Big cash seizure puts light on Nicaragua drug role

The Guardian
Adriana Gomez Licon

Most days the only vehicles on Highway 15 are battered trucks shuttling grain, coffee beans and cooking oil through the lush, mountainous highlands on the Honduras-Nicaragua border.

Then one recent morning, a convoy of six vans cruised down the two-lane road. All were emblazoned with the logo of the world's largest Spanish-language television network, Televisa, and inside were 18 Mexicans with press badges, high-definition video cameras, microphones and a satellite dish.

Nicaraguan police were waiting. Acting on an anonymous tip from Honduras, officers pulled over the vans and after two days of investigation determined the occupants were falsely posing as employees of Televisa's news division. Hidden beneath the sound boards and screens in three of the vans, officers found black gym bags stuffed with $9.2 million in cash.

The Aug. 20 seizure has pulled back the curtain on Nicaragua's role as a conduit between South American cocaine producers and the Mexican drug cartels that move their product into the United States. It also shows how the gangs are resorting to ever-more inventive ways to move their profits out of the U.S. as authorities crack down harder on suspicious bank transfers and other relatively easy ways of moving money.

"It's been a case that has drawn our attention. We are studying the way organized crime is operating," said Nicaragua's National Police spokesman, Commander Fernando Borge. "Organized crime is powerful and has many resources and it will try in every different way to get across our country."

Nicaraguan police say the cash was destined for Costa Rica, where the fake journalists planned to pay for a load of drugs that had been smuggled into the United States.

Authorities here aren't saying which cartel employed the woman and 17 men arrested — most of them in their 20s or 30s and most with addresses in Mexico City or its suburbs. Testimony in a high-profile trial in progress in Nicaragua has alleged, however, that Nicaragua and Costa Rica are being used as transfer points in the trade between Colombian drug traffickers and the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is one of Mexico's two most powerful criminal organizations.

Costa Rican authorities say the woman arrested, 30-year-old Raquel Alatorre, who is believed to be the leader of the group, had crossed from Nicaragua into their country at least 15 times since 2006, though it was unclear if she had traveled in similar convoys previously.

"We were not investigating them," said Costa Rica's vice minister of security, Celso Gamboa. "We were not very shrewd."

Nicaragua's Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policy, which tracks how much money is seized from suspected criminals in the country, says a total of $40 million in cash has been confiscated by police over the past seven years, including $7 million last year alone.

"Normally drug dealers don't function like this. This isn't the usual way they operate," said Roberto Orozco, a researcher with the group. "However, it is possible that we're seeing new techniques emerge, with drug dealers disguising themselves as journalists."

The seized 2011 Chevy Express vans, five white and one yellow-and-blue, bore custom-made stickers with Televisa's orange sun logo. The logo was also embroidered in the neck lanyards of the suspects' supposed press badges and stamped on their microphones.

Nicaraguan prosecutors say police had received an anonymous call the previous day from a man in Honduras who said he had overheard the group talking suspiciously about crossing into Nicaragua.

So 13 officers waited south of the border checkpoint and stopped the convoy inside Nicaragua.

The people in the vans gave inconsistent accounts about what stories they were planned to cover in Nicaragua, with some saying they going to produce a piece on tourism, and others saying the topic was crime.

Local media have cited unidentified Nicaraguan authorities as saying the fake journalists claimed they were going to cover the current trial of a Nicaraguan who allegedly helped the Sinaloa cartel smuggle drugs and money through his country to Costa Rica and Colombia. The defendant, Henry Farinas, was charged after a 2011 attack apparently aimed at him killed Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral, who was being driven by Farinas to a Guatemala airport.

The indictment against the 18 people, obtained by The Associated Press, says they had no way to show authorities that Televisa sent the large contingent on assignment. So police escorted the suspects to the capital city of Managua and kept them at the Holiday Inn for two days while investigators contacted the Mexican Embassy to find out more information about them.

Embassy officials reported that the 18 people were not employees of Televisa, and that justified a thorough search of the vans, the indictment says.

Nicaragua's courts and treasury are now fighting over who gets to keep the money. The archbishop of Managua has also put in a bid, saying the Roman Catholic Church could use the money to help the poor of Nicaragua, the second-poorest nation in the hemisphere. In previous cash seizures, the money was held by the courts until trials were finished and then distributed among law enforcement agencies.

Last Friday, police showed off 16 of the 18 suspects to the news media.

Sirens blaring, ski-masked police officers dressed in black drove the five white vans with the orange Televisa logo onto the parking lot of Nicaragua's National Police headquarters in Managua. Some officers took wads of cash from gym bags for the cameras. Prosecutor Javier Antonio Morazan said in court documents that at least one wad of cash underwent a narcotic trace detector and tested positive for cocaine.

Alatorre and the 17 men will have their first hearing next week on charges of organized crime and money laundering.

Televisa has said since the arrests that the detainees were not its reporters and the vehicles were never in its car fleet. A statement this week said the company may sue the group for pretending to be its reporters.

