Planet Colombia

Here's all you need to know to parse the story of Orejuela's extradition and trial: "Between 2000 and 2005, the United States will have spent nearly $4 billion, but Plan Colombia will end next year unless Congress approves additional funding."

Scott Hiasson writes in today's Miami Herald that cofounder of the Cali cartel Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, known as the "Chess Player," may be denied access to his own assets to pay for his defense unless his attorney can show them to be "untainted by cocaine."

Gilberto was extradited to Miami this month; his younger brother, also indicted in Miami, is in Colombia facing extradition. Prosecutors say the brothers blended their cocaine business with seemingly legitimate enterprises -- including pharmacies, construction companies, a soccer team and an airline -- in an effort to conceal drug profits. The U.S. government seeks to seize $2.1 billion from the cartel.

Ironic how seldom the reverse is asked about the "seemingly legitimate enterprises" of our globalized narco-economy. Could, say, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase and Halliburton distinguish their legitimate profits from those by the drug trade which they've laundered into their balance sheets?

Orejuela gets a namecheck in Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon in the important chapter "Connecting Drugs and Oil," in context of a report by the Center for Public Integrity which established a direct link between the facilities of Halliburton subsidy Brown and Root and "every drug-producing region and every drug-consuming region in the world." Ruppert discusses a guaranteed loan, through CIA cut-out banks, to the Russian financial conglomerate Alfa Group, which included $292 to pay for Brown and Root's contract to refurbish a Siberian oil field. An official report of the Russian FSB claimed that the Alfa Group's top executives, Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, "allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia into Europe."

Ruppert writes:

Fridman and Aven, who reportedly smuggled the heroin in connection with Russia's Solntsevo mob family, were the same executives who applied for the EXIM loans that Halliburton's lobbying later safely secured. As a result, Brown and Root's work in Alfa Tyumen oil field's could continue - and expand.

The CPI story reports allegations that organized criminal interests in the Alfa Group had stolen the oil field by fraud. It then uses official reports from the FSB, oil companies such as BP-Amoco, former CIA and KGB officers, and press accounts to establish a solid link to Alfa Tyumen and the transportation of heroin.

...

The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa official met with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela...to conclude an agreement about the transfer of money into the Alfa Bank from offshore.... The plan was to insert it back into the Russian economy through the purchase of stock in Russian companies. The former KG agent "reported that there was evidence regarding [Alfa Bank's] involvement with the money laundering of Latin American drug cartels."

It would be difficult for Cheney and Halliburton to assert mere coincidence in all of this, as CPI reported that Tyumen's lead Washington attorney James C Langdon Jr at the firm of Aikin Gump "helped coordinate a $2.2 million fundraiser for Bush this June. He then agreed to help recruit 100 lawyers and lobbyists in the capital to raise $25,000 each for W's campaign."

The farce of Orejuela's persecution comes into focus in a November article of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. While federal officials tout him as their biggest trophy since Pablo Escobar's turkey shoot, "some experts say the extradition is more of a moral victory than a practical one. 'They don't get any bigger than this, but it is largely symbolic,' said Adam Isacson, director of programs for the Center for International Policy in Washington. 'Gilberto is no longer a player.'"

"It's hard to believe," said Tom Cash, who ran the DEA's Miami office during the cartel's heyday. "These people were the untouchables in Cali." Cash credited the cartel's long run to its low profile and business acumen. "It's one of those proof positives that these cocaine traffickers were far from cowboys, much more like Wall Street businessmen who used their stealth and their brains and were extremely successful for a very long time," he said.

Now the Cali cartel has been replaced by smaller, more dangerous "baby cartels." Experts estimate as many as 300 mini cartels operate in Colombia.

Between 2000 and 2005, the United States will have spent nearly $4 billion, but Plan Colombia will end next year unless Congress approves additional funding.

So there you have it - again. Though Orejuela's name is legend, he is "no longer a player," so can be served up to showcase the success of Plan Colombia. Which needs a shot in the arm, so to speak.

Orejuela is no dummy; he knows which players are playing him:

"Colombia needs economic assistance from the United States and the US government needs to showcase results in the fight against drug trafficking," he told Semana magazine. "My brother and I have a symbolic value in this context."