Friday, April 08, 2011

LA SERVIDUMBRE INTELECTUAL


Libro Primero


_ En verdad, maese Rafael, que me sorprende que no os halléis sirviendo a algún rey, pues estoy cierto de que no hay ningún príncipe a quien no fuerais grato en seguida, va que podríais agradarle con vuestra profunda experiencia y vuestro conocimiento de los hombres y de los países, instruirle con muchos ejemplos y ayudarle con vuestros consejos. Si esto hicieseis, os darían un buen empleo, y podríais proteger a la vez a vuestros amigos y parientes.

_ En lo tocante a mis parientes y amigos - respondió- no tengo de qué preocuparme, pues ya he hecho mucho por ellos. Los demás hombres no se desprenden de sus bienes de fortuna hasta que se sienten viejos y enfermos, y aun entonces, pese a que no pueden usarlos, no renuncian a ellos de muy buen grado. Yo, estando todavía en la flor de mi juventud y sano, repartí los míos entre amigos y parientes, y creo que estarán contentos de mi liberalidad y que no querrán después que me haga esclavo de un rey.

...

_ Veo claramente, amigo Rafael -tercié yo- que no apetecéis riquezas ni poder; y yo no reverencio ni aprecio menos a un hombre que piensa como vos de los poderosos. Creo que obraríais de acuerdo con vuestro natural generoso sacrificando vuestra comodidad y consagrando vuestro saber y vuestra diligencia a la república, lo que podríais hacer con gran fruto siendo del Consejo del algún príncipe, donde el príncipe podría oír vuestras honradas opiniones. Un príncipe, bien lo sabéis, es como una fuente de la que manan perennemente sobre su pueblo todos los bienes y todos los males. En vos hay una ciencia sin experiencia y una experiencia sin ciencia tan grandes, que seríais un excelente consejero de cualquier rey.

_ Os equivocáis dos veces, maese More -me respondió-; primero respecto de mi persona y luego de la cosa en sí misma. No hay en mí la habilidad que vos me atribuís, y aunque la hubiese y yo mismo turbase mi propio sosiego, no serviría para los negocios de Estado. En primer lugar, a las gentes divierten más los hechos bélicos y caballerescos (de los cuales nada sé ni deseo saber) que las cosas de la paz, y más se preocupan de conquistar, por buenas o malas artes, nuevos territorios que de gobernar pacíficamente los que ya tienen. Además, los consejeros de los reyes, o bien carecen de entendimiento o bien tienen tanto que no les dejan probar las opiniones ajenas, a no ser que se trate de aplaudir las más insensatas por haberlas dicho aquellos personajes que por mediación de los cuales, adulándolos, esperan conseguir el favor del príncipe. Es una cosa natural que el hombre ame sus propias obras. También a la hembra del cuervo y a la mona les parecen sus crías hermosísimas. En semejante compañía, donde se desdeñan y desprecian los ajenos pareceres y los demás consideran las propias opiniones como las mejores, si alguien propone como ejemplo a seguir lo que ha leído se hizo en otros tiempos o lo que ha visto en países extranjeros, advierte que los que le escuchan se comportan como si fuesen a perder su fama de discretos, y aun como si después hubiesen de ser tenidos por necios, a menos de poder demostrar el error en que han caído los otros, Si no persuaden todas estas razones, se escudan diciendo: "Estas cosas eran del agrado de nuestros padres y antepasados. ¡Quién pudiera ser tan sabio como ellos!". Con esto hacen callar a los demás y vuelven a sentarse. Como si constituyese un grave peligro que un hombre fuese en alguna cuestión más sabio que sus antepasados. A más, nosotros que consentimos que no sean cumplidas las mejores y más sabias leyes que ellos dictan, cuando se pretende mejorarlas nos aferramos a ellas, pese a los muchos defectos que hallamos en las mismas. He oído muchas veces juicios absurdos y orgullosos como esos en diversos países, y hasta una vez en la misma Inglaterra.


Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen (Subtitulado al Español)


MORO, T. Utopía. Editorial Época. Iztapalapa, México, D.F. 1982


A todos aquellos a quienes el poder no ha podido corromper.


¿Atípico?


Marzo ha terminado, dejándonos al final con una colita... de precipitaciones en el Distrito Federal. I would be fine to find out how atypical the last month really was, need data to test it for free, myths; cheers!



Atípica ciertamente ha sido la plática con este compa el pasado domingo.

_ Así es, eso es en todos lados, siempre se quieren alzar el cuello con las ideas y el trabajo de uno, pero lo que si me saca de onda es que mis compañeros medio rojillos, se la pasan platicando que si los Illuminati tienen dominado al mundo, y no sé que tantas cosas más -me dice mi interlocutor.

Es entonces que entiendo que es hora de tomar, mientras lo veo aproximarse, el metrobús, again.

_ Pues, sin necesidad de ser a conspiracy lover, o andar investigando sobre Skulls and Bones y no ocultar que "me creo" medio rojillo, si sé que está del nabo que unos cuantos concentren la riqueza de nuestro planeta, mi estimado -termino mi última frase mientras abordo el más reciente transporte greenie de nuestra ciudad.

No del metrobús, pero sí del STC-Metro ha llegado un burro blanco a pisar territorio puma. Una no muy afortunada coincidencia, pero sí conveniente me ha dado la oportunidad de mostrarle in deep uno que otro concepto sobre mi tema de estudio.

_ ¿Ahora comprendes porque tenía listo el clip? ... "...la diferencia es que nosotros nos metíamos a estudiar en serio como eran estas cosas...", pa' no andar rebuznando tanto aquí como allá, ¿ahora lo ves? Conozco colegas que intentan, pero son incapaces de comprender en contexto eso de: una anomalía de 0.7 Celsius above the 1961-1990 global mean, y andan repitiendo como si juera El Credo lo que seguramente ni siquiera arañan en aprehender un poquillo, bato.

_ Sí, fue un chingo, loco; pero creo que ahora sí entiendo una o dos cosas de eso que llaman Calentamiento Global -although he seems a bit overwhelmed.

_ Well, por lo menos yo sí te afirmarte que todo lo que escuchaste en ese intento de explicación de hace rato, es honesto porque es algo que he leído y meditado, ergo, entendido -errr, I hope.

_ ¿Falta algo, no? -y sé que no es necesaria una palabra más pa´conocer lo que piensa.

_ Si te estás refieriendo a "las posibles soluciones", solo voy a refrescártelas porque, seguramente de tanto repetirlas ya te la sabes by heart, my friend:

Asté tiene que convertirse en un consumidor que piense en todos los demás, i.e., consciente; no matter what they say, el gran billete sigue dominando la mayoría de lo que importa pa´nosotros como especie, inclusive los recursos naturales, compadre; therefore, desde el antiguo, pero nowdays vituperado análisis rojillo, hay que carcomer, así sea poco a poco, sus astronómicas ganancias, porque las grandes empresas transnacionales, siguen siendo los mayores emisores de contaminantes, aún por sobre los automóbiles -intento que lo anterior sea contundente e irrefutable.

_ ¿No crees que exageras un poquito, Marco? -me dice mi cuaderno mirándome como si juera de un planeta lejano al nuestro.

_ Es fácil, carnal. Paréntesis... chécate, vienen de nueX las campañas presidenciales en los "esteits", el candidato de la propaganda, y por lo tanto, del billete, va a la reelección. ¿Pronóstico? Ganará quien sea más efectivo en el cociente dólar invertido/impacto mediático; right, Hillary? Fuera de todo eso, nothing really changes, contrario a lo que piensas no es dentro de La Casa Blanca desde donde se diseñan los tratados comerciales, políticas monetarias y fiscales, estrategias de desarrollo comunitario y, en última instancia, invasiones extranjeras. ¡Ah! Paréntesis del paréntesis, ahora que nuestros políticos saben que, "they are not alone" dentro de la Embajada de las Barras y las Estrellas en nuestra capirucha, el líder del movimiento de resistencia civil y pacífica, que nosotros construimos pacientemente desde las grass roots, tendría que responder a varios cuestionamiento$, míos por lo menos.

Cuando llegamos al slide de los "acuerdos globales", seguramente recuerda algo porque me dice mientras apunta a los balazos:

_ Como ya me sé tus teorías del consumidor consciente, el uso de la bicla, y la metáfora del pozole en la kermesse, ¿qué más tiene hoy, compadre?

