Pubdate: Thu, 28 Mar 2002
Source: Boston Phoenix (MA)
Copyright: 2002 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group.
Contact:  http://www.bostonphoenix.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/54
Author: Al Giordano
Note: To read Giordano's story in full, complete with documentation of his 
sources, see www.narconews.com.

US DRUGGED POLICY

Colombia's Narco-Candidate

In 1997 and '98, alert US Customs agents in California seized three 
Colombia-bound ships laden with 50,000 kilos of potassium permanganate, a 
chemical necessary for the manufacture of cocaine. According to an August 
3, 2001, document signed by then-DEA chief Donnie R. Marshall, the ships 
had originated in Hong Kong and were each destined for Medellin, Colombia, 
to deliver the chemical - whose legal uses include the manufacture of 
printed circuit boards - to a company called GMP Productos Quimicos, S.A. 
(GMP Chemical Products). Over the past decade, GMP has imported huge 
quantities of potassium permanganate, according to Marshall, and is 
suspected by Colombian law enforcement of leaking the chemical to coke 
producers.

The amount of permanganate seized before reaching GMP was enough to make a 
half-million kilos of cocaine, with a street value of $15 billion.

What makes this little episode of more than passing interest is that GMP 
Chemical Products is owned by Pedro Juan Moreno Villa, long-time right-hand 
man to Colombian presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Velez, who is expected 
to win the May 26 national election.

Colombia's Conservative Party threw its support to Uribe after a poor 
showing in the recent congressional elections.

The party's electoral disappointment stemmed from public disaffection with 
current Conservative Party president Andres Pastrana's support for the US 
military adventure known as Plan Colombia - an American initiative, 
designed to win the "War on Drugs" abroad, which has only further 
entrenched drug production and organized crime.

Ironically, Colombian voters will likely elect Uribe, who, like his father, 
has been deeply immersed in the drug economy from the earliest days of his 
career - as evidenced, in part, by his long, intimate political association 
with Moreno, who is currently managing Uribe's presidential campaign.

Alvaro Uribe's path to Colombia's highest office began in the city of 
Medellin, the capital of the province of Antioquia, in 1982. At that time, 
unofficial mayor Pablo Escobar, head of the notorious Medellin drug cartel, 
was the undisputed king of the city: nothing happened in Medellin without 
his permission. When Uribe became the official mayor, Medellin was a boomtown.

Escobar was taking the city by storm, constructing public housing for the 
poor, paying taxes, and stoking Mayor Uribe's construction of a world-class 
subway system.

The Liberal Party, through which Uribe and Escobar rose in the same 
electoral wave to mayoral and legislative power, is to Antioquia what the 
Democratic Party is to Boston: the entire political show.

 From 1995 to 1997, Uribe was governor of Antioquia, and Moreno served as 
his chief of staff. (During roughly the same period, from 1994 to 1998, 
Moreno's GMP was also Colombia's largest importer of permanganate.) 
Together, the two men oversaw the rise of paramilitary organizations in 
Antioquia in the mid 1990s.

This brings us back to those California permanganate seizures in 1997-'98. 
The shipments were seized without the usual media fanfare. Such seizures 
usually involve US companies, which have been heavily fined for failing to 
notify the DEA about potassium permanganate shipments that exceed the legal 
limit of 500 kilograms per month.

The January 14, 2000, Hartford Courant reported, for example, that the 
Connecticut-based chemical firm MacDermid Inc. paid the feds $50,000 "to 
settle a claim involving the export of a chemical that can be used to 
synthesize cocaine" for just that reason.

And, the Courant reported, MacDermid was selling the chemical to 
"legitimate buyers." In contrast, GMP was not fined a single devalued 
Colombian peso by the US government.

The Customs Service, the DEA, and other US law-enforcement agencies were 
caught in a public-relations disaster.

Their agents did their job. And the bureaucrats in Washington spent more 
than three years trying to cover it up. The permanganate traffickers - not 
content to be on the road to the Colombian presidency, they also wanted to 
collect their tips - fought from early 1998 until mid 2001, in a case 
before DEA administrative-law judge Gail Randall, to avoid legal penalties 
and to get their 50,000 kilos back. If the Justice Department had fined 
GMP, it would have unleashed a chain of events embarrassing to Moreno and, 
consequently, to presidential candidate Uribe Velez. It would have 
interfered with Washington's electoral plans for Colombia: to weaken all 
other potential candidates (those who are still alive and not in captivity) 
and install Uribe as the next Colombian president.

Perhaps because he was at the end of his term, or perhaps because his own 
DEA troops were already furious with the bureaucratic cover-ups of the 
California seizures, then-DEA chief Marshall rejected the non- binding 
recommendation of the administrative-law judge and ordered the 50,000 kilos 
permanently seized.

It is only because Marshall went public with his findings that we now know 
the intricacies of Moreno's operation.

The bottom line is this: coca grows on trees in Colombia, and the military, 
paramilitaries, police, rebels, and poor farmers will be battling in vain 
for control of the coca-leaf market for decades to come. But the person who 
controls the potassium permanganate market in Colombia - a product that 
must be imported from continents far away - truly controls the global 
traffic of processed cocaine.

The same standards set by Moreno's GMP company will no doubt be applied 
when Moreno and Uribe - and their customers from the ranks of the narcos 
and paramilitary groups - get their mitts on the entire Colombian military 
and law-enforcement complex, as well as on Plan Colombia's $2 billion.

Perhaps that is Washington's intent.

It would not be the first time that United States officials backed a 
presidential candidate in Latin America who, once elected, could be easily 
blackmailed and controlled because of his documented narco history: the 
likes of Pinochet, Noriega, Salinas, Zedillo, Menem, Banzer, and Fujimori 
all come to mind.
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MAP posted-by: Beth