September 24, 2007   Here is yet another reason why law enforcement, particularly attendant to drug money running, is so important and cannot be suspended: money laundering. Moving money to create spheres of influence or for self enrichment when illegal remains....illegal today and must be enforced. It is inappropriate to simply "move on" when large scale corruption is at play. Rather, common sense is best applied.

Argentina, a once thriving success story, today is dooming itself to a certain place in the annals of failing nation states because it fails itself to stop money laundering, bribery and dirty monies. Note that this entire airport, as reported today, has no capability to screen for content coming and going in Argentina. It is an airport for political and content mischief.
 
We are not sure why exactly this bag man for Chavez, also wanted by Interpol, will take up to a year to be extradited according to US authorities as he lives in Florida where he apparently has his base of operations, called "investors VISAS" by some. We are also not sure what he lists as his place of employment....global bag man for Chavez? How does one pay taxes on this? Does he pay taxes? How many more mimic this man in Florida, freely moving about the cabin with illegal bags of cash?  Where there is smoke, there is often fire. We doubt he moves alone.
 
There is no question that Chavez is helping fund each and every single major effort against the USA, as he does in Ecuador, in Latin America.

There are of course other efforts underway to create political and economic harm to governments who stand to protect and defend their people from criminals such as the FARC. We see this happening daily at the hands of the pro drug, anti Plan Colombia, Soros-backed actors who work away to create political attacks against Uribe's law and order. What Chavez fears the most is legitimate business, transparency and contract law. What Soros's groups fear the most is still begging for a full review. Moreover, when a cartel style government such as Chavez's carries a parallel agenda to the Soros actors in Latin America, now under media controls in most nations, which permit sole content provided in general by Iranian News and AL JAZEERA, we are aware that free speech and accountability, is almost dead now.
 
We have seen examples of Chavez's so called governmental contracts. They are horrible and are not contracts as we know them but they are instruments of whole sale governmental controls over vast regions of monies. Each contains specific language  barring transparency, barring review, barring public advise and consent, and bar any legal capacity to apply legitimate justice if a contract- such as they are- dispute arises. Chavez states he alone will provide a dispute settlement officer- of his choosing and from his political party.  In other words, Chavez does business....like the Russian mob or like the FARC. This bears a solid analysis because Ecuador is enacting the identical non-rule of law game plan.
 
Why anyone legitimate does business with this cartel begs the question. And why anyone refuses to state the obvious begs the question.

Mary O'Grady in the Wall Street Journal today (see below) commendably continues this tale. The Argentine Kirchners will serve as bag men for the Chavez machine and will no doubt act to assist converting Argentina in to a nation of leaders who enshrine opacity, hiding their acts in murky formats.

We do not know what Soros is doing, if at all, about all this inasmuch as he has been a major land and property owner in Argentina.

We do know that his groups are crawling all over Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and now Mexico among others.
 
We also do not know why the USA has not condemned this craven Chavez-funded cartel-like manipulation of an entire nation by his open wallet and his installed paid goons, guards, bag men, thugs and political managers. This has wrecked Bolivia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Venezuela and Ecuador. Now Argentina.

Concurrently, Brazil continues to try to retain its position as Chavez's Hong Kong- a banking/finance center. We are not sure how long Brazil can retain its faux neutrality but we do note that the dominoes of criminal cartels fall when open speech, accountability and media are bought off and silence descends like a cheap metal or iron curtain. As in Ecuador and Venezuela, how long do you think that free press in Argentina- a proud and long standing profession- will last in the next few years? Like Brazil, the shutters close tightly now.
 
This week, Mrs. Kirchner, along with Ecuador's Rafael Correa, will be feted in New York for her political leadership.

The Council of the Americas will host her person. She will, as will Correa, lie a lot about the Chavez bag men in her country.

We do not know why anyone enjoys being lied to or will sit down to lunch or suffer lectures from liars.
Like Iran's Ahmadinejad- another Chavez cartel crony as is Rafael Correa, New York annually suffers this gaggle...of liars during UN annual gatherings.