_ Qué bueno lo preguntó camarada, porque siempre hay algo nuevo en esta tiendita. Now, imaginemos que existe en alguna colonia no tan favorecida una asociación de colonos, la cual todavía se preocupa por mejorar el lamentable estado del vecindario. En esta ocasión, todos juntos han identificado ya la necesidad de pavimentar sus calles, pero contrario a la corriente desean utilizar adoquín en lugar de concreto, porque algun excéntrico presente sugirió que eso permitiría la filtración del agua de lluvia, y por ende la recarga de sus acuíferos (una idea que alguna vez uno de sus empleados y yo, nos dimos cuenta que compartíamos sin haberla platicado nunca antes, pero de la que ninguno ha registrado sus derechos todavía), de los que se benefician con el suministro de agua con los pozos del barrio. Pá no hacértela larga aprueban la decisión conjunta en asamblea y nombran un comité encargado de recaudar los fondos y llevarlo a la realidad. Well, pues el dichoso comité, que según esto, está formado por las mentes más brillantes de por ahí, nomás no da color en organizar al pueblo y aterrizar el proyecto, mientras el tiempo pasa y las calles de la colonia empeoran. Pues más o menos, después de haberle explicado lo del fondo verde y el mercado de los bonos de carbono, es en lo que -casi apuesto- terminará el último exitoso acuerdo que pretende salvar a nuestro planeta, time will tell, buddy; y yo soy muy paciente, indeed.

_ Anything else, folk? -me recomienda mientras dejamos nuestro cubo rumbo a la estación del metro más cercana.

_ Of course, tenga en cuenta compañero que la transición energética no se dará sin recursos económicos, contrario a lo que piensan algunas entidades pro verdes, eso en nuestro país ha de pasar indefectiblemente, aunque a algunos no nos cuadre, por los ingresos petroleros, mientras nos inventamos algo menos contaminante. Una última, hoy escuchaba en la radio los atinados comentarios del bebé Sinclair, y se emocionaba con la actual condición saludable de "nuestro" sistema bancario mexicano -iluso, si de verdad leyera un poquito, entonces sabría lo virtual que son tales ganancias-, en todo caso es una visión muy clasemediera tomar partido por una bronca que no es nuestro, como el de los principales monopolios del país, a truly pleito de vedettes -analogo al que a veces se da en los seminarios científicos-; ¿qué tiene eso que ver con lo que estamos hablando? Pues que el pequeño burgués promedio no ve más allá de sus narices, y compra las aborregadamente las soluciones que se le dan a cucharadas sin cuestionarlas, lo que al final no va a resolver nuestras emergencias ambientales planetarias; he dicho, carnal.





M@RenCadenadO;

Metro Balderas, México, D.F.;

08/04/11.


"... tell my wife I love her very much..."



PREGUNTAS SIN RESPUESTA:


¿De pura chiripada, visitó usted también alguna otra embajada? Ya no digamos las catalogadas como indeseables a saber: Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba sobre todo; pero ya de jodido... ¿plantó su pie sobre las representaciones oficiales de: Sudáfrica, Tailandia, Islandia, los Emiratos Árabes o alguna rising star como la India?

¿Qué objeto tenía la visita, sabiendo que desde entonces hay más margen de maniobra, según entiendo después del fracaso en Irak y otras recientes aventuras bélicas, en cuestión geopolítica?











http://marcosalas.blogspot.com/2011/04/la-servidumbre-intelectual.html
http://creatividadsocialmentecomprometida.blogspot.com/2011/04/riesgos-y-oportunidades.html




Tuesday, April 05, 2011


The war against Libya and the eruption of European imperialism

5 April 2011

The readiness of the European powers to line up almost unanimously behind the imperialist war against Libya is a defining moment in the political life of the continent.

On January 20, 2003, French Foreign Minister Dominique De Villepin said of Iraq, “We believe that military intervention would be the worst solution.” Paris voted against war in the United Nations Security Council.

Together with opposition to the war from Germany, this led to the unedifying spectacle of putative leaders of the antiwar movement amongst “left” groups and the left social democrats hailing Europe as a counterweight to US militarism and even leading chants of “Vive la France!”

In the run-up to the war against Libya, France was in the forefront of demands for military intervention, with the Sarkozy government aligning itself with Britain and Washington against its longtime German ally and publicly denouncing Berlin’s reluctance to back war. With US support, France pushed through UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorising an attack on Libya. On March 10, 2011, France became the first country in the world to recognise the National Transitional Council as Libya’s government. It led the first air strikes on March 19.

France’s particular enmity towards Libya and the Gaddafi regime stretches back to the civil war in Chad and was made worse by the cargo hold bomb that destroyed France’s UTA Flight 772 in 1989—less than a year after the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. This may have played a part in France’s shift to military intervention in Libya.

More fundamentally, however, it is understandable only from the broader motive of eliminating a regime that France views as an obstacle to its historic imperialist ambitions in Africa. Crucially for Paris, as much as Washington, the mass movement against Western-backed dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia was seen as a threat to imperialist influence in North Africa. The war against Libya provides the opportunity to install an outright stooge regime and turn Libya into a base of operations against the threat of socialist revolution throughout the region.

Libya is also seen as setting a precedent for further military interventions, with President Nicolas Sarkozy asserting on March 24 that UN Resolution 1973’s citing of the “responsibility to protect” allowed for further interventions in Africa and the Middle East—beginning with the Ivory Coast. Yesterday, French and UN forces opened fire from helicopters on military camps operated by Ivory Coast incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo. Paris has now sent close to 500 additional troops to reinforce its 1,500-strong military presence in its former colony to ensure the victory of its chosen puppet, Alassane Ouattara.

Similar foreign policy considerations animate other European powers in backing war against Libya.

Washington, through its military might and political influence over the Libyan opposition, intends to beat back the challenge to its domination from both China and the European powers. Prior to the war, US economic influence in Libya was minimal. Italy was Tripoli’s major trading partner, followed by Germany and China.

After the war, the National Transitional Council will be called on to ensure that a new balance is established. But most European powers have nevertheless signed on for a military campaign under US leadership in the hope of not being squeezed out of the division of the spoils of war, and because they, like France, have an overriding interest in the precedent set for similar colonial interventions.

The exception of Germany is not simply a continuation of its position in 2003. In the intervening years, Berlin has pursued a marked orientation towards new alliances that strengthen its position against the US.

Germany abstained on UN Security Council Resolution 1973 alongside Brazil, Russia, India and China—known as the BRICs—and against its NATO allies. Germany has, in fact, been seeking closer relations with Russia for years, on which it relies for its gas supplies. German trade with China is in excess of $100 billion a year.

Berlin may believe that its economic influence in North Africa and the Middle East is the best means of projecting Germany’s global interests, but like its European counterparts it must inevitably face up to the gap between such ambitions and its lack of military muscle if it is to avoid being sidelined by the US. As in the 1930s, mounting geopolitical tensions lead inevitably towards European rearmament.

What accounts for this renewed campaign of imperialist domination?

The financial crash of 2008, which wiped out trillions in paper capital assets, has proved to be a turning point in the fortunes of world capitalism, raising antagonisms between the major powers to a new intensity.

The crash was the culmination of a protracted process in which the US was transformed from the premier world economic power and guarantor of capitalist stability into the leading debtor nation and the chief source of economic and political instability on the world arena. It has no way of reversing its decline and meeting the challenge from rising powers, especially China, as well as its traditional rivals in Europe and Japan, other than to deepen the offensive begun in earnest in Iraq to secure its global military hegemony. China, Europe, et al must and will follow suit. This intensified struggle for markets, profits and resources ultimately threatens the eruption of a third world war.

This crisis also dictates a sustained escalation of the class struggle.

Rescuing the banks by emptying government coffers cost the US and European powers trillions. But it was only the beginning of an economic crisis, the likes of which has no equal since the 1930s. After the bailout comes the macroeconomic impact—the onset of recession and the driving up of state debt to 50 percent, 80 percent, a hundred percent and more of GDP.

The only way the bourgeoisie can claw any of this lost revenue back is through the drastic lowering of working-class living standards—a policy of class war at home to accompany imperialist war abroad. Governments throughout Europe are intent on imposing a fundamental realignment of class forces in the interest of the major corporations and the super-rich by means of historically unprecedented austerity drives involving hundreds of billions of euros in cuts, the slashing of wages and a hike in exploitation.

