Estrategia - Relaciones Internacionales - Historia y Cultura de la Guerra - Hardware militar. Nuestro lema: "Conocer para obrar"
Nuestra finalidad es promover el conocimiento y el debate de temas vinculados con el arte y la ciencia militar. La elección de los artículos busca reflejar todas las opiniones. Al margen de su atribución ideológica. A los efectos de promover el pensamiento crítico de los lectores.

jueves, 7 de abril de 2011

Se Diversifica el Narcotráfico.

La lucha efectiva contra las FARC y el narcotráfico en Colombia han traido un resultado inesperado. Que los insurgentes y los narcos se dediquen a actividades ilegales no tradicionales: la extracción y exportación de oro.


Latin America's Narco-Traffickers Diversify, Again: Part I


Sean Goforth | 07 Apr 2011

This is the first of a two-part series examining diversification efforts by Latin American drug-trafficking networks. Part I examines the FARC's illegal gold-mining operations in Colombia. Part II will examine Mexican drug traffickers' use of oil-tapping to generate revenues.

For more than 40 years, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, has waged a bloody war against the Colombian government, financed largely through cocaine trafficking. Over the past decade, as the Colombian government marshaled U.S. military assistance to greater effect, the FARC has seen its guerilla ranks diminished by about half. Meanwhile, coca eradication programs in the Colombian countryside have dented the group's access to cocaine's chief ingredient. The FARC responded by resorting to kidnapping, holding some hostages for cash ransoms and others -- most notably French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt -- as political bargaining chips. Here, too, as the trend grew clearer, the Colombian government mounted a concerted counterattack, carrying out raids on FARC camps to retrieve many hostages, including Betancourt in 2008.

To stanch its losses, the FARC has increasingly turned to Colombia's most venerated source of riches: gold. Today, with gold selling near record highs -- above $1,400 an ounce, with an increase of more than 30 percent in the past year alone -- Colombia is sitting pretty. Revenue from licensed mines has surpassed that of coffee exports, and while Colombia is still considered a mid-tier exporter of gold on the world market, many firms reckon it could greatly increase its exports. Multinational corporations from Canada, the United States, South Africa and elsewhere are tripping over each other in their efforts to move in. In January, China publicly offered to build a rail network dubbed a "dry canal" to allow Colombia to speed its natural resources -- especially coal, but also gold -- from the Atlantic port of Cartagena to the port of Buenaventura on the country's Pacific coast.

On the ground, droves of Colombian farmers have headed out to the jungles to prospect for gold, toiling in pits and streams unlicensed by the mining ministry. Illegal gold mining causes serious problems beyond lost tax revenue. For one, unregulated mines are an environmental disaster because they rely on liquid mercury to separate river sediment from minerals. As a result, Colombia has become the world's largest per capita mercury polluter. And one river in northern Colombia is now known as "La Cianurada" because of all the cyanide -- another byproduct of gold mining -- that has been dumped into it from illegal mines. Finally, on many sites, miners are clearing jungle to prospect.

As worrisome, these mines -- which number in the thousands -- have become a new front for the FARC. A FARC cable intercepted by the Colombian government stated that gold was becoming a major source of financing for operations. A commander with the nom de guerre "Mauricio" is thought to be running the FARC's gold mining activities, which include owning some illegal mines and extorting payments -- known as the "vacuna," or vaccine, against harm to person or property -- from other miners.

Many FARC leaders have been killed in government raids since 2008. But while media accounts paint the FARC as being in disarray due to those losses, a New York Times article last month stated that the outfit approaches gold mining with "an accountant's precision," extorting $3,800 a month for each backhoe in operation and $141,000 a month for permission to mine at particular sites. While there are no firm estimates of the FARC's total revenue from mining, InSight, a crime-monitoring group, calculates that 23 tons of gold are illegally mined each year in Antioquia's Bajo Cauca region alone, where the FARC's 36th Front is known to be heavily involved in mining. That represents nearly half of Colombia's annual legal production.

The FARC is not alone in its newfound interest. The ELN, a smaller insurgent group similar to the FARC, is widely believed to be involved in illegal gold mining as well. But while these groups are well-known to observers of Colombian organized crime, other newer groups are now getting in on the action. The Urabeños and Rostrojos are spinoffs of right-wing paramilitaries formed in the 1980s, with forces of about 1,200 fighters each. They are now battling it out for control of the gold trade in Caucasia, a city with a population of 100,000 located not far from Colombia's second-largest city, Medellin. In 2010, Caucasia suffered more than 60 grenade attacks, widely attributed to the two groups, with the violence centered around Caucasia's downtown and its many gold-buying shops.

In January, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos made public the extent of illegal mining operations by the FARC and other groups. He proposed to "formalize" more -- presumably hundreds more -- small-scale miners in an effort to curb their environmental damage and cut off a budding source of income for the FARC and other criminal groups.

For decades Latin America's drug traffickers have responded to government crackdowns by moving to diversify their sources of revenue. This traditionally meant getting a hand in other trafficking enterprises that are distinctly illegal at every step, from production or acquisition to distribution. This most recent wave of diversification has added a complication. Gold offers criminal gangs a triple benefit: It is extremely valuable; once introduced into the supply chain, it is indistinguishable from the legal commodity; and an extensive trafficking network is not required to tap into the already existing global market.

A broadly similar strategy is being employed by criminal minds in Mexico, albeit with a different commodity.
Sean Goforth teaches international political economy at Coastal Carolina University and blogs on Latin America for the Foreign Policy Association.

Fuente: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8443/latin-americas-narco-traffickers-diversify-again-part-i

No hay comentarios: