CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

94 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
only begun to change in 2005. And no one wants the weak Afghan army to
plunge the nation again into violence while trying to extend control
throughout the country.
Over the past decade, the linkages between drugs, criminal syndicates,
and terrorists have become unmistakably—and frighteningly—clear. The
war on terror cannot be won without waging an equal war on drugs, and the
war on drugs cannot be won without waging an equal war on drug money.
Remember what I said earlier: When you get to the end game, converting
product to cash, the drug kingpins and their terrorist allies win 99.9 percent
of the time. This is dirty money at work.
Colombia and Peru
Drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere has gone through an interesting
metamorphosis over the past 30 years, essentially starting with several
competing groups, then evolving into large integrated structures, and now
shifting back to smaller franchise operations. The ease with which drug revenues
are laundered gives the industry its staying power through these cycles,
taking full advantage of the tried and proven holes in the global
financial system.
Pablo Escobar intimidated, bribed, and murdered his way to the top of
the Colombian drug trade in the 1970s and 1980s. Emerging as El Patrón
among traffickers, he elevated Medellín drug lords into a cartel, cooperating
at the top, and assuring an endless supply of drugs to western markets. Escobar
was for a time perhaps the richest criminal in the world.
The violence of the Medellín cartel was also its undoing. In the 1980s a
justice minister, a newspaper publisher, an attorney general, and a leading
presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galán, were assassinated. An Avianca
flight was blown out of the air, killing 107. Even the national police agency
was bombed. The government set about confiscating cartel assets—nearly a
thousand properties, 367 airplanes, 73 boats, 700 vehicles, 1,200 guns, and
tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. Escobar was shot to death in
1993, and the Medellín cartel was broken.
Only to be replaced by the Cali cartel. Also formed in the 1970s, it
was headed by Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, named the Chess Player for
his strategic cunning, and younger brother Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela. In
the early 1990s, with rising resentment of Medellín’s violence, the Cali