The connection between the new stage in the eruption of imperialist militarism and the turn to class war against working people is reflected in the media’s routine use of military terminology when discussing the austerity measures being imposed.

The March 24 edition of the Economist notes how far this economic blitzkrieg has already gone. It writes:

“The authorities have applied shock and awe in the form of fiscal and monetary stimulus. They have prevented the complete collapse of the financial sector—bankers’ pay has certainly held up just fine. The corporate sector is also doing well… But the benefits of recovery seem to have been distributed almost entirely to the owners of capital rather than workers. In America total real wages have risen by $168 billion since the recovery began, but that has been far outstripped by a $528 billion jump in profits. Dhaval Joshi of BCA Research reckons that this is the first time profits have outperformed wages in absolute terms in 50 years.

“In Germany, profits have increased by €113 billion ($159 billion) since the start of the recovery, and employee pay has risen by just €36 billion. Things look even worse for workers in Britain, where profits have risen by £14 billion ($22.7 billion) but aggregate real wages have fallen by £2 billion… labour’s share has been in decline across the OECD since 1980. The gap has been particularly marked in America: productivity rose by 83 percent between 1973 and 2007, but male median real wages rose by just 5 percent.”

This is only the beginning of what the ruling elite has in mind.

The attacks levelled against workers will deepen, even as crisis-ridden regimes such as Sarkozy’s in France or the Conservative-led coalition in Britain utilise flag-waving over Libya as a means of diverting attention from their domestic agenda.

The working class must formulate its own response to this fundamental political shift. Just as the bourgeoisie’s foreign and domestic policy is dictated by the global interests of the major corporations and the super-rich elite, so too must workers elaborate their own unified international strategy.

Opposition to war cannot be confined to pacifist appeals to either governments or the United Nations, under whose imprimatur the war against Libya is being waged. Neither can a stand against war be expected from any section of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. Like the struggle to defend jobs and services, the fight against war requires the waging of the class struggle by the workers themselves.

The only viable answer to imperialist war is the independent political mobilisation of the working class in the struggle to replace the rule of capital with a system based upon social equality and genuine democracy. It means workers setting out to take power into their own hands, linking opposition to war with a struggle for decent jobs, social services, health care and education for all, to be paid for through the redistribution of wealth from the ruling elite to working people—the expropriation of the corporate and financial oligopolies and their conversion into democratically-controlled public enterprises.

The fundamental principle of all advanced workers and youth must be the international unity of the working class in the struggle against the common enemy—imperialism. The realisation of this unity proceeds through the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International as the new revolutionary leadership of the international working class.

Chris Marsden

Neo-Ottomans discover new Middle East

By M K Bhadrakumar

To emphasize commonalities and to marginalize differences is the overall drift of diplomacy in inter-state relationships. But there could also be extraordinary times when good diplomacy needs to accentuate differences in a relationship characterized by growing commonalities.

Turkish diplomacy focused during the recent years on building up "zero-problem" relationships with Iran and Syria. But even as stunning results have begun appearing, a need has arisen for Ankara to mark a certain distance from its neighbors. The Arab revolt threatens to bring to the surface new templates of regional rivalry.

The Middle East was the arena where the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry played out for over half a millennia all the way up to the beginning of the 20th century. The prospect of the birth of a New Middle East finds the two regional powers jockeying for leadership. Arguably, there are third parties - Western powers on the whole and some among Arabs - who may actually hope to gain out from a replay of the historical rivalry in the contemporary regional setting, which by common reckoning is working to the advantage of Iran's rise.

Unfinished business in Gaza
The alacrity with which Turkey filed a report to the United Nations in New York regarding its seizure of a cache of weapons from a transiting Iranian aircraft en route to Syria on March 21 and the attendant media "leaks" - all this happening in a fast-forward mode within the week - underscores an interplay of regional rivalries.

Indeed, Turkey acted as a responsible member of the international community when it apprehended the Iranian aircraft violating the United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran - although the "prohibited military items" ferried across to Aleppo in Syria consisted of just 60 Kalashnikov rifles, 14 machine guns, 8,000 rounds of ammunition and 2,000 mortar shells.

What matters is that Colombia, which is a staunch ally of the United States and heads the Iran sanctions committee, promptly told the Security Council that the incident is a "matter of serious concern" and Western diplomats rushed to comment that the episode "reflected positively on Turkey".

An element of discord has indeed appeared in Turkish-Iranian-Syrian ties, which had been on a steady upward curve. The issue also likely involves Hezbollah and (or) Hamas, and we may not have heard the last word. Yesterday, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said ominously that an all-out war against the Gaza Strip is inevitable.

To quote Olmert, "If there's one thing I regret - it's that we didn't finish the job back then - we cannot avoid the need to complete the job. Israel cannot accept the presence of a terror entity in Gaza, which threatens the citizens of Israel, without taking action. Not random action, but controlled, precise and organized action with enough force to bring a change to the reality in Gaza."

Turks are some of the oldest practitioners of modern diplomacy. They know tensions are building up in Syria, and Ankara has taken a prescriptive approach toward Damascus by openly and repeatedly calling on President Bashar Assad to reform. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke to Assad twice. President Abdullah Gul reiterated Turkey's call for reforms within a day of Assad's address on Wednesday where he said the Syrian protests were the result of a "foreign plot".

Gul used uncharacteristically strong language: "Whatever needs [to be done] should be done. There can be no closed regime on the Mediterranean coast. Assad is aware of this, too ... We are sharing our experiences with him and we do not want chaos in Syria." Gul's adviser Ersat Hurmuzlu demanded: "Waiting for the protests to end to make reforms is a wrong approach. Necessary reforms should be made now, not later. Leaders should be brave ... It would be an easy transformation if the Syrian administration can make significant reforms on human rights and democracy and find solutions in the struggle against corruption."

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Reuters: "It is like Eastern Europe in the late 1990s ... Those who try to prevent this process will face more difficulties like in Libya ... We don't have any evidence [of a "foreign plot"] ... We're supporting reforms and democratization [in Syria] but it should be a peaceful transformation, not through violence, attacks against civilians or by trying to keep the status quo or by creating instability."

Marked shift in attitudes
The sudden Turkish belligerence toward Syria has a complex backdrop. No Arab state was more anti-Turkish than Ba'athist Syria. In the Syrian folklore, Ottomans are cast as villains, and just below the surface lies a territorial dispute dating back to 1939 when Turks annexed Hatay province from Syria. This is also where the hidden meaning of the Turkish seizure of Iranian aircraft carrying weapons en route to Syria probably lies.

Again, Turkey has been reaching out to Hezbollah and Hamas, bypassing Syria's (and Iran's) claim to be their interlocutor, in an effort to enhance its regional credentials and burnish its standing with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states.

The GCC states, on their part, regard it a good thing that Ankara is willing to shoot across Tehran's bow. Unlike the case with Iran, whose objectives vis-a-vis Hezbollah and Hamas are viewed in zero-sum terms by Saudi Arabia, Turkey's efforts to advance its political status are not perceived as aimed at threatening or marginalizing Riyadh's interests.

Therefore, the visit by the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal to Ankara last week assumes great significance. The Saudis have been apprehensive about the flowering of Turkish-Iranian ties. Riyadh is deeply concerned that Tehran may turn out to be the real beneficiary of the current turmoil in the Middle East.

The Saudis see that only Turkey can act as a counterweight to Iran in the emergent scenario where Egypt is in a shambles and US regional policies are in disarray. But at the same time, Saudis were disenchanted that Erdogan's ebullient "Third Worldism" was becoming too radical whereas in the end everything in the New Middle East ought to come down to sectarianism - Turkey is Sunni (and Salafi), so is Saudi Arabia, but Iran is Shi'ite.

Conceivably, Faisal reminded the Turkish leadership - Gul lived in Jeddah for eight years and knows how the Saudi mind works - that amidst the euphoria of the Arab revolt for democratization, it shouldn't be forgotten that, at the end of the day, through the Ottoman era Arabs preferred Sublime Porte (the open court of the sultan) to Persian hegemony. But Turkey doesn't need to be particularly reminded of that. The Ottomans had a thorough grasp of sectarianism in the Muslim Middle East and they played up confessional differences, encouraged sectarianism and propped up minorities with great skill and aplomb. Anyway, there has been a marked shift in the Turkish attitudes since Faisal flew back home from Ankara.

