US Action News

To all those who doubted if Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez was involved in drug-trafficking activities, doubt no more; the evidence is in.

The Colombian navy has seized a submarine believed to have been built to smuggle cocaine to Mexico.

BOGOTA, Colombia – A 100-foot (33-meter), twin-screw diesel submarine seized at a jungle shipyard in Ecuador marks a quantum, if anticipated, leap in drug-smuggling evasion technology, the top U.S. counter-drug official for the region said Sunday.

Twenty million people in the U.S. regularly use illegal drugs, spurring street crime and wrecking families. Narcotics cost the U.S. economy $215 billion a year — enough to cover health care for 30.9 million Americans — in overburdened courts, prisons and hospitals and lost productivity, the department says.

“It’s the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy,” says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London from 2006 to 2009. “If you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point,” Woods says.

Emergency-room visits from abuse of prescription and over-the-counter medicines doubled in the U.S. in four years, matching for the first time the number of overdoses of illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

Today, a large part of the Latin American continent is in danger of collapsing into a situation that fluctuates between totalitarianism and anarchy; between authoritarianism and chaos. The region is also in danger of falling under the strange influence of insurgent and terrorist groups, drug cartels and distant countries that historically have been poles apart from the region’s culture and civilization (mainly Iran, China, and perhaps Russia). Soon, we will wake up to the day where we will find the nightmare not in Iraq or in Central Asia, but right here in our own backyard.