This is not diplomacy, this is not honorable, and it is not helpful.

Ahmadinejad, having done NYC today, will decamp immediately to....Caracas to de brief his new business and political partner Chavez.

It is one more lap in his Victory Tour for....criminal cartels that debase and destroy personal freedoms.
The many faces of Soros's employees and paid contractors continue to write and speak publicly to tell us that Chavez is not a worry and is no problem at all.

They also use OAS and US governmental monies to tell us that the FARC deserves to be treated as a legitimate group and are helping the FARC create economic harm to Colombia by their acts before the US Congress to suspend free trade for Colombia. This is also called lobbying against the best interests of the USA and South America. Chavez seeks the return of the FARC ruining over 1/2 of Colombia. Soros's minions appear to be on a parallel track. It is a nexus that aids the Axis and does not help freedom building. We do not know why this effort is so well funded today and hope that such events end.

Last we looked, criminal cartels as nation states are always a problem and always lead to no good. When whole regions of the globe succumb to the private lures of crime, we have a problem and we do appropriately worry. To so say otherwise is to enable crime.
 
We reprint a superb article from today's Wall Street Journal, knowing full well that Correa's Ecuador has a frontal plan to publicly convert Ecuador to one more zone of defeat for liberty with their new allies- Ahmadinejad and Chavez. Watch for Correa this week to disingenuously tell us, as he foolishly has done in Miami this week end, that he is different from Chavez. Correa does not need to decamp with Mahmoud to Caracas to debrief. His approach is already well scripted, locked and loaded.
 
Do you know which PR, lobbying companies, pro FARC groups, and whose government is co mingled with Correa?

We hope that you will ask a lot and find a semblance of satisfaction in much needed fact gathering. To not ask renders the power of truth telling emasculated.

To not self educate renders one irresponsible and neutered in every meaningful sense and zeroes in on a chronic problem which can be corrected: complicity in crime. Do you know what Correa spends Chavez's money on? Ask. Ask often and ask well. To refuse to perform one's duty against crime waves brings no satisfactions. There will be no satisfactions for Ecuador as the iron curtain of crime rings down this Sunday following Correa's pre-rigged electioneering. The silence will be deafening. Most TV channels will be glued to.... telenovelas on this momentous occasion. Correa is counting on the vapidity of his own people and the ease with which he can buy them off. So far his satisfactions appear to be satisfying his paid backers out of Iran and Caracas. Do you find satisfaction in pretending that democracy's lights are vibrant in Ecuador?
 
-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

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The Wall Street Journal 

THE AMERICAS

Beware of Venezuelans Bearing Gifts

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
September 24, 2007; Page A18

When Argentine customs officials caught a Venezuelan businessman trying to smuggle almost $800,000 in cash into the country last month, they parted him from his loot but allowed him to leave the country. He flew to Uruguay and then to Florida where, as someone who also holds an American passport, he has a home.
The mystery of where the money came from and where it was going has not been solved. But thanks to investigative reporting by the Argentine daily La Nación, we now know that there was good reason for Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson to think he could just walk off that plane with a bag of money. As it turns out, the Argentine government of President Néstor Kirchner has a policy of allowing Venezuelans tied to the government in Caracas to come and go freely at Buenos Aires' Aeroparque airport, with no scrutiny of their baggage whatsoever.

This revelation has raised serious questions about Argentine sovereignty and about the relationship Mr. Kirchner has established with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. More to the point, Argentines now want to know whether unchecked Venezuelan traffic through the country is what's behind the acceleration of Mr. Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution in Argentina, as it was in Bolivia. They also want to know if the money was destined for the political campaign of Mr. Kirchner's wife, Cristina Fernández Kirchner, who is the Peronist candidate in next month's presidential elections.