A bullish, proactive mood
Turkey seems to weigh in that with the dramatic decline in the US' influence and profile, the Middle East is returning to its historical divides and there is a flock waiting to be led despite Iran's manifest desire to surge. Turkey also factors in that the returns for carrying the burden of leadership in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region promise to be fabulous - wealth, influence, power and glory. At its most audacious level, Turkey can even aspire to be an intermediary between its Arab "wards" and the West, which has been ignoring it.

Thus, while on the one hand, Ankara has brazenly intruded into the Iran-Syrian alliance and is dictating to Damascus to come back into the Sunni Arab fold (which the Alawaite regime cannot easily do), on the other hand, Davutoglu is heading for Manama next week to "see the situation on the ground" and follow up on the consultations he has had with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have been alleging an Iranian hand behind the Shi'ite uprising in Bahrain.

Davutoglu said, "An escalation of tension in Bahrain may create an escalation of tension in the Gulf." In sharp contrast with the Iranian stance, Turkey does not object to the Saudi intervention in Bahrain. (Initially it did, but no longer.)

Turkey also appreciates that the GCC is funding Bahrain to help it carry out reforms. Turkey feels that the GCC (read Saudi Arabia) should solve the problems within its region. As Hurmuzlu put it, "They [GCC states] should not seek solutions outside the region by delegating to powerful countries as sub-contractors."

Davutoglu faces a tough challenge to navigate between the Saudi and Iranian interests in Bahrain. It is highly unlikely that Tehran will be pleased with the sight of the Turkish diplomat wading into its Shi'ite backyard.

Again, the Turkish position on the situation in Yemen ("quite critical") is close to Saudi Arabia's and diverges from Iran's. Turkey agrees with Saudi Arabia that the priority should be to keep Yemen united and to avoid sectarian conflict. Turkey is only guardedly supportive of change of leadership in Yemen.

How realistic are Turkey's neo-Ottoman ambitions? The hard reality is that despite sustained efforts Turkey is far from becoming a dominant factor in the Middle East. On the contrary, Turkey's proactive mode might end up generating anxiety in the region that it is intervening in intra-Arab politics.

However, Turkey is in a bullish mood. Its economy grew by 8.9% in 2010 and its gross domestic product per capita has just burst through the magical US$10,000 threshold. And it is convinced of its credentials as a shining example of democracy for Muslim nations anywhere.

But Turks don't care to look at life from others' perspective. In the Arab memory, Ottoman legacy consists in a mere clutch of habits that Turks left behind and nothing more - coffee and waterpipes, or baksheesh (bribery) and the khazouk (a crude metal spike used by Ottomans to torture Arab subjects).

Turkey's Sunni Arab co-religionists resent the Ottoman era. No one speaks Turkish in the Arab world and everyone is keen to learn English or French. Simply put, there is a mountain load to forget in half a millennium of history. Erdogan is a regional celebrity, but then it is largely a matter of the sultan's personal charisma.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)



Wikileaks en La Jornada

EU no veía mal la llegada de López Obrador a Los Pinos

El embajador Garza consideraba que AMLO estaba en camino de construir un gobierno fuerte

Washington tendrá que jugar un papel determinante en sus programas, recomendaba el diplomático

Foto
Andrés Manuel López Obrador acudió este lunes a la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional a presentar su plan de gobierno. En 2006 fue considerado por la embajada de EU un político experimentado, cordial y modesto
Foto La Jornada
Periódico La Jornada
Martes 5 de abril de 2011, p. 2

La impresión que causó el candidato de la coalición Por el Bien de Todos, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, en su primer encuentro cara a cara con el embajador de Estados Unidos, Anthony Garza, y sus asesores, el 23 de enero de 2006 –casi al arranque de la campaña electoral–, parecía haber conjurado el temor del gobierno de George W. Bush de estar confrontando a un político que, de llegar a la presidencia, sumaría un gobierno de izquierda más en Latinoamérica. Esta percepción moderada se sintetiza en el título del despacho que los diplomáticos enviaron a Washington: AMLO, Apocalypse not.

Después de conversar extensamente con el candidato de la izquierda sobre cómo sería el papel de México en la arena internacional bajo su mando, el republicano Garza concluye que López Obrador está trabajando y poniendo las piezas en el lugar correcto para construir un gobierno fuerte, según el cable 06MEXICO505, filtrado por Wikileaks. Sin embargo, advierte que para que su gobierno sea efectivo va a necesitar que Estados Unidos juegue un papel determinante en sus programas.

Al día siguiente de este desayuno, los asesores políticos de la embajada invitaron al coordinador de la campaña de AMLO, Jesús Ortega, quien les dio la impresión de no estar al tanto de todos los asuntos importantes relacionados con la agenda lopezobradorista. Ni siquiera tenía idea de que su candidato se había reunido la víspera con el embajador. Después de una extensa plática, los estadunidenses dudan: No sabemos si será un buen contacto para mantener informada a la embajada sobre el curso de la campaña, según el cable 06MEXICO536. Piensan que a la luz de las divisiones dentro del partido, el nombramiento de Ortega como coordinador de campaña fue para aplacar a su fracción.

A raíz del primer encuentro, los estadunidenses califican a López Obrador de modesto, cordial y político experimentado, a pesar de su visión divergente de la del gobierno de George W. Bush.

Esta opinión cambiará sustantivamente en las siguientes semanas, en la medida en que la campaña avanza y las definiciones de AMLO se distinguen claramente del modelo neoliberal que los conservadores estadunidenses defienden como una doctrina inamovible.

Al desayuno AMLO llegó puntual, acompañado por sus asesores José María Pérez Gay y Rogelio Ramírez de la O. Por la contraparte estadunidense estuvieron los consejeros político y económico de la misión y el director de la Agencia de Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo Internacional (USAID, por sus siglas en inglés).

Así fue como interpretaron sus palabras: AMLO dijo que su diplomacia sería prudente, consistente con los logros internos. Interrogado por Garza sobre su posición frente a Cuba, Venezuela y Bolivia (temas que generalmente López Obrador no aborda en público), el candidato explicó que cada caso es distinto, que no existe una sola izquierda y que no había que olvidar que también Brasil, Argentina y Chile (en ese momento) eran gobiernos de izquierda. Ante la insistencia del embajador de que México, por su tamaño y su economía, tenía que ser fiel de la balanza en la región latinoamericana, López Obrador aclaró que no le interesaba encabezar iniciativas ni sumarse a los bloques regionales, específicamente los bloques anti Estados Unidos o anti Mercosur. Concluyó aclarando que para él no resulta especialmente placentero viajar y que no conocía en persona a Hugo Chávez, a Fidel Castro ni a Evo Morales.

En el tema de la seguridad, Garza señaló de entrada que la próxima administración en México debía dar prioridad al combate al narcotráfico y al terrorismo. López Obrador explicó su estrategia de dos carriles. Primero, una reforma constitucional para otorgar al Ejército más poder y autoridad en la lucha contra los traficantes de drogas porque –dijo, según este reporte– los militares son menos corruptos que las demás agencias de seguridad y pueden ser más efectivos. Esto, añadió, también acotaría la influencia de la PGR, demasiado corrupta, según la redacción del cable.

Segundo, AMLO se proponía una restructuración total del aparato de justicia, consolidando todas las agencias, incluida la policía federal y el Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, teniendo como eje a la Secretaría de Gobernación.

Sobre migración, expuso que la mejor forma de contener el flujo de trabajadores hacia el norte era promover el desarrollo de proyectos productivos e infraestructura en gran escala, por parte del sector privado con cooperación estadunidense, especialmente en el sureste, donde se originan las nuevas oleadas de migrantes.

En su comentario final, la embajada estima que si bien AMLO está dando los pasos correctos hacia la conformación de un gobierno fuerte, “va a necesitar que Estados Unidos juegue un papel relevante.

Él cree que crear empleos en México para contener la migración será una rama de olivo para llegar a Estados Unidos a negociar la regularización o amnistía de los mexicanos que ya están ahí.

