Jim Cason and David Brooks, the Washington correspondents for the Mexico City daily La Jornada, have consistently offered drug war coverage inside the United States that ought to be - but isn't - published by US daily newspapers.
Their latest journalistic coup unearthed a US Department of Treasury document that admits that when it comes to the $600 billion US dollars that annually flow from drug trafficking and other illicit activity, the United States -- and not Mexico -- is the international headquarters of the illegal drug business.
Translated excerpts from
La Jornada, Mexico City, March 12, 2000
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/index.html
"The United States,
a Paradise for Money Launderers"
by Jim Cason and David Brooks
"WASHINGTON, MARCH 11: The Department of Treasury informed that the US has converted into one of the principal centers of money laundering in the world - the largest, according to experts - and that New York and Los Angeles are the preferred cities for the deposit of funds generated by trafficking in drugs, illegal arms, financial fraud, counterfeiting and other similar crimes.
"….The "Strategic Document on Money Laundering," made by the office of the Treasury Department offers a bleak panorama of the problem: "The amount of funds generated by the sale of drugs, arms trafficking, bank and stock fraud, counterfeiting and similar crimes each year equals almost 600 billion dollars."
"Raymond Baker, expert in money laundering matters for the Brookings Institution, declared before the US Senate last year that "The United States has converted, according to credible calculations, into the largest depository of illegally made profits in the world." Baker told La Jornada on Friday that Treasury Department functionaries under-estimate the problem…. "The efforts against money laundering are a failure. Of all the money washed that circulates in the world, according to my calculation, half of it ends up in the United States." Treasury Department functionaries recently informed that 99.9 percent of the illegal money deposited in US banks is deposited undetected.
Next: Click here for a special report on the turning political tide in Mexico. For the first time in history, the world "legalization" is everywhere....