Rightwing Narco's Family Paid $83 Million to the U.S. to Avoid Prosecution
I found this article headline trolling around the internet and I thought that it was quite ironic given all the news this week about the 47 members of FARC being indicted by the DOJ. It refers to a news article titled "The Price of Justice" in the Colombian Magazine Cambio. It really speaks to the hypocisy of the DEA and the war on drugs. Dan Feder is a free lance jounalist who writes articles for narconews.com
Cambio magazine Link
http://www.cambio.com.co/html/portada/articulos/4545/
You will have to cut and paste it in...sorry I am having trouble making it work
Rightwing Narco's Family Paid $83 Million to the U.S. to Avoid Prosecution
Por Dan Feder, Narconews.com
Publicado en Thu Mar 9th, 2006 a las 05:45:57 PM EST
As Bill Conroy and Narco News continue to investigate and uncover documents regarding the allegations of massive corruption in the Bogotá office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio (owned and directed in part by former drug legalization supporter Gabriel García Marquéz) has dug up a juicy tidbit of its own. In this week's issue, whose cover reads "The Price of Justice," the magazine reveals that on January 31 of this year the U.S. Justice Department received the last $1.3 million of an $83 million payment from the family of slain Colombian paramilitary boss and narco-trafficker Gonzalo "The Mexican" Rodríguez Gacha. In return for the massive payment, the family - Rodríguez' widow and seven of his "heirs" - received immunity from prosecution, which they were facing from the Jacksonville, Florida U.S. District Court.
Cambio reports:
"In early February, after several weeks of operations in towns in the northeast and the Magdalena Medio region of Cudinamarca department, Colombian intelligence agents sat down to look through a mountain of documents confiscated during raids that included the properties of people who more than 15 years ago belonged to the organization of drug trafficker and paramilitary Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, "El Mexicano." One of the documents caught the investigators' attention: it was a copy of a legal agreement prepared in the United States about ten years ago by an attorney who represented the bloodthirsty capo's heirs.
Getting a glimpse of an unknown history, the agents discovered a secret operation that lasted more than a decade and just recently ended. As a result the U.S. Justice Department obtained more than $80 million, which had been deposited in 24 bank accounts in Europe and Asia managed by El Mexicano's front companies.
Offered in exchange was a type of legal immunity for the widow and seven of the principle heirs to the fortune of the drug boss, who died in a confrontation with elite National Police forces on December 15, 1989, near Coveñas on the Caribbean coast. They all unconditionally signed an agreement that required them to completely renounce all claims on those monies and to facilitate their "repatriation" (as the document calls it) to the United States. Rodríguez Gacha's inheritors thus remained free from any charges related to conspiracy to introduce drugs into that country or money laundering.
This deal is a first of its kind, as it breaks the traditional molds in Washington that granted benefits to Colombian drug traffickers only when they confessed to their own crimes or gave up names. The last episode in this story, unpublished until today, was written by its own characters on Tuesday, January 31, 2006, when the last payment of $1.3 million dollars was deposited in to the judicial bank account of the Jacksonville, Florida District Court from a bank in Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man, a tax haven between Great Britain and Ireland....."
The article goes on to say that the DEA let the family keep 4 million dollars so that they could live with dignity.