Foto
El cierre de campaña de AMLO en el Zócalo de la ciudad de México, el miércoles 28 de junio de 2006, reunió a una multitud y echó por tierra el pronóstico de diplomáticos estadunidenses de que se quedaría sin gasolina antes de las eleccionesFoto Alfredo Domínguez

Los funcionarios de la embajada volvieron a sacar a colación el tema de negociar la legalización de los migrantes indocumentados al día siguiente con Jesús Ortega. “Le explicamos –dice el cable correspondiente– que la inmigración y la regularización son asuntos internos (de Estados Unidos) y no son negociables. Le propusimos que sería mejor que México se centre en controlar su frontera y en utilizar todas las posibilidades de la migración legal. Aparentemente Ortega entendió y se comprometió a debatir el tema con los suyos.”

No transcurre ni un mes cuando ya los consejeros de la embajada estadunidense se empiezan a poner nerviosos por el contenido de la campaña del candidato, que en febrero de 2006 supera por diez puntos a todos sus contrincantes.

Parece que se está inclinando por una retórica populista, advierte un consejero (cable 06MEXICO953) cuando López Obrador descalifica las reformas fiscal y energética del foxismo señalando que son dictadas por los organismos financieros internacionales y de efectos regresivos. El candidato de la izquierda denuncia que la reforma fiscal favorecerá a los grandes evasores y la reforma energética pretende privatizar el sector. “Habrá que ver más adelante –dice el comentario del cable– si éste es el verdadero AMLO o si se trata solamente de una táctica de campaña para consolidar su base popular.”

Al mes del primer y último encuentro AMLO-Garza, otro despacho (06MEXICO680) se aboca a analizar una terna de posibles integrantes del gabinete de AMLO, mencionados por el propio candidato en un programa de televisión. Ninguno de ellos es radical, dicen los analistas de la embajada con relación a Rogelio Ramírez de la O (quienes puede tender puentes con el sector privado, que desconfía del tabasqueño), Juan Ramón de la Fuente y José María Pérez Gay, un crítico consistente del neoliberalismo.

En su cable de marzo (06MEXICO1311) la embajada reconoce que López Obrador tiene un apoyo consolidado del electorado, que el entusiasmo de las multitudes en los mítines no decrece y que lo más probable es que los priístas decepcionados virarán su voto hacia el PRD, no hacia el PAN. La apuesta de EU es que, como comentan algunos informantes, a un ritmo de cinco mítines al día AMLO se quede sin gasolina antes de las elecciones.

Lo que termina por espolear la desconfianza estadunidense fue la iniciativa de Porfirio Muñoz Ledo que creó el Consejo Consultivo para un Proyecto Alternativo de Nación. La embajada sigue con atención todas sus intervenciones y opina que Muñoz Ledo logró reunir a los académicos más izquierdistas del PRD y el PRI. Sus propuestas son una receta para el desastre, escriben en el cable 06MEXICO1476. Pero no creemos que AMLO vaya a apoyar las ideas más radicales.

El confiable Ramírez de la O les asegura, en público y en privado, que su candidato conducirá la economía responsablemente. Y en abril (cable 06MEXICO1797), cuando López Obrador declara que el muy respetado –según los estadunidenses– gobernador del Banco de México Guillermo Ortiz debería renunciar, el mismo Ramírez tranquiliza a sus interlocutores de la embajada y les dice que solamente es retórica de campaña.

En mayo, ya en la recta final de las campañas, la embajada envía a Washington un muy detallado informe sobre los planes de la tercera etapa de la carrera lopezobradorista con datos de informantes del interior de la campaña. El cable 06MEXICO2702 indica que López Obrador abandonará los municipios aislados y pobres, donde se siente cómodo, para embarcarse en actos de mayor calado en los centros urbanos, para tratar de conquistar el voto de la clase media. Frente a lo que reconoce como estrategia exitosa del PAN –la propaganda negra que machacaba diciendo que AMLO era un peligro para México–, los asesores políticos comentan que el tabasqueño jugará el papel de víctima ante sus inescrupulosos opositores, porque es una táctica que le ha funcionado en el pasado, por ejemplo, durante el desafuero. Los informantes del PRD mantienen al tanto al personal de la embajada sobre la rivalidad de Muñoz Ledo y Manuel Camacho Solís, quienes intentaron bombardear la posición del posible futuro canciller Pérez Gay. Pero por el momento su lugar parece seguro, concluyen.

Enlaces:

Esta nota con vínculos a los cables

Los cables sobre México en WikiLeaks

Sitio especial de La Jornada sobre WikiLeaks


How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs

As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored



Mexico drugs

A soldier guards marijuana that is being incinerated in Tijuana, Mexico. Photograph: Guillermo Arias/AP

On 10 April 2006, a DC-9 jet landed in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, on the Gulf of Mexico, as the sun was setting. Mexican soldiers, waiting to intercept it, found 128 cases packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100m. But something else – more important and far-reaching – was discovered in the paper trail behind the purchase of the plane by the Sinaloa narco-trafficking cartel.

During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.

The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller's cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war.

Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year's "deferred prosecution" has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.

More shocking, and more important, the bank was sanctioned for failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4bn – a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico's gross national product – into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business.

"Wachovia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations," said Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor. Yet the total fine was less than 2% of the bank's $12.3bn profit for 2009. On 24 March 2010, Wells Fargo stock traded at $30.86 – up 1% on the week of the court settlement.

The conclusion to the case was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the "legal" banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer.

At the height of the 2008 banking crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said he had evidence to suggest the proceeds from drugs and crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to banks on the brink of collapse. "Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade," he said. "There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."

Wachovia was acquired by Wells Fargo during the 2008 crash, just as Wells Fargo became a beneficiary of $25bn in taxpayers' money. Wachovia's prosecutors were clear, however, that there was no suggestion Wells Fargo had behaved improperly; it had co-operated fully with the investigation. Mexico is the US's third largest international trading partner and Wachovia was understandably interested in this volume of legitimate trade.

José Luis Marmolejo, who prosecuted those running one of the casas de cambio at the Mexican end, said: "Wachovia handled all the transfers. They never reported any as suspicious."

"As early as 2004, Wachovia understood the risk," the bank admitted in the statement of settlement with the federal government, but, "despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in the business". There is, of course, the legitimate use of CDCs as a way into the Hispanic market. In 2005 the World Bank said that Mexico was receiving $8.1bn in remittances.

During research into the Wachovia Mexican case, the Observer obtained documents previously provided to financial regulators. It emerged that the alarm that was ignored came from, among other places, London, as a result of the diligence of one of the most important whistleblowers of our time. A man who, in a series of interviews with the Observer, adds detail to the documents, laying bare the story of how Wachovia was at the centre of one of the world's biggest money-laundering operations.

Martin Woods, a Liverpudlian in his mid-40s, joined the London office of Wachovia Bank in February 2005 as a senior anti-money laundering officer. He had previously served with the Metropolitan police drug squad. As a detective he joined the money-laundering investigation team of the National Crime Squad, where he worked on the British end of the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal in the late 1990s.

Woods talks like a police officer – in the best sense of the word: punctilious, exact, with a roguish humour, but moral at the core. He was an ideal appointment for any bank eager to operate a diligent and effective risk management policy against the lucrative scourge of high finance: laundering, knowing or otherwise, the vast proceeds of criminality, tax-evasion, and dealing in arms and drugs.

Woods had a police officer's eye and a police officer's instincts – not those of a banker. And this influenced not only his methods, but his mentality. "I think that a lot of things matter more than money – and that marks you out in a culture which appears to prevail in many of the banks in the world," he says.

Woods was set apart by his modus operandi. His speciality, he explains, was his application of a "know your client", or KYC, policing strategy to identifying dirty money. "KYC is a fundamental approach to anti-money laundering, going after tax evasion or counter-terrorist financing. Who are your clients? Is the documentation right? Good, responsible banking involved always knowing your customer and it still does."

When he looked at Wachovia, the first thing Woods noticed was a deficiency in KYC information. And among his first reports to his superiors at the bank's headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, were observations on a shortfall in KYC at Wachovia's operation in London, which he set about correcting, while at the same time implementing what was known as an enhanced transaction monitoring programme, gathering more information on clients whose money came through the bank's offices in the City, in sterling or euros. By August 2006, Woods had identified a number of suspicious transactions relating to casas de cambio customers in Mexico.

Primarily, these involved deposits of traveller's cheques in euros. They had sequential numbers and deposited larger amounts of money than any innocent travelling person would need, with inadequate or no KYC information on them and what seemed to a trained eye to be dubious signatures. "It was basic work," he says. "They didn't answer the obvious questions: 'Is the transaction real, or does it look synthetic? Does the traveller's cheque meet the protocols? Is it all there, and if not, why not?'"