---

Associated Press writer Cesar Barrentes in San Jose, Costa Rica, contributed to this report.

Who is fighting in Syria? Journalists Lie Than Admit That They’ve Been Manipulated

The 4th Media
Thierry Meyssan

Though the Western press portrays the Free Syrian Army as an armed revolutionary group, for more than a year Thierry Meyssan has affirmed that it is on the contrary a counter-revolutionary body. According to him, it would have progressively passed from the hands of reactionary monarchies in the Gulf to those of Turkey, acting for NATO. Such a non-mainstream affirmation needs demonstrative proof…

_____________________________________________

For the last 18 months, Syria has been prey to troubles that have steadily increased to become a widespread armed conflict having already killed about 20,000 people. If there is consensus on this observation, narratives and interpretations vary beyond.

For Western states and their press, the Syrians aspire to live in the Western market democracies. Following the Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan “Arab Spring” models, they rose up to overthrow their dictator Bashar al-Assad. The latter suppressed the demonstrations with bloodshed. While Westerners would have liked to intervene to stop the massacre, the Russians and Chinese, out of self-interest or contempt for human life, opposed intervention.

On the contrary for all other states that are not vassals of the U.S. and for their media, the U.S. launched an operation planned a long time ago against Syria. First, through its regional allies, and then directly, they have introduced armed bands, modeled on the Contras in Nicaragua, that have destabilized the country.

But they found only very weak domestic support and were routed while Russia and China prevented NATO’s destroying the Syrian army and reversing the regional equation.

Who is telling the truth? Who is wrong?

Armed groups in Syria do not defend democracy, they fight against it

First, the interpretation of Syrian events as an episode of the “Arab Spring” is an illusion because this “spring” has no basis in reality. This is an advertising slogan to positively present unrelated facts. Although there has been a popular revolt in Tunisia, Yemen and Bahrain, there was none in neither Egypt nor Libya.

In Egypt, the street demonstrations have been limited to the capital and parts of the middle class; never, absolutely never, have the Egyptian people identified with the telegenic spectacle of Tahrir Square [1]. In Libya, there was no political revolt, but a separatist movement in Cyrenaica against the power of Tripoli, and the military intervention of NATO, which cost the lives of about 160,000 people.

The Lebanese station NourTV has been very successful airing a series of broadcasts by Hassan Hamade entitled “The Arab Spring, from Lawrence of Arabia to Bernard-Henri Levy.”

The authors develop therein the idea that the “Arab Spring” is a remake of the “Arab Revolt” of 1916-1918 orchestrated by the British against the Ottomans. This time, Westerners have manipulated situations to upset a generation of leaders and impose the Muslim Brotherhood.

In fact, the “Arab Spring” is false advertising. Now, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Gaza are governed by a brotherhood; on the one hand imposing a moral order and on the other supporting Zionism and pseudo-liberal capitalism, that is to say the interests of Israel and the Anglo-Americans. The illusion was dispelled. Some authors, like Syria’s Said Hilal Alcharifi, now deride the “NATO spring“.

Secondly, the leaders of the Syrian National Council (SNC) as well as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) commanders are not democratic at all, in the sense that they would be favourable to “a government of the people, by the people, for the people“, according to Abraham Lincoln’s formula taken from the French Constitution.

Thus, the first president of the SNC was the Paris academic, Burhan Ghalioun. He was in no way “a Syrian opponent persecuted by the regime” since he circulated freely in and out of his country.

Nor was he a “secular intellectual” as he claims, since he was the political advisor to the Algerian Abbassi Madani, President of the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF), now a refugee in Qatar.

His successor, Abdel Basset Syda [2] entered politics only in the last months, and immediately established himself as a mere executor of US wishes. Upon his election as head of the SNC, he pledged not to defend the will of his people, but to implement the “road map” that Washington drew up for Syria: The Day After.

                                                        Logo of the “Free Syrian Army”

Nor are the Free Syrian Army fighters champions of democracy. They recognize the spiritual authority of sheikh Adnan Alrour, a takfirist preacher, who calls for the overthrow and killing of Assad, not for political reasons but simply because Assad is of the Alawite faith, that is to say a heretic in the preacher’s eyes.

All of the identified officers in the FSA are Sunnis and all of the FSA brigades are named after historical Sunni figures. The “revolutionary tribunals” of the FSA sentence their political opponents to death (and not only supporters of Bashar al-Assad) and they slaughter the unbelievers in public. The FSA program is to end the secular regime installed by the Baath, the SSNP and the Communist Party in favor of a pure religious Sunni regime.

The Syrian conflict was premeditated by the West

The western will to end Syria is known and it is quite sufficient to explain current events. Let us recall some facts that leave no doubt as to the premeditation of these events [3].

Luis Posada Carriles Acquitted in Texas

The Nation
David Brooks

Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA employee, veteran of the failed invasion of Cuba, support operative for the Nicaraguan Contras and the accused mastermind behind the worst terrorist attacks in Latin America and the Caribbean, was acquitted last Friday in a federal court in El Paso, Texas—but only on charges related with lying to immigration authorities, and not for his long history of violence, for which justice authorities in Venezuela and other countries are still seeking his extradition.

