The recently published 2016 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) is an annual report by the Department of State to Congress prepared in accordance with the Foreign Assistance Act.

It describes the efforts of key countries to attack all aspects of the international drug trade in Calendar Year 2015. Volume I covers drug and chemical control activities. Volume II covers money laundering and financial crimes.

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Here’s a summary of what it says about Costa Rica:

Countries/Jurisdictions of Primary Concern – Costa Rica

Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. 2016 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR)

Transnational criminal organizations increasingly favor Costa Rica as a base to commit financial crimes, including money laundering, as a result of its geographic location and other factors, including limited enforcement capability. This trend raises serious concerns about the Costa Rican government’s ability to prevent these organizations from further infiltrating the economy. As Costa Rica has shifted from a transit point to an operations base for regional narcotics trafficking organizations, the laundering of proceeds from illicit activities has increased. Proceeds from international narcotics trafficking represent the largest source of assets laundered in Costa Rica, although human trafficking, financial fraud, corruption, and contraband smuggling also generate illicit revenue. In 2015, the head of Costa Rica’s intelligence agency, known as the DIS for its Spanish acronym, said that approximately $4.2 billion annually is laundered in Costa Rica.

Much of the money laundering in Costa Rica is channeled through the country’s nascent construction industry. Other sectors have been identified as vulnerable to exploitation by criminal organizations seeking to launder illicit proceeds, including both state and private financial institutions. Money/value transfer services, including money remitters, the casino industry, and the real estate sector, are also particularly susceptible. Various Costa Rica-based online gaming operations launder millions of dollars in illicit proceeds through the country and offshore centers annually. Authorities also have detected, however with less frequency, trade-based money laundering schemes. There have been no prosecutions related to terrorist financing, and measures to detect, investigate, and prosecute such financing are limited. Moreover, narcotics and arms trafficking linked to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and bulk cash smuggling by nationals from countries at higher risk for terrorist financing have been detected in recent years.

You can read the entire 2016 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report here.

Correct me if I’m wrong here but the last time I looked, with the total value of the illicit drug market in the USA estimated to be around $625.63 billion, it clearly the USA who is the #1 illegal drug consuming nation on planet earth. In fact, compared to $625.63 Billion, Costa Rica’s alleged $4.2 billion in ‘laundered’ money is petty cash!

The point of this article is not to condone money laundering but merely to point out that on occasions, the people that complain the most about things are often the ones that need to look at the problems in their own system before they start pushing around other countries to change their ‘evil’ ways.

Here a few more glaring facts and figures about the ‘war for drugs’, the CIA (Cocaine Importing Agency) and money laundering that should shame any wanker left with a brain still working at the US Department of State:

  1. Martin Woods of Hermes Forensic Solutions used to be a senior anti-money laundering officer at the London office of Wachovia Bank and prior to that he served with the Metropolitan police. “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.”
  2. Catherine Austin Fitts, a past Managing Director of Dillon Read, a Wall Street investment bank and former Assistant Secretary, HUD said on video that: “The Department of Justice estimates that the United States is the leader in laundering organized crime profits of about $500 billion to a trillion dollars per year.”
  3. Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

    Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

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  4. International banks have aided Mexican drug gangs.

    Despite strict rules, some banks have failed to ‘know their customer’ or ask about the source of large amounts of cash, allowing billions in dirty money from Mexico to be laundered.

  5. HSBC would later protest that it knew not whence the money came, but Puebla had been under investigation by Mexican and US Federal authorities for two years when HSBC was caught, for handling a staggering $376bn of suspect money for an American bank, Wachovia. Wachovia was punished with a “deferred prosecution” — a yellow card; none of its employees was arrested….

    HSBC is now trying to prevent publication of a report on how it complies with money-laundering rules imposed on it by the US authorities in 2012, when it was fined a record $1.9bn (£1.32bn).

  6. “We remain silent on fact that we aren’t just protecting opium producers but that we brought in heroin processing and distribution of 98% of the world’s heroin is all done by air.” Gordon Duff.
  7. “Indeed, the evidence suggests that the US has neither the intention nor the incentive to end money laundering. Rather, it seeks nothing less than a monopoly in it
    . It pursues this monopoly by forcing non-US financial institutions to impose much stricter rules than those that are enforced domestically. That’s especially true when it comes to the most profitable customers of US banks: rogue nations, drug cartels, and the like.” Mark Nestmann
  8. By launching a War on Terror in Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed to a doubling of opium production there, making Afghanistan now the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin and most of the world’s hashish…

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    Americans should be aware of the overall pattern that drug production repeatedly rises where America intervenes militarily — Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s, Colombia and Afghanistan since then. (Opium cultivation also increased in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.)3 And the opposite is also true: where America ceases to intervene militarily, notably in Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug production declines.” Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 217-37.