Woods discussed the matter with Wachovia's global head of anti-money laundering for correspondent banking, who believed the cheques could signify tax evasion. He then undertook what banks call a "look back" at previous transactions and saw fit to submit a series of SARs, or suspicious activity reports, to the authorities in the UK and his superiors in Charlotte, urging the blocking of named parties and large series of sequentially numbered traveller's cheques from Mexico. He issued a number of SARs in 2006, of which 50 related to the casas de cambio in Mexico. To his amazement, the response from Wachovia's Miami office, the centre for Latin American business, was anything but supportive – he felt it was quite the reverse.

As it turned out, however, Woods was on the right track. Wachovia's business in Mexico was coming under closer and closer scrutiny by US federal law enforcement. Wachovia was issued with a number of subpoenas for information on its Mexican operation. Woods has subsequently been informed that Wachovia had six or seven thousand subpoenas. He says this was "An absurd number. So at what point does someone at the highest level not get the feeling that something is very, very wrong?"

In April and May 2007, Wachovia – as a result of increasing interest and pressure from the US attorney's office – began to close its relationship with some of the casas de cambio. But rather than launch an internal investigation into Woods's alerts over Mexico, Woods claims Wachovia hung its own money-laundering expert out to dry. The records show that during 2007 Woods "continued to submit more SARs related to the casas de cambio".

In July 2007, all of Wachovia's remaining 10 Mexican casa de cambio clients operating through London suddenly stopped doing so. Later in 2007, after the investigation of Wachovia was reported in the US financial media, the bank decided to end its remaining relationships with the Mexican casas de cambio globally. By this time, Woods says, he found his personal situation within the bank untenable; while the bank acted on one level to protect itself from the federal investigation into its shortcomings, on another, it rounded on the man who had been among the first to spot them.

On 16 June Woods was told by Wachovia's head of compliance that his latest SAR need not have been filed, that he had no legal requirement to investigate an overseas case and no right of access to documents held overseas from Britain, even if they were held by Wachovia.

Woods's life went into freefall. He went to hospital with a prolapsed disc, reported sick and was told by the bank that he not done so in the appropriate manner, as directed by the employees' handbook. He was off work for three weeks, returning in August 2007 to find a letter from the bank's compliance managing director, which was unrelenting in its tone and words of warning.

The letter addressed itself to what the manager called "specific examples of your failure to perform at an acceptable standard". Woods, on the edge of a breakdown, was put on sick leave by his GP; he was later given psychiatric treatment, enrolled on a stress management course and put on medication.

Late in 2007, Woods attended a function at Scotland Yard where colleagues from the US were being entertained. There, he sought out a representative of the Drug Enforcement Administration and told him about the casas de cambio, the SARs and his employer's reaction. The Federal Reserve and officials of the office of comptroller of currency in Washington DC then "spent a lot of time examining the SARs" that had been sent by Woods to Charlotte from London.

"They got back in touch with me a while afterwards and we began to put the pieces of the jigsaw together," says Woods. What they found was – as Costa says – the tip of the iceberg of what was happening to drug money in the banking industry, but at least it was visible and it had a name: Wachovia.

In June 2005, the DEA, the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service and the US attorney's office in southern Florida began investigating wire transfers from Mexico to the US. They were traced back to correspondent bank accounts held by casas de cambio at Wachovia. The CDC accounts were supervised and managed by a business unit of Wachovia in the bank's Miami offices.

"Through CDCs," said the court document, "persons in Mexico can use hard currency and … wire transfer the value of that currency to US bank accounts to purchase items in the United States or other countries. The nature of the CDC business allows money launderers the opportunity to move drug dollars that are in Mexico into CDCs and ultimately into the US banking system.

"On numerous occasions," say the court papers, "monies were deposited into a CDC by a drug-trafficking organisation. Using false identities, the CDC then wired that money through its Wachovia correspondent bank accounts for the purchase of airplanes for drug-trafficking organisations." The court settlement of 2010 would detail that "nearly $13m went through correspondent bank accounts at Wachovia for the purchase of aircraft to be used in the illegal narcotics trade. From these aircraft, more than 20,000kg of cocaine were seized."

All this occurred despite the fact that Wachovia's office was in Miami, designated by the US government as a "high-intensity money laundering and related financial crime area", and a "high-intensity drug trafficking area". Since the drug cartel war began in 2005, Mexico had been designated a high-risk source of money laundering.

"As early as 2004," the court settlement would read, "Wachovia understood the risk that was associated with doing business with the Mexican CDCs. Wachovia was aware of the general industry warnings. As early as July 2005, Wachovia was aware that other large US banks were exiting the CDC business based on [anti-money laundering] concerns … despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in business."

On 16 March 2010, Douglas Edwards, senior vice-president of Wachovia Bank, put his signature to page 10 of a 25-page settlement, in which the bank admitted its role as outlined by the prosecutors. On page 11, he signed again, as senior vice-president of Wells Fargo. The documents show Wachovia providing three services to 22 CDCs in Mexico: wire transfers, a "bulk cash service" and a "pouch deposit service", to accept "deposit items drawn on US banks, eg cheques and traveller's cheques", as spotted by Woods.

"For the time period of 1 May 2004 through 31 May 2007, Wachovia processed at least $$373.6bn in CDCs, $4.7bn in bulk cash" – a total of more than $378.3bn, a sum that dwarfs the budgets debated by US state and UK local authorities to provide services to citizens.

The document gives a fascinating insight into how the laundering of drug money works. It details how investigators "found readily identifiable evidence of red flags of large-scale money laundering". There were "structured wire transfers" whereby "it was commonplace in the CDC accounts for round-number wire transfers to be made on the same day or in close succession, by the same wire senders, for the … same account".

Over two days, 10 wire transfers by four individuals "went though Wachovia for deposit into an aircraft broker's account. All of the transfers were in round numbers. None of the individuals of business that wired money had any connection to the aircraft or the entity that allegedly owned the aircraft. The investigation has further revealed that the identities of the individuals who sent the money were false and that the business was a shell entity. That plane was subsequently seized with approximately 2,000kg of cocaine on board."

Many of the sequentially numbered traveller's cheques, of the kind dealt with by Woods, contained "unusual markings" or "lacked any legible signature". Also, "many of the CDCs that used Wachovia's bulk cash service sent significantly more cash to Wachovia than what Wachovia had expected. More specifically, many of the CDCs exceeded their monthly activity by at least 50%."

Recognising these "red flags", the US attorney's office in Miami, the IRS and the DEA began investigating Wachovia, later joined by FinCEN, one of the US Treasury's agencies to fight money laundering, while the office of the comptroller of the currency carried out a parallel investigation. The violations they found were, says the document, "serious and systemic and allowed certain Wachovia customers to launder millions of dollars of proceeds from the sale of illegal narcotics through Wachovia accounts over an extended time period. The investigation has identified that at least $110m in drug proceeds were funnelled through the CDC accounts held at Wachovia."

The settlement concludes by discussing Wachovia's "considerable co-operation and remedial actions" since the prosecution was initiated, after the bank was bought by Wells Fargo. "In consideration of Wachovia's remedial actions," concludes the prosecutor, "the United States shall recommend to the court … that prosecution of Wachovia on the information filed … be deferred for a period of 12 months."

But while the federal prosecution proceeded, Woods had remained out in the cold. On Christmas Eve 2008, his lawyers filed tribunal proceedings against Wachovia for bullying and detrimental treatment of a whistleblower. The case was settled in May 2009, by which time Woods felt as though he was "the most toxic person in the bank". Wachovia agreed to pay an undisclosed amount, in return for which Woods left the bank and said he would not make public the terms of the settlement.

After years of tribulation, Woods was finally formally vindicated, though not by Wachovia: a letter arrived from John Dugan, the comptroller of the currency in Washington DC, dated 19 March 2010 – three days after the settlement in Miami. Dugan said he was "writing to personally recognise and express my appreciation for the role you played in the actions brought against Wachovia Bank for violations of the bank secrecy act … Not only did the information that you provided facilitate our investigation, but you demonstrated great personal courage and integrity by speaking up. Without the efforts of individuals like you, actions such as the one taken against Wachovia would not be possible."