The Argentine government appeared happy to get rid of Mr. Antonini in the early morning hours of Aug. 4 when the money was discovered. With him out of the country, it apparently believed the whole thing could be easily swept under the rug. But then a local cable TV station reported the incident. Soon the wider Argentine media picked up the story and the public learned that the Venezuelan bagman had arrived on a charter flight from Caracas with two Argentine government officials and three executives of the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, PdVSA. This sparked a political firestorm for the Kirchners. Now Argentina wants Washington to extradite Mr. Antonini. That process could take up to a year.

In the meantime, the presidential race is heating up and the first couple is claiming to know nothing about what Mr. Antonini was up to. For a while that seemed at least plausible. But as details have emerged about the circumstances at Aeroparque, the government's umbrage at the suggestion that it could have been complicit in the matter is looking downright theatrical.

Mr. Chávez's influence has been rising in Argentina for some years now, in part because Mr. Kirchner has much in common ideologically with the Venezuelan. Like Mr. Chávez, Mr. Kirchner has surrounded himself with former left-wing terrorists and their sympathizers and has made anti-Americanism a central theme in his policy agenda. Mr. Kirchner is also a practical man and after Argentina was branded a deadbeat for its 2001 debt moratorium, the Chávez offer to play international banker and buy up government bonds was an offer he couldn't refuse. Now the Antonini affair has exposed another facet of the Chávez-Kirchner alliance: open access to Argentina for Chávez foot soldiers.

La Nación reported on Aug. 18 that PdVSA flights receive "preferential treatment" when they arrive in Argentina. The planes drop their passengers in the military zone at Aeroparque where they clear Customs and Immigration. But according to the paper, that zone has one special feature that makes it relevant to the suitcase scandal: "there are no scanners to examine baggage."

The plane Mr. Antonini was on, which was hired by the Argentine state-owned energy company Enarsa, seems to have parked at the wrong terminal. That's why he got nabbed. La Nación also reports that sources familiar with airport activity say that in the past few months at least eight PdVSA flights have landed at the military zone in Aeroparque and that at least one PdVSA plane lands there every month. Given what was found on Mr. Antonini it is reasonable to ponder what these flights might be carrying. As La Nación has pointed out, one of the organizers of the anti-American rally in Buenos Aires when George W. Bush went to Uruguay in March admitted that the event was paid for by Venezuela. But how the money got to Argentina is still not known.

Quite apart from money, there is also the question of revolutionary personnel coming and going. Citgo, the Venezuelan gasoline company that operates in the U.S. but has no business in Argentina or Bolivia, has a U.S. registered plane that has landed more than once in Aeroparque. The same plane, in July 2006, was used for an official visit to a presidential summit in Cordoba, Argentina. "But," according to La Nación, "in that moment, it was operating as the transportation for the Cuban delegation." In fact, the paper says "these planes are used for both government and business purposes and it is difficult to know the nationality of the passengers because they fly Venezuelans, Cubans and Bolivians."

The highest ranking Argentine official on Mr. Antonini's flight was Claudio Uberti, the director of highway concessions. La Nación says that Mr. Uberti flew out of Argentina 27 times in the past 12 months and six of those trips were to Venezuela. The paper reports that he went more frequently than that to Venezuela but sometimes flew from Bolivia. When he arrived home on charter flights, he repeatedly used the military zone at Aeroparque. "If that had happened this time, Mr. Antonini wouldn't be famous," writes La Nación reporter Daniel Gallo. For his part, Mr. Antonini reportedly entered Argentina 12 times in the past year.

According to Mr. Gallo, "the PdVSA flights are peculiar in that their passengers, supposedly high-ranking Venezuelan representatives, do not appear on the registers or meeting agendas of Argentine officials, as they should by law. Neither [Planning] Minister Julio De Vido nor Mr. Uberti report meetings with PdVSA that would have required the trips by such visitors."

It may take a good long time to figure out just where Mr. Antonini was going with his stash. Speculation ranges from laundering money to paying a bribe to funding political activity. But in a sense it doesn't really matter. What has been revealed since Aug. 4 is that Mr. Kirchner has sacrificed Argentine national security in order to satisfy Mr. Chávez. That can't be good for the stability of the Southern Cone.