By Vestnik Kavkaza
In recent years the Afghan drug traffic grew so large that the CSTO qualified it as a global threat in 2011. According to some data, in three years the territory planted with opium poppies grew 50% in Afghanistan. A big sector of the shadow economy of Afghanistan is connected with planting opium poppies and production of drugs. The drugs are exported to the broadest market, including Russia.
The director of the Federal Drug Control Service of Russia, Viktor Ivanov, said that the banking system is particularly interested in drug money during liquidity crises: “The financial and banking system gets a lot of benefits from the production and sale of drugs, because all the money from the sale of drugs by organized crime is not stored under pillows. They are deposited in accounts and circulate in the financial system.”
According to Ivanov, the annual turnover of drugs amounts to from 500 to 800 billion dollars: “These are the earnings of organized crime, that is, of people who are involved in drug production, trafficking, smuggling, transit, distribution, etc. But this income, as I've said, becomes part of the financial and banking system and in the financial crisis, the essence of which, as we know, is a chronic shortage of liquidity, there is an average 90% liquidity shortage in the entire world banking system.”
Ivanov says that these funds sometimes become part of the banking system against the will of the bankers: “This is due to the way the banking system works and, of course, it requires some modernization. I can give you a rather recent example: two years ago a well-known bank, HSBC, received a fine of nearly $3 billion because it had money from the sale of cocaine. There are many examples like that. Therefore, some financial speculators and those who profit from it are actively promoting ideas related to legalization.”
The head of the Federal Drug Control Service reminds that “in the 1950s the production of cocaine began to grow in Colombia. Prior to this, cocaine had never been produced in such large quantities in Colombia… The production of cocaine has given rise to transcontinental drug transit, because Colombians do not consume it in such large quantities. Therefore, this expensive criminal product is transported to the largest, distant markets - to the United States, the countries of Central America, Europe, across the Atlantic, Africa and even beyond the EU. These are the largest markets for cocaine. Its transit through small countries gives rise to political instability, because the transit is organized not by independent groups, but by paramilitary groups, armed to the teeth, guerillas who have motor columns, airplanes, helicopters, even submarines designed for these purposes.”
According to Ivanov, “it is deplorable that in circumstances of poor social conditions and a significant number of impoverished people, it is the only field for people to make money in, to bring some income home. Therefore impoverished people are supporting the cartels. The degree of the tragedy of this situation is hard to imagine. All the transit countries are in a similar situation. And we observe similar trends emerging in Central Asia.”
