorities, they stick to rackets that fall under
Colombian jurisdiction that is virtually under their control, while playing
ball with the DEA.
It’s an old trick that kept New York mafia boss Paul
Castellano out of prison until his assassination in 1985.
Rackets like embezzlement, swindle and fraud, anything that
has to do with corruption, is an industry former Comptroller General Edgar Maya
in 2018 estimated to be three times the value of drug trafficking, $18.4
billion to be precise.
While Maya made that claim, his half-brother was serving a
38-year prison for ordering the assassination of a labor union worker who was
being a pain in the ass of US mining company Drummond.
Three years before that, Maya’s brother Angel was
assassinated after serving a six-year sentence for embezzlement. His other
brother, Hernan, is a former prosecutor who has been accused of providing
medical services to paramilitaries who controlled drug trafficking routes to
Venezuela.
The Maya Clan illustrates how organized crime is intertwined
with both the public sector and the private sector. They also illustrate how
corruption rackets are no less violent than drug trafficking.
Politics is where the real money’s at
President Ivan Duque‘s recent implication in election
rigging gives a unique insight into how high organized crime reaches, and how
violent it is.
Duque’s party, the Democratic Center (CD), is the political
home of Senator Jose Obdulio Gaviria, the cousin of Pablo Escobar whose brother
has maintained ties with Medellin crime syndicate Oficina de Envigado.
Colombia’s ruling party is also the home of Senator Paola
Holguin, the daughter of a Medellin Cartel money launderer, Senator Maria Restrepo,
who allegedly swindled her way into congress and Senator Maria Fernanda Cabal,
whose husband was awarded a $30 million fund after she threatened and bribed
her way into Congress.
And how could I forget the boss of bosses, CD leader and
former President Alvaro Uribe, the only former Medellin Cartel associate with a
Medal of Freedom. Duque’s political patron made racketeering government policy.
In a region called Montes de Maria, Uribe sent in the
military to sow terror in 2008 after which his associates and their lawyers
went in to buy the land off the terrorized locals who were almost willing to
give their land away. They ended up stealing land the size of a small country.
After the mafia’s puppet took office in 2018, Duque put a
former representative of alleged land thieves, Andres Augusto Castro, in charge
of the agency that was supposed to give this land back.
Guess what happened. At least nine victims of land theft
were thrown into jail while the convicted thieves walk free.
The risks of challenging the bosses
Duque’s transport minister, Angela Maria Orozco, proceeded
to take $375 million from the treasury of which half would go to Luis Carlos
Sarmiento, whose corporation Grupo Aval financed two-thirds of the president’s
campaign.
Judge Jorge Enrique Ibañez caught Sarmiento’s former
consultant and prevented the heist. Orozco was never investigated to the best
of my knowledge, but Ibañez said in February last year he was being shadowed
and that his phones were being wiretapped.
When you’re only prevent one crime, the retaliation is
intimidating, but nothing compare to when you threaten the bosses’ structural
rackets.
Roberto Mauricio Rodriguez, an official of the
Superintendency for Finance, said in August last year that he was receiving
death threats after testifying over Grupo Aval’s bribery practices with their
former Brazilian partner Odebrecht.
“They said they were going to cut me and my daughters to
pieces,” Rodriguez said.
Colombia’s former anti-corruption prosecutor, Luis Gustavo
Moreno, survived two assassination attempts. He agreed to testify about the
practice of congressmen bribing Supreme Court judges.
Chief Prosecutor Nestor Humberto Martinez extradited Moreno
to the United States before he was able to testify.
Jorge Pizano, the auditor of Grupo Aval and Odebrecht’s road
infrastructure project, died of cyanide poisoning in 2017 after he told
prosecutors about the bribery that got the corporations their juicy gig.
Before his death, Pizano accused Martinez, a.k.a.
“Sarmiento’s Guy,” of being in on the racket.
Pizano’s son died of cyanide poisoning too. “Accidentally,”
the then-chief prosecutor concluded after his office destroyed evidence and he
ended the investigation.
Duque’s alleged involvement in rigging the 2018 elections
reaches the level where not even the president is safe. After all, he is only a
front man, not a boss, and can be replaced.
Ahead of the elections, money launderer Jose Guillermo
Hernandez was wiretapped while he was talking about collecting illegal
contributions from businesses to swing the elections.
His efforts got Hernandez invited to the presidential
inauguration, but something must’ve gone wrong. He was murdered in Brazil in
May last year.
The prosecution wouldn’t touch the election rigging evidence
with a 10-foot pole until journalist Gonzalo Guillen made the latest evidence
of election rigging public on Wednesday.
Duque’s long-time friend, Chief Prosecutor Francisco
Barbosa, told press he would forward the case to “the competent authorities.”
Barbosa IS the competent authority.
The thing is that the chief prosecutor been around gangsters
long enough to know that chasing narcos is much less likely to get you killed
than snitching on Colombia’s real mafia bosses, the ones who have almost
usurped the state.
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