Money Laundering Makes Up 3% Colombia GDP

[Judi Lynn]

Friday, 29 July 2011 10:54
Money Laundering Makes Up 3% Colombia GDP
Written by Hannah Stone

The amount of money laundered in Colombia each year has risen to eight billion dollars, more than three percent of the country's GDP, according to officials.

Attorney General Viviane Morales, speaking at an anti-money laundering convention in Cartagena, said that the laundering of illegal gains has become a regressive tax paid by all Colombians.

Maria Mercedes Cuellar, head of Colombian banking association Asobancaria, said that it was necessary to get rid of the idea that all money laundering is connected to drug trafficking.

Other illicit activities, like illegal gold mining and extortion, are also source of profit for criminal groups in the country.

More:
http://insightcrime.org/insight-latest-news/item/1315-money-laundering-makes-up-3-colombia-gdp

[joshcryer]

1. Viviane Morales is a real champion of Colombian transparency! Good for her!

A far sight from other Latin American countries.

[rabs]

2. Saw this in El Espectador yesterday

and was amazed. If eight billion dollars is being laundered annually now (2011), that is more than the entire seven billion the U.S. has provided Colombia since Plan Colombia began in ernest in 2000 to fight narco-trafficking and later the FARC and ELN.

Doesn't say much for the seven U.S. billions that have gone down that rathole.

Note the source is Viviane Morales, the Attorny General in the Santos government. She is also the prosecutor in the Felipe Arias AIS corruption scandal and who ordered him sent to prison while the case advances.

[Peace Patriot]

3. The U.S. $7 billion is ALSO "laundered" money--stolen from U.S. taxpayers with lies about

the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" but actually used to decapitate the grass roots leftist political leadership in the country, with thousands of murders of trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, Indigenous leaders, campesino leaders and others, committed by the Colombian military itself (about half) and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads (the other half), as prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich." It was also used, in my opinion, to consolidate the trillion+ dollar cocaine revenue stream and direct its profits to U.S. banksters, the Bush Cartel, the CIA and other beneficiaries. THAT is the primary reason for the brutal displacement of 5 MILLION peasant farmers and U.S. dollars, and U.S. military training and "technical assistance" used to slaughter the FARC guerrillas--to grab the lands of all the little farmers, who might be growing a few coca leaves along with food crops, and to take over the FARC's cocaine operations, favoring the big drug lords who are tied to the rightwing political establishment.

"Laundered" U.S. tax dollars.