The so-called "deferred prosecution" detailed in the Miami document is a form of probation whereby if the bank abides by the law for a year, charges are dropped. So this March the bank was in the clear. The week that the deferred prosecution expired, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo said the parent bank had no comment to make on the documentation pertaining to Woods's case, or his allegations. She added that there was no comment on Sloman's remarks to the court; a provision in the settlement stipulated Wachovia was not allowed to issue public statements that contradicted it.

But the settlement leaves a sour taste in many mouths – and certainly in Woods's. The deferred prosecution is part of this "cop-out all round", he says. "The regulatory authorities do not have to spend any more time on it, and they don't have to push it as far as a criminal trial. They just issue criminal proceedings, and settle. The law enforcement people do what they are supposed to do, but what's the point? All those people dealing with all that money from drug-trafficking and murder, and no one goes to jail?"

One of the foremost figures in the training of anti-money laundering officers is Robert Mazur, lead infiltrator for US law enforcement of the Colombian Medellín cartel during the epic prosecution and collapse of the BCCI banking business in 1991 (his story was made famous by his memoir, The Infiltrator, which became a movie).

Mazur, whose firm Chase and Associates works closely with law enforcement agencies and trains officers for bank anti-money laundering, cast a keen eye over the case against Wachovia, and he says now that "the only thing that will make the banks properly vigilant to what is happening is when they hear the rattle of handcuffs in the boardroom".

Mazur said that "a lot of the law enforcement people were disappointed to see a settlement" between the administration and Wachovia. "But I know there were external circumstances that worked to Wachovia's benefit, not least that the US banking system was on the edge of collapse."

What concerns Mazur is that what law enforcement agencies and politicians hope to achieve against the cartels is limited, and falls short of the obvious attack the US could make in its war on drugs: go after the money. "We're thinking way too small," Mazur says. "I train law enforcement officers, thousands of them every year, and they say to me that if they tried to do half of what I did, they'd be arrested. But I tell them: 'You got to think big. The headlines you will be reading in seven years' time will be the result of the work you begin now.' With BCCI, we had to spend two years setting it up, two years doing undercover work, and another two years getting it to trial. If they want to do something big, like go after the money, that's how long it takes."

But Mazur warns: "If you look at the career ladders of law enforcement, there's no incentive to go after the big money. People move every two to three years. The DEA is focused on drug trafficking rather than money laundering. You get a quicker result that way – they want to get the traffickers and seize their assets. But this is like treating a sick plant by cutting off a few branches – it just grows new ones. Going after the big money is cutting down the plant – it's a harder door to knock on, it's a longer haul, and it won't get you the short-term riches."

The office of the comptroller of the currency is still examining whether individuals in Wachovia are criminally liable. Sources at FinCEN say that a so-called "look-back" is in process, as directed by the settlement and agreed to by Wachovia, into the $378.4bn that was not directly associated with the aircraft purchases and cocaine hauls, but neither was it subject to the proper anti-laundering checks. A FinCEN source says that $20bn already examined appears to have "suspicious origins". But this is just the beginning.

Antonio Maria Costa, who was executive director of the UN's office on drugs and crime from May 2002 to August 2010, charts the history of the contamination of the global banking industry by drug and criminal money since his first initiatives to try to curb it from the European commission during the 1990s. "The connection between organised crime and financial institutions started in the late 1970s, early 1980s," he says, "when the mafia became globalised."

Until then, criminal money had circulated largely in cash, with the authorities making the occasional, spectacular "sting" or haul. During Costa's time as director for economics and finance at the EC in Brussels, from 1987, inroads were made against penetration of banks by criminal laundering, and "criminal money started moving back to cash, out of the financial institutions and banks. Then two things happened: the financial crisis in Russia, after the emergence of the Russian mafia, and the crises of 2003 and 2007-08.

"With these crises," says Costa, "the banking sector was short of liquidity, the banks exposed themselves to the criminal syndicates, who had cash in hand."

Costa questions the readiness of governments and their regulatory structures to challenge this large-scale corruption of the global economy: "Government regulators showed what they were capable of when the issue suddenly changed to laundering money for terrorism – on that, they suddenly became serious and changed their attitude."

Hardly surprising, then, that Wachovia does not appear to be the end of the line. In August 2010, it emerged in quarterly disclosures by HSBC that the US justice department was seeking to fine it for anti-money laundering compliance problems reported to include dealings with Mexico.

"Wachovia had my résumé, they knew who I was," says Woods. "But they did not want to know – their attitude was, 'Why are you doing this?' They should have been on my side, because they were compliance people, not commercial people. But really they were commercial people all along. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the biggest money-laundering scandal of our time.

"These are the proceeds of murder and misery in Mexico, and of drugs sold around the world," he says. "All the law enforcement people wanted to see this come to trial. But no one goes to jail. "What does the settlement do to fight the cartels? Nothing – it doesn't make the job of law enforcement easier and it encourages the cartels and anyone who wants to make money by laundering their blood dollars. Where's the risk? There is none.

"Is it in the interest of the American people to encourage both the drug cartels and the banks in this way? Is it in the interest of the Mexican people? It's simple: if you don't see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 30,000 people killed in Mexico, you're missing the point."

Woods feels unable to rest on his laurels. He tours the world for a consultancy he now runs, Hermes Forensic Solutions, counselling and speaking to banks on the dangers of laundering criminal money, and how to spot and stop it. "New York and London," says Woods, "have become the world's two biggest laundries of criminal and drug money, and offshore tax havens. Not the Cayman Islands, not the Isle of Man or Jersey. The big laundering is right through the City of London and Wall Street.

"After the Wachovia case, no one in the regulatory community has sat down with me and asked, 'What happened?' or 'What can we do to avoid this happening to other banks?' They are not interested. They are the same people who attack the whistleblowers and this is a position the [British] Financial Services Authority at least has adopted on legal advice: it has been advised that the confidentiality of banking and bankers takes primacy over the public information disclosure act. That is how the priorities work: secrecy first, public interest second.

"Meanwhile, the drug industry has two products: money and suffering. On one hand, you have massive profits and enrichment. On the other, you have massive suffering, misery and death. You cannot separate one from the other.

"What happened at Wachovia was symptomatic of the failure of the entire regulatory system to apply the kind of proper governance and adequate risk management which would have prevented not just the laundering of blood money, but the global crisis.


THE ROVING EYE

There's no business like war business

By Pepe Escobar

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here.


Lies, hypocrisy and hidden agendas. This is what United States President Barack Obama did not dwell on when explaining his Libya doctrine to America and the world. The mind boggles with so many black holes engulfing this splendid little war that is not a war (a "time-limited, scope-limited military action", as per the White House) - compounded with the inability of progressive thinking to condemn, at the same time, the ruthlessness of the Muammar Gaddafi regime and the Anglo-French-American

"humanitarian" bombing.

United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 has worked like a Trojan horse, allowing the Anglo-French-American consortium - and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) - to become the UN's air force in its support of an armed uprising. Apart from having nothing to do with protecting civilians, this arrangement is absolutely illegal in terms of international law. The inbuilt endgame, as even malnourished African kids know by now, but has never been acknowledged, is regime change.

Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard of Canada, NATO's commander for Libya, may insist all he wants that the mission is purely designed to protect civilians. Yet those "innocent civilians" operating tanks and firing Kalashnikovs as part of a rag-tag wild bunch are in fact soldiers in a civil war - and the focus should be on whether NATO from now on will remain their air force, following the steps of the Anglo-French-American consortium. Incidentally, the "coalition of the wiling" fighting Libya consists of only 12 NATO members (out of 28) plus Qatar. This has absolutely nothing to do with an "international community".

The full verdict on the UN-mandated no-fly zone will have to wait for the emergence of a "rebel" government and the end of the civil war (if it ends soon). Then it will be possible to analyze how Tomahawking and bombing was ever justified; why civilians in Cyrenaica were "protected" while those in Tripoli were Tomahawked; what sort of "rebel" motley crew was "saved"; whether this whole thing was legal in the first place; how the resolution was a cover for regime change; how the love affair between the Libyan "revolutionaries" and the West may end in bloody divorce (remember Afghanistan); and which Western players stand to immensely profit from the wealth of a new, unified (or balkanized) Libya.

For the moment at least, it's quite easy to identify the profiteers.

