War On Drugs: Treasury Sanctions Cocaine and Bulk Cash Trafficking Coordinator with Ties to Sinaloa Cartel Leader Chapo Guzman

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today announced the designation of Mexican national Alfredo Vasquez Hernandez (a.k.a. Alfredo Compadre) pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act) for providing support to and acting on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel and its leader, Joaquin Guzman Loera (a.k.a.Chapo Guzman). 

“Alfredo Vasquez Hernandez has played a key role in Chapo Guzman’s drug trafficking and bulk cash smuggling operations,” said OFAC Director Adam J. Szubin. “Today’s designation of Chapo Guzman’s logistical coordinator increases the pressure on the Sinaloa Cartel and Chapo’s drug trafficking organization.”

As a result of today’s action, U.S. persons are prohibited from conducting financial or commercial transactions with the designees and any assets they may have under U.S. jurisdiction are frozen. 

A federal grand jury in the Northern District of Illinois indicted Vasquez Hernandez in August 2009 on two counts of conspiring to traffic drugs in an indictment targeting the Sinaloa Cartel and its leaders, Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada Garcia. The indictment charges Vasquez Hernandez and others with conspiring to import cocaine and heroin into the United States. Specifically, the indictment describes Vasquez Hernandez as the logistical coordinator of the importation of multi-ton quantities of cocaine from Mexico and South and Central American countries into the United States, and of deliveries of bulk currency from the United States to Mexico to Chapo Guzman. Mexican authorities arrested Vasquez Hernandez in January 2011. His extradition to the United States is currently pending.

OFAC worked closely with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in particular, the DEA Chicago Field Division and the DEA Los Angeles High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area/Southern California Drug Task Force on this investigation. 

Today’s action is part of ongoing efforts pursuant to the Kingpin Act to apply financial measures against significant foreign narcotics traffickers worldwide. Internationally, more than 1,000 individuals and entities linked to drug kingpins named by the President and OFAC have been designated pursuant to the Kingpin Act since June 2000. 

Penalties for violations of the Kingpin Act range from civil penalties of up to $1.075 million per violation to more severe criminal penalties. Criminal penalties for corporate officers may include up to 30 years in prison and fines up to $5 million. Criminal fines for corporations may reach $10 million. Other individuals face up to 10 years in prison and fines pursuant to Title 18 of the United States Code for criminal violations of the Kingpin Act.

Free Market Consequences of the Nanny State

By Zach Foster

Best read with the companion article: Legislating Morality in the Nanny State

Apart from the reduction of individual liberty that comes from the Nanny State’s constant need to legislate morality, this moral crusade also has profound consequences on the free market and people’s quality of life.  Everyone knows that the federal government’s War on Drugs has been a massive failure.  All in all, the people who are going to consume drugs are already consuming drugs unapologetically.  Whenever someone gets caught with narcotics and arrested, they may temporarily regret the error of their ways, not because they regret the drug use that has been pleasurable to them, but simply because they got caught.

Criminalizing narcotics has only cemented their use,[1] much like Prohibition laws in the 1920s saw a hike in the consumption of alcohol.[2]  Prohibition laws, meant to “protect the citizens” from themselves failed to do so, and they put citizens in more danger as organized crime rose up in the streets of cities across America, fueled by alcohol sales on the black market.  Such a scourge never left society, as criminal enterprises intelligently branched out into other business front, both on the black market—prostitution, narcotics, underground gambling—and in the legitimate business world—casinos, burlesque houses, hotels, and many other ventures.

Organized crime today is primarily fueled by drug trafficking and weapons trafficking—when people are buying industrial quantities of narcotics, they need guns to defend those drugs from police and competitor raids.[3]  This underground enterprise makes gang life profitable—at the expense of the lives of gang victims[4] and the futures of many young inner city children—and the damaging effects on society can be seen in Mexico[5] and Columbia,[6] where powerful drug cartels are wealthy and strong enough to fight multiple-front wars against government police and soldiers and other cartels.

When drugs are made and sold on the black market, the health of citizens is in exponentially more danger.  Apart from the risk of becoming addicted—a risk that also applies to legal drugs like alcohol and pharmaceuticals—there is no way for a person to know what is in the narcotics he or she is about to consume.  Columbian cocaine, after the harvest of the coca plants, is known to be made with cement, ammonia, quicklime, and sulfuric acid.[7]  Those chemicals make it portable and compactible, and those chemicals go into the nostrils and lungs of human beings. 

 

Continued in Part 2: Underground narcotics, prostitution, and skyrocketing prices

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[1] War On Drugs A Failure! http://tabacco.blog-city.com/war_on_drugs_a_failure_criminalization_doesnt_work__time_.htm

[2] Did Alcohol Use Decrease During Alcohol Prohibition? http://www.druglibrary.org/prohibitionresults1.htm

[3] The War On Drugs Has Failed. http://thebuzzcincy.com/international/1230amwdbz2/the-global-war-on-drugs-has-failed/

[4] Drugs and Guns Are Killing Two Thirds of NY’s Black Men. http://newsone.com/nation/newsonestaff4/drugs-and-guns-are-killing-ny-two-thirds-of-murder-victims-are-black-drugs-involved/

[5] Mexico Under Siege. http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/its-a-war

[6] Columbian Drug Wars: Guerrillas, Paramilitary Groups, and the Government. http://www.bookrags.com/research/colombian-drug-wars-guerrillas-para-hbh-01/

[7] Why the war on drugs in Columbia may never be won. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/16/colombia-drugs-cocaine-trafficking