  9. In Afghanistan: “As opium production surged from a minimal 180 tons to a monumental 8,200 in the first five years of U.S. occupation.”

    Not surprisingly, the Agency looked the other way while Afghanistan’s opium production grew unchecked from about 100 tons annually in the 1970s to 2,000 tons by 1991. In 1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer. By 1984, it supplied a staggering 60% of the U.S. market and 80% of the European one.” Alfred McCoy

  10. Illegal drug production in Afghanistan has increased by a factor of 50 and continues to rise since a US-led operation was launched in the country in 2001.
  11. “If the CIA was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs into inner-city neighborhoods to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, what did that say about the legitimacy of the vast covert organization? What did it tell us about the so-called war on drugs? What did it tell us about the government’s callousness and indifference to the poor, especially poor people of color at the height of the crack epidemic? What did it say about rogue military operations carried out beyond public scrutiny?” Chris Hedges.
  12. Alfred McCoy’s 700 page book ‘The Politics of Heroin. CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade‘ may open your eyes to what has been going for a long time… Yes! I have a copy and I’ve read it and, if you live near me and want to read it, give me a call!

    13. Remember that were were told that the USA invaded Afghanistan because a guy in a cave with a satellite phone supposedly masterminded the most amazing terrorist attack on New York City skyscrapers and the Pentagon on the 11th September 2001?

    Even though it was the “Five Dancing Israelis” who OBVIOUSLY knew in advance what was going to happen on September 11th and who openly declared on Israhelli TV that: “our purpose was to document the event!”

    Did you know that the FBI released the “Five Dancing Israelis” who were arrested by the NYPD on 9-11 for filming and celebrating the attacks on the WTC and driving around in a van that tested positive for explosives and who admitted that Mossad agents working undercover in the USA?

    Don’t you want to know why how our nation can imprison Afghanis and many others in Guantanamo Bay, without trial, and torture them for information regarding 9-11 for more than a decade yet the FBI released the Five Dancing Israelis to fly back to Israel and do television interviews.

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    Well here’s the real reason why the USA invaded Afghanistan.

    The price of a barrel of oil is sitting at around $40 at this moment. How much do you think a ‘barrel’ full of heroin would sell for?

    For relatively pure heroin from Afghanistan, the world’s largest supplier of heroin, selling a barrel of heroin would net you $19,923,200!

    But it gets better because by the time that ‘smack’ hits American streets and after it’s cut up a few times, you are now selling a barrel of heroin for the equivalent of $60,000,000 — $80,000,000!

    And you thought oil was profitable…

    “The British empire was bankrolled by the milky fluid of the poppy flower; opium” and now the U.S. empire is taking it’s cut!

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    So as you can clearly see, some of these names are well known financial institutions and some experts suggest that more money is laundered through New York and London than any of the so called offshore financial centers and certainly way more than in Costa Rica.

    Since more legal and illegal drugs are sold and consumed in the US than any other country in the world, perhaps we should be asking what other US and British financial institutions are helping these drug dealers with their finances?

    Which US banks in US cities are helping the Russians, Colombians, Mexicans and other drug dealing scumbags to invest their ill gotten gains and to transfer their US dollar drug money out of the USA?

    Which US immigration officials at the US borders inadvertently allow cars and trucks loaded with “$20 billion to $25 billion in U.S. bank notes” to drive across the border into Mexico?

    After delving into the facts and figures for no more than fifteen minutes, with US$700 million ‘here’ and US$378 billion ‘there’ before you know it, you’re talking about ‘serious’ money.

    All of this can lead to one inescapable conclusion, that Costa Rica does have it’s problems but, the USA is undoubtedly the money laundering centre for the South American drug cartels and every other major illegal drug producing nation because that’s where the largest number of illegal drug users are located and where then biggest illegal drug sales are made!

    Feel Free To Leave Your Comments About This Article In Our Discussion Forum here.

    Written by Scott Oliver, author of 1: How To Buy Costa Rica Real Estate Without Losing Your Camisa, 2: Costa Rica’s Guide To Making Money Offshore and 3. ¿Cómo Comprar Bienes Raíces en Costa Rica, Sin Perder Su Camisa?

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