07/11/2010
Sipping a coffee in the neighborhood of La Candelaria in Bogota, Colombia, I opened my copy of El Tiempo to see what the national newspaper had to say. On the bottom right corner of the front page of Thursday’s edition, a headline caught my eye: “Lucha sin cuartel”, or merciless fight.
The merciless fight was referring to a government raid on La Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes (DNE), the agency responsible for managing the seized assets of the narcotraficantes, or drug traffickers.
The raid was undertaken at the behest of the agency’s new leader—Juan Carlos Restrepo, who maintained he had “detected a series of fraudulent operations, the value of which could be measured in billions of pesos.”
Corruption in the Colombian agency that manages the assets seized from the drug trade?
I wasn’t exactly astonished, but then I realized I really didn’t know what their ally in the United States did with theirs.
After several conversations and discussions, I realized no one else seemed to know either. The dilemma was pretty simple: if the assets seized in any way funded police operations, they could easily create a budgetary dependence that—well I think the implications are fairly obvious…
And so the cursory research…
In the U.S. the assets seized by the USDA are held in something called the Assets Forfeiture Fund, created as part of 1984’s Comprehensive Crime Control Act. Essentially it works like this: the proceeds of forfeiture are used “to pay the costs associated with such forfeitures, including the costs of managing and disposing of property, satisfying valid liens, mortgages, and other innocent owner claims, and costs associated with accomplishing the legal forfeiture of the property.”
Pretty reasonable, really. The money seized is used to manage the money seized.
But then there’s a part under general investigative expenses about compensating “state and local law enforcement officers participating in joint law enforcement operations with a federal agency participating in the fund.”
I guess that’s where it gets hazy to me. States and municipalities facing budget cutbacks seem to have a strong incentive to “participate”. One particular U.S. Department of Justice audit I found from 2007 suggested that “while the DEA had established internal control policies for safeguarding seized cash, some of those policies need to be strengthened. For example, the DEA should: (1) better define situations when seized cash should be counted immediately by the seizing agent.”
Better define situations when seized cash should be counted immediately by the seizing agent?
I won’t go there.
In the Colombian context, the editorial in El Tiempo suggested it might be time “to clean the DNE from the inside.” But cleaning or reorganizing the DNE or DEA implies they can both operate transparently—that there is a way or ways to make them less susceptible to what that same editorial called “irregularities.”
I’d agree there is: eliminate the need for the cash seized to be managed at all.
Eliminate the cash.
Because as long as it’s treated as something that can be purified or at least managed, there will continue to be “evidence of a series of shady characters receiving benefits” and “numerous assets seized by the authorities, simply disappearing from the public registry.”
Whether it’s in Colombia or in the United States, whether it’s greed or desperation, the temptation to take a little extra home from work or to rationalize the funding of policing operations with the proceeds from drug trafficking are or at least should be blatantly obvious.
El Tiempo argues the Colombian government should be applauded for showing a willingness to eradicate “corruption, democracy’s most evil cancer.”
They could start by eliminating the DNE.
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