Drugs & US Law Enforcement (2006-2017)

[slapout9]

Yep and you will see more of it. As border patrol intensifies they will move to unguarded coastlines that is why you have to secure the Border and the Coast and the Airspace at the same time or they will just adapt.

[bourbon]

Paying Through the Nose: Why cocaine traffickers praise the Euro, by Ryan Grim. Mother Jones, March 19, 2008.

And it says it has spied one: The cost of pure coke rose 44 percent in the United States between January and September 2007. The dea credits its own efforts, of course, along with increased Mexican and Colombian cooperation, for the downturn in supply it says caused the price hike.

But the agency omits an important factor: the plummeting value of the dollar, especially as compared to the soaring euro. Even as the dea has made it more bothersome to bring coke into the United States, the sliding dollar has made importing it less profitable. Both the UN and dea note that a kilo of coke brings in two times as much in Europe as it does in America.

As with any commodity, producers look to maximize earnings by selling in markets with the strongest currencies. But unlike oil, for instance, the value of which is measured in dollars, the cocaine market is more fluid. "The euro has become the preferred currency for drug traffickers," declared then-dea administrator Karen Tandy at an anti-drug conference last May. "We're seeing a glut of euro notes throughout South America," she said, adding that "9 of 10 travelers who carried the $1.7 billion euros that came into the United States during 2005 did not come from Europe...They came from Latin America."

The 500 Euro banknote must also make the Euro pretty attractive.

[bourbon]

McMafia: Crime without frontiers, By Misha Glenny
Gangsters, profiteers, poisoners and pimps are ripping through global society. A grim new study concludes that peace brings crime to nations, Reviewed by Cal McCrystal. The Independent, 6 April 2008.

Their power and occasional resemblance to (or even consanguinity with) some western capitalists have left old international institutions "bewildered", Glenny says of Eastern European crime syndicates. "These men (and occasionally women) understood instinctively that rising living standards in the West, increased trade and migration flows, and the greatly reduced ability of many governments to police their countries combined to form a gold mine." A new Silk Route – "a multi-lane criminal highway" – now links the "thick belt of instability" in the Balkans with Central Asia, China and Pakistan, permitting the swift and easy transfer of people, narcotics, cash for laundering, and other contraband to Western Europe and the United States.

...
"Virtually overnight," Glenny argues, a UN Security Council vote for sanctions against Belgrade in 1992 "created a pan-Balkan mafia of immense power, reach, creativity and venality." Greece, which believed the embargo to be unjust, helped the gangs break it.

And so, grimly, to Dubai, Mumbai, the "gaudy opulence" of Nigeria's kleptocracy, South Africa's billion-dollar car thefts, Canada's marijuana trade, the paramilitary gangsters of Colombia, the bent nouveaux riches of China, the notorious yakuza of Japan – all seemingly, in our small, increasingly tightly bound world, tentacles of a single monster.

This is a well-sustained narrative dealing seamlessly, if dismayingly, with the tricks, motives and rewards of the new global underworld and the (for the most part) impotence of governments in tackling it successfully. Indeed, Glenny tells us how President Bill Clinton ordered the Italian authorities to back away from prosecuting Montenegro's young president, Milo Djukanovic, for organising a $20 million-a-year cigarette smuggling racket, because Washington needed him in its battle against Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic.

No wonder, then, that the world's "shadow economy" now accounts for between 15 and 20 per cent of global turnover, or that most countries have their own silnice hanby, the "Road of Shame" linking Dresden and Prague on which prostitutes and pimps openly ply their trade for tourists, truckers and toerag-toffs.

emphasis mine