DEA helped Colombian drug trafficker launder cash, new report reveals
10/01/2012 22:35Source: Yahoo - The Envoy
Undercover agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, working with their Mexican counterparts, helped transfer millions of dollars in drug cash and even escorted a shipment of cocaine via Dallas to Spain. The covert activities were undertaken as part of an operation to infiltrate and prosecute a major Colombian-Mexican narco-trafficking organization moving cocaine from Colombia to Mexico and the United States.
The undercover operation, detailed in Mexican government documents obtained by the New York Times, first came to light via a Monday dispatch by Times reporter Ginger Thompson.
The documents "describe American counternarcotics agents, Mexican law enforcement officials and a Colombian informant working undercover together over several months in 2007," Thompson reported. "Together, they conducted numerous wire transfers of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, smuggled millions of dollars in bulk cash—and escorted at least one large shipment of cocaine from Ecuador to Dallas to Madrid."
The documents "show that in 2007 the authorities infiltrated" the operations of an accused major Colombian cocaine trafficker, named Harold Mauricio Poveda-Ortega, Thompson wrote. Poveda-Ortega, also known as the Rabbit, "was considered the principal cocaine supplier to the Mexican drug cartel leader Arturo Beltran Leyva."
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