After a trial that dragged on for thirteen weeks, and only three hours after beginning deliberations, the jury reached a unanimous “not guilty” verdict on each one of the eleven counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and immigration fraud.

The verdict marks the end of the US government’s prosecution of Posada Carriles, begun four years ago when he was accused of entering the United States illegally, and now all indications are that he will continue living happily in Miami, where he is considered a hero. At the end of the trial, he left the courthouse a free man.

Now the only pending legal action remaining against him is Venezuela’s extradition request to try him on seventy-three counts of murder, as he is accused of organizing the most serious terrorist attack in Latin America: the 1976 bombing of the Cubana de Aviación passenger airliner.

The US Justice Department expressed that it was “disappointed by the decision” of the jury in El Paso. But José Pertierra, the attorney who is representing the Venezuelan government in its efforts to extradite Posada Carriles, told La Jornada: “I suggest that the United States government not feel so disappointed and extradite him instead.”

The case in El Paso arose from his illegal entry into the United States in 2005, where he first applied for political asylum and later for citizenship.

Federal prosecutors accused Posada Carriles of lying about the way he entered the country, as well as making statements denying his participation in terrorist activities, especially the bomb attacks on hotels and tourist sites in Cuba in 1997, which took the life of the Italian tourist Fabio di Celmo and left twelve others wounded.

Pertierra who attended the trial every day in El Paso, told La Jornada that the evidence presented during the trial was “overwhelming” in proving that Posada lied to immigration authorities about his entry into the United States as well as his role in the terrorist attacks against Cuba. He added that the recorded statements from Posada Carriles himself, as well as the testimony from multiple witnesses, “couldn’t have been clearer.”

These witnesses included expert forensic pathologists and Cuban investigators, associates of the accused, and even the reporter Ann Louise Bardach, who interviewed the previously convicted terrorist for the New York Times. In that interview, Posada Carriles admitted being the mastermind behind the attacks against the hotels in Cuba.

Pertierra said the verdict “did not surprise me,” indicating that “the show [the defense] put on, and the confusion that it generated among the jury, won out over the evidence.”

Explaining how it was possible that a “not guilty” verdict could be reached for Posada Carriles despite the introduction of witnesses, tape recordings and interviews that proved his culpability on the lying, perjury and obstruction charges, Pertierra indicated that jury trials in this country are part of “a failed system,” with outcomes similar to this one and as the whole world could see in the O.J. Simpson case some years ago. He said that jury members—citizens selected by the defense as well as the prosecution—are often ignorant of the context of the case they are asked to decide, and often easily confused and subject to all kinds of manipulation by the attorneys. Also, the prolongation of this trial for up to three months even though the charges did not merit such a lengthy procedure was part of the defense strategy to “overwhelm” the jury with the goal of making it almost “deaf and blind” by the end. Finally, with the judge’s authorization, the defense managed to hold “mini-trials within the main trial, against Cuba and Cuban prosecution witnesses” and in this way deviate the focus from the accused to the accusers, going so far as to accuse them of torture and other violations.

Although the trial was notable for being the first time in United States that the government presented proof against its former employee (he was a CIA agent until 1976, and later collaborated in Washington’s secret war channeling assistance to the Nicaraguan Contra forces in the 1980s), it’s worth emphasizing that Posada Carriles has never been formally accused, much less prosecuted on US soil, for his participation in terrorist actions. The trial in El Paso was solely limited to his lies about his role in some of those attacks. This, despite US authorities having qualified him as a terrorist suspect and placing him on the official no-fly list for commercial flights in this country.

In addition to working for the CIA, it’s worth recalling that Posada Carriles participated in the US-supported invasion of the Bay of Pigs; that he was an officer in the US Army and that in 1976 he moved to Venezuela to head the intelligence service in that country. That same year he was arrested after being accused of being the mastermind of the attack on the Cuban airliner, and escaped before facing a civil trial for what was at the time the worst terrorist act in the hemisphere. In 2001, he was arrested in Panama, for planning to kill Fidel Castro with 200 pounds of dynamite and C-4 explosives, in a university auditorium filled with students in 2000, but was pardoned by then–Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso in 2004, showing up a short time later in the United States. In 2005 he was arrested here, which led to the beginning of the process that ended last Friday in El Paso with his acquittal.

“I haven’t reached the end of the road; the nature of the struggle has changed, but it is still the same,” said Posada Carriles after the trial concluded, according to AFP. He added that he would dedicate himself, in a peaceful way, to “restoring what Cuba used to be.”
For more information about his “road,” documents from the CIA and other US agencies detailing the career of Posada Carriles can be found at the website for the National Security Archive, the center for research and documentation.

Pertierra said that the Venezuelan government will continue to demand that the US government fulfill its obligations and respond to the extradition request for Posada Carriles.

“The seventy-three murder charges in Caracas are more important than eleven charges of perjury in El Paso,” said Pertierra.