The Pentagon
Pentagon supremo Robert Gates said this weekend, with a straight face, there are only three repressive regimes in the whole Middle East: Iran, Syria and Libya. The Pentagon is taking out the weak link - Libya. The others were always key features of the neo-conservative take-out/evil list. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, etc are model democracies.

As for this "now you see it, now you don't" war, the Pentagon is managing to fight it not once, but twice. It started with Africom - established under the George W Bush administration, beefed up under Obama, and rejected by scores of African governments, scholars and human rights organizations. Now the war is transitioning to NATO, which is essentially Pentagon rule over its European minions.

This is Africom's first African war, conducted up to now by General Carter Ham out of his headquarters in un-African Stuttgart. Africom, as Horace Campbell, professor of African American studies and political science at Syracuse University puts it, is a scam; "fundamentally a front for US military contractors like Dyncorp, MPRI and KBR operating in Africa. US military planners who benefit from the revolving door of privatization of warfare are delighted by the opportunity to give Africom credibility under the facade of the Libyan intervention."

Africom's Tomahawks also hit - metaphorically - the African Union (AU), which, unlike the Arab League, cannot be easily bought by the West. The Arab Gulf petro-monarchies all cheered the bombing - but not Egypt and Tunisia. Only five African countries are not subordinated to Africom; Libya is one of them, along with Sudan, Ivory Coast, Eritrea and Zimbabwe.

NATO
NATO's master plan is to rule the Mediterranean as a NATO lake. Under these "optics" (Pentagon speak) the Mediterranean is infinitely more important nowadays as a theater of war than AfPak.

There are only three out of 20 nations on or in the Mediterranean that are not full members of NATO or allied with its "partnership" programs: Libya, Lebanon and Syria. Make no mistake; Syria is next. Lebanon is already under a NATO blockade since 2006. Now a blockade also applies to Libya. The US - via NATO - is just about to square the circle.

Saudi Arabia
What a deal. King Abdullah gets rid of his eternal foe Gaddafi. The House of Saud - in trademark abject fashion - bends over backwards for the West's benefit. The attention of world public opinion is diverted from the Saudis invading Bahrain to smash a legitimate, peaceful, pro-democracy protest movement.

The House of Saud sold the fiction that "the Arab League" as a whole voted for a no-fly zone. That is a lie; out of 22 members, only 11 were present at the vote; six are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), of which Saudi Arabia is the top dog. The House of Saud just needed to twist the arms of three more. Syria and Algeria were against it. Translation; only nine out of 22 Arab countries voted for the no-fly zone.

Now Saudi Arabia can even order GCC head Abdulrahman al-Attiyah to say, with a straight face, "the Libyan system has lost its legitimacy." As for the "legitimate" House of Saud and the al-Khalifas in Bahrain, someone should induct them into the Humanitarian Hall of Fame.

Qatar
The hosts of the 2022 soccer World Cup sure know how to clinch a deal. Their Mirages are helping to bomb Libya while Doha gets ready to market eastern Libya oil. Qatar promptly became the first Arab nation to recognize the Libyan "rebels" as the only legitimate government of the country only one day after securing the oil marketing deal.

The 'rebels'
All the worthy democratic aspirations of the Libyan youth movement notwithstanding, the most organized opposition group happens to be the National Front for the Salvation of Libya - financed for years by the House of Saud, the CIA and French intelligence. The rebel "Interim Transitional National Council" is little else than the good ol' National Front, plus a few military defectors. This is the elite of the "innocent civilians" the "coalition" is "protecting".

Right on cue, the "Interim Transitional National Council" has got a new finance minister, US-educated economist Ali Tarhouni. He disclosed that a bunch of Western countries gave them credit backed by Libya's sovereign fund, and the British allowed them to access $1.1 billion of Gaddafi's funds. This means the Anglo-French-American consortium - and now NATO - will only pay for the bombs. As war scams go this one is priceless; the West uses Libya's own cash to finance a bunch of opportunists Libyan rebels to fight the Libyan government. And on top of it the Americans, the Brits and the French feel the love for all that bombing. Neo-cons must be kicking themselves; why couldn't former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz come up with something like this for Iraq 2003?

The French
Oh la la, this could be material for a Proustian novel. The top spring collection in Paris catwalks is the President Nicolas Sarkozy fashion show - a no-fly zone model with Mirage/Rafale air strike accessories. This fashion show was masterminded by Nouri Mesmari, Gaddafi's chief of protocol, who defected to France in October 2010. The Italian secret service leaked to selected media outlets how he did it. The role of the DGSE, the French secret service, has been more or less explained on paid website Maghreb Confidential.

Essentially, the Benghazi revolt coq au vin had been simmering since November 2010. The cooks were Mesmari, air force colonel Abdullah Gehani, and the French secret service. Mesmari was called "Libyan WikiLeak", because he spilled over virtually every one of Gaddafi's military secrets. Sarkozy loved it - furious because Gaddafi had cancelled juicy contracts to buy Rafales (to replace his Mirages now being bombed) and French-built nuclear power plants.

That explains why Sarkozy has been so gung ho into posing as the new Arab liberator, was the first leader of a European power to recognize the "rebels" (to the disgust of many at the European Union), and was the first to bomb Gaddafi's forces.

This busts open the role of shameless self-promoting philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, who's now frantically milking in the world's media that he phoned Sarkozy from Benghazi and awakened his humanitarian streak. Either Levy is a patsy, or a convenient "intellectual" cherry added to the already-prepared bombing cake.

Terminator Sarkozy is unstoppable. He has just warned every single Arab ruler that they face Libya-style bombing if they crack down on protesters. He even said that the Ivory Coast was "next". Bahrain and Yemen, of course, are exempt. As for the US, it is once again supporting a military coup (it didn't work with Omar "Sheikh al-Torture" Suleiman in Egypt; maybe it will work in Libya).

Al-Qaeda
The oh so convenient bogeyman resurfaces. The Anglo-French-American consortium - and now NATO - are (again) fighting alongside al-Qaeda, represented by al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQM).

Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi - who has fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan - extensively confirmed to Italian media that he had personally recruited "around 25" jihadis from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against the US in Iraq; now "they are on the front lines in Adjabiya".

This after Chad's president Idriss Deby stressed that AQM had raided military arsenals in Cyrenaica and may be now holding quite a few surface-to-air missiles. In early March, AQM publicly supported the "rebels". The ghost of Osama bin Laden must be pulling a Cheshire cat; once again he gets the Pentagon to work for him.

The water privatizers
Few in the West may know that Libya - along with Egypt - sits over the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer; that is, an ocean of extremely valuable fresh water. So yes, this "now you see it, now you don't" war is a crucial water war. Control of the aquifer is priceless - as in "rescuing" valuable natural resources from the "savages".

This Water Pipelineistan - buried underground deep in the desert along 4,000 km - is the Great Man-Made River Project (GMMRP), which Gaddafi built for $25 billion without borrowing a single cent from the IMF or the World Bank (what a bad example for the developing world). The GMMRP supplies Tripoli, Benghazi and the whole Libyan coastline. The amount of water is estimated by scientists to be the equivalent to 200 years of water flowing down the Nile.

Compare this to the so-called three sisters - Veolia (formerly Vivendi), Suez Ondeo (formerly Generale des Eaux) and Saur - the French companies that control over 40% of the global water market. All eyes must imperatively focus on whether these pipelines are bombed. An extremely possible scenario is that if they are, juicy "reconstruction" contracts will benefit France. That will be the final step to privatize all this - for the moment free - water. From shock doctrine to water doctrine.

Well, that's only a short list of profiteers - no one knows who'll get the oil - and the natural gas - in the end. Meanwhile, the (bombing) show must go on. There's no business like war business.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Abandona Javier Sicilia la poesía

Eduardo Miranda


CUERNAVACA, Mor., 2 de abril (apro).- El poeta Javier Sicilia dijo adiós a la poesía, luego de leer en público su último poema dedicado a su hijo asesinado, Juan Francisco.

Reunido frente a amigos en la explanada del zócalo de Cuernavaca, recitó:

"El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra

Nos la ahogaron adentro

Como te (asfixiaron),

Como te

desgarraron a ti los pulmones

Y el dolor no se me aparta

sólo queda un mundo

Por el silencio de los justos

Sólo por tu silencio y por mi silencio, Juanelo".

Por último el poema dijo: " El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra, es mi último poema, no puedo escribir más poesía...la poesía ya no existe en mi”.