Why hasn’t a single one of the snow kings who reign over the drug trade in the United States ever been caught?
Why do the mass media talk so much about drugs and so little about why people take them? Why do they condemn drug addicts instead of the lifestyle that ratchets up anxiety, anguish, loneliness, and fear or the consumer culture that leads people to seek chemical consolation?
If an illness is made into a crime and that crime is made into a business, is it fair to punish those who are sick?
Why doesn’t the United States wage war on its own banks, the ones that launder all those drug dollars? Or against the Swiss bankers who wash them whiter yet?
Why are the drug dealers the most fervent supporters of antidrug laws?
Doesn’t the free circulation of goods and capital favor illegal trafficking? Isn’t the drug business the most perfect prototype of neoliberal thinking? Aren’t the traffickers just following the golden rule of the market, that every demand will be met by a supply?
Why is it that the most popular drugs today are the drugs of productivity? The ones that hide exhaustion and fear, that fake omnipotence, that help you produce more and earn more? Couldn’t we read in that a sign of the times? Could it just be happenstance that unproductive hallucinogens like LSD, the drugs of the sixties, have receded into prehistory? Were the desperate of those times different? What about their desperations?
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A baby who doesn’t cry gets no milk, and a man who doesn’t hustle is a fool.
—FROM THE TANGO “CAMBALACHE” BY ENRIQUE SANTOS DISCÉPOLO
SEMINAR ON ETHICS
■ Practicum: How to Make Friends and Succeed in Life
■ Lessons for Resisting Useless Vices
PRACTICUM: HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND SUCCEED IN LIFE
Crime is the mirror image of order. The criminals who fill jails are poor and nearly always use small arms and crude methods. If not for those defects of poverty and preindustrial technology, slum criminals could well be wearing the crowns of kings, the wide-brimmed hats of gentlemen, the miters of bishops, or the caps of generals, and they would be signing government decrees instead of placing their thumbprints on confessions.
IMPERIAL POWER
Queen Victoria of England gave her name to an epoch that was indeed victorious, a time of splendor for an empire that ruled the seas and a good part of the lands as well. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us under the letter V, the queen led her subjects by the example of her austere life, always upholding strict morals and good habits, and it is to her in great measure that we owe the spread of concepts like dignity, authority, and respect for family, which were characteristic of Victorian society. In portraits she always wears a scowl, due perhaps to the difficulties she faced and the boredom she suffered in pursuit of the virtuous life.
Although the Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn’t mention this detail, Queen Victoria was also the greatest drug trafficker of the nineteenth century. Under her long reign, opium became the most valuable commodity of imperial trade. Large-scale poppy cultivation and opium production were developed in India at British initiative and under British control. A large portion of that opium entered China as contraband, and the drug industry pried open a growing consumer market. The number of addicts was said to have grown to about 12 million by 1839, when, observing its devastating effects on the population, the Chinese emperor outlawed the trafficking and use of opium and ordered the cargoes of several British ships impounded. The queen, who never in her life uttered the word “drug,” decried that unpardonable sacrilege against free trade and sent her fleet of warships to the coasts of China. During the two decades, with a few interruptions, that the opium war lasted, the word “war” was also never uttered.
On the tail of the warships came cargo ships loaded with opium. At the conclusion of each military action, commercial operations resumed. In one of the first battles, the taking of the port of Tin-hai in 1841, three Britons died and so did more than two thousand Chinese. The balance of losses continued more or less like that in the years that followed. The first truce ended in 1856, when the city of Canton was bombarded by order of Sir John Bowring, a devout Christian who liked to say, “Jesus is free trade, and free trade is Jesus.” The second truce ended in 1860, when Queen Victoria’s patience ran out. It was time to put an end to the obstinacy of the Chinese. Peking fell under cannon fire and the invading troops assaulted and burned the imperial summer palace. After that, China accepted opium, the number of drug addicts skyrocketed, and British merchants lived happily ever after.
THE POWER OF SECRECY
The richest countries in the world are Switzerland and Luxembourg. Two small nations, two large financial markets. About minuscule Luxembourg, little or nothing is known. Switzerland, in contrast, is famous for the marksmanship of William Tell, the precision of its watches, and the discretion of its bankers.
The prestige of Swiss banks is long-standing; a seven-century tradition guarantees their seriousness and security. But it was during World War II that Switzerland became a great financial power. Loyal to its equally long tradition of neutrality, Switzerland did not take part in the war. It did, however, take part in the business of war, selling its services, and at a very good price, to Nazi Germany. The deal was brilliant: Swiss banks took the gold that Hitler stole from the countries he occupied and from the Jews he trapped, including gold teeth from the dead in gas chambers and concentration camps, and turned it into convertible currency. The gold crossed into Switzerland without any problem, while people persecuted by the Nazis were turned away at the border.
Bertolt Brecht used to say that robbing a bank is a crime but the greater crime is to found one. After the war, Switzerland became the cave of Ali Baba for the world’s dictators, crooked politicians, tax-evading acrobats, and traffickers in drugs and arms. Under the resplendent sidewalks of the Banhofstrasse in Zurich and the Corraterie in Geneva lie the fruits of looting and fraud, transformed into stacks of gold bars and mountains of bills.
Besieged by scandals and lawsuits, numbered accounts are not what they used to be, but for better or worse the engine of national prosperity hums along. Money still has the right to wear a costume and a mask in this never-ending carnival, and referendums have proved that the majority of the population finds nothing wrong with that.
Though the money arrives as dirty as can be and the washings are incredibly complicated, this launderette leaves it spotless. In the eighties, when Ronald Reagan presided over the United States, Switzerland was the center of operations for the many-faceted manipulations of Oliver North. As Swiss journalist Jean Ziegler discovered, U.S. arms went to Iran, an enemy country, which paid for them in part with morphine and heroin. From Switzerland the drugs were sold and in Switzerland the money was deposited that later financed the mercenaries who bombed cooperatives and schools in Nicaragua. Back then, Reagan liked to compare those mercenaries to the U.S. Founding Fathers.
Whether temples with high marble columns or discreet chapels, Swiss sanctuaries dodge questions and proffer mystery. Ferdinand Marcos, despot of the Philippines, kept between $1 billion and $1.5 billion in forty Swiss banks. The Philippine consul in Zurich was a director of Crédit Suisse. At the beginning of 1998, twelve years after Marcos’s fall and after many suits and countersuits, the Federal Tribunal ordered $570 million returned to the Philippine government. It wasn’t everything, but it was something and an exception to the rule: normally, stolen money disappears without a trace. Swiss surgeons give it a new face and name, fabricating a new legal life and a fake identity for it. Of the booty looted by the Somoza dynasty, vampires of Nicaragua, nothing at all turned up. Practically nothing was found, and nothing at all was returned, of what the Duvalier dynasty stole from Haiti. Mobutu Sese Seko, who squeezed the last drop out of Congo, always visited his bankers in Geneva in a fleet of armored Mercedes. Mobutu had between $4 billion and $5 billion: only $6 million could be found after his dictatorship fell. The dictator of Mali, Moussa T
raoré, had a little over $1 billion; Swiss bankers returned $4 million.
The money of the Argentine officers who sacrificed themselves for the fatherland by waging terror from 1976 on ended up in Switzerland. Twenty-two years later, a lawsuit revealed the tip of that iceberg. How many millions vanished into the mist that shrouds their phantom accounts? In the nineties, the Salinas family stripped Mexico clean. Raúl Salinas, the president’s brother, was called “Mr. Ten Percent” in recognition of the commissions he pocketed from privatizing public services and protecting the drug mafia. The press reported that his river of dollars ended up in Citibank, the Union des Banques Suisses, the Société de Banque Suisse, and other affiliates of money’s Red Cross. How much will be recovered? Money plunges into the magic waters of Lake Geneva and becomes invisible.
There are those who praise Uruguay by calling it the “Switzerland of America.” We Uruguayans aren’t too sure about that tribute. Does it honor our democratic traditions or our own secret banking laws? Since numbered accounts came in a few years ago, Uruguay has become the Southern Cone’s cashier, a huge bank with an ocean view.
DIVINE POWER
On the last night of 1970, three of God’s bankers met in a hotel in Nassau. Caressed by tropical breezes, surrounded by postcard scenery, Roberto Calvi, Michele Sindona, and Paul Marcinkus celebrated the birth of the new year by raising their glasses in a prayer for the annihilation of Marxism. Twelve years later, they annihilated the Banco Ambrosiano.
The Banco Ambrosiano wasn’t Marxist. Known as “la banca dei preti,” the priests’ bank, Ambrosiano would not accept stockholders who had not been baptized. It wasn’t the only banking institution linked to the Church. Back in 1605, Pope Paul V had founded the Bank of the Holy Ghost, which no longer performed financial miracles for divine benefit, as it had been taken over by the Italian state, but the Vatican had, and continues to have, its own official bank, piously called the Institute for Religious Works. In any case, Ambrosiano was very important, the second-largest private bank in Italy, and the Financial Times called its collapse the gravest crisis in the history of Western banking. In this colossal swindle, over a billion dollars went missing and the Vatican itself, one of the bank’s primary stockholders and greatest beneficiaries of its loans, was directly implicated.
Many camels went through the eye of that needle. Ambrosiano wove a global spider’s web for laundering money from drug trafficking and arms dealing, working hand in hand with the Sicilian and U.S. mafias and with drug networks in Turkey and Colombia. The Cosa Nostra used it to evade taxes on the profits of its smuggling and kidnapping operations, and it sent a shower of dollars to Polish unions fighting against the Communist regime. The bank also generously supplied the Contras in Nicaragua and the P-2 Lodge in Italy, Masons who allied with their traditional enemy the Church to fight the red threat. The capos of the P-2 received a hundred million dollars from Ambrosiano, which contributed to their family prosperity and helped them set up a parallel government for carrying out terrorist attacks meant to punish the Italian left and sow panic among the population.
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For Religion Class
When I went to Rome for the first time I no longer believed in God, and for me earth was the only heaven and the only hell. But my memory of God the father from my childhood wasn’t a bad one, and deep inside I kept a special place for God the son, the rebel of Galilee who defied the imperial city where my Alitalia flight was then landing. Of the Holy Ghost, I confess, not much stayed with me, just a vague recollection of a white dove that dives down with outspread wings and impregnates virgins.
As soon as I walked into the Rome airport a huge sign loomed before my eyes: BANK OF THE HOLY GHOST.
I was young and it made quite an impression on me that this was what the Holy Ghost was up to.
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The bank was cleaned out over a number of years, its assets flowing into a number of open financial mouths in Switzerland, the Bahamas, Panama, and other fiscal paradises. Heads of government, ministers, cardinals, bankers, captains of industry, and top bureaucrats were all accomplices in the looting organized by Calvi, Sindona, and Marcinkus. Calvi, who administered monies for the Holy See and presided over Ambrosiano, was famous for his icy smile and his accounting pirouettes. Sindona, king of the Italian stock exchange, trusted by the Vatican to handle its investments in real estate and finance, also served as a bag man for the U.S. embassy’s donations to right-wing parties. He owned banks, factories, and hotels in several countries and was even the owner of the Watergate building in Washington, which earned a spot in the history books thanks to the curiosity of Richard Nixon. Archbishop Marcinkus, who presided over the Institute for Religious Works, was born in Chicago, in the same neighborhood as Al Capone. A muscular man always chomping on a cigar, he had been the pope’s bodyguard before he became his business manager.
The three men worked for the greater glory of God and their own pocketbooks. It could be said that they had successful careers. But none of them escaped the persecution and martyrdom trumpeted in the Gospels for apostles of the faith. Shortly before Banco Ambrosiano went belly-up, Roberto Calvi was found hanged under a bridge in London. Four years later, Michele Sindona, then in a maximum-security prison, asked for coffee with sugar. They didn’t quite catch the order and gave him coffee with cyanide. A few months after that, an arrest warrant was issued for Archbishop Marcinkus, for fraudulent bankruptcy.
POLITICAL POWER
Sixty years ago the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt had some advice for anyone wanting to pursue a career in politics: “Proclaim: ‘I have robbed, and I aspire to robbing on a larger scale.’ Promise to sell off every last inch of Argentine soil, to sell the Congress building and turn the Palace of Justice into a tenement. In your speeches, say: ‘Stealing isn’t easy, gentlemen. You have to be a cynic, and that’s what I am. You have to be a traitor, and that’s what I am.’”
Arlt thought this would be a sure-fire formula for success, since all the scoundrels speak of is honesty and people tire of lies. A Brazilian politician, Adhemar de Barros, won over the electorate of the state of São Paulo, the richest in the country, with the slogan “Rouba mas faz”—“He steals but he gets things done.” In Argentina, in contrast, Arlt’s advice never caught on and today it’s still impossible to find a politician who has the courage to admit he will steal or to confess he has stolen. And none of these looters of the public purse is capable of acknowledging, “I stole for myself. I stole to give myself the good life.” If any of them had a conscience that could torment him, he would at least say: “I did it for the party, for the people, for the country.” Some politicians love their country so much they take it all home.
Roberto Arlt’s formula won’t work. No Brazilian politician has copied Adhemar de Barros’s recipe. As a general rule, what garners the most votes are the arts of theater—good acting, well-chosen masks. As another Argentine writer, José Pablo Feinmann, once put it, electoral politics tends to reward doublespeak and split personalities. Many professional politicians cultivate the schizophrenia that turns timid Clark Kent into Superman just by his removing his glasses and insipid Bruce Wayne into Batman when he puts on his bat cape.
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Prices
In 1993, the tiny Brazilian Social Democratic Party didn’t have the minimum number of representatives in Congress to be eligible for the presidential elections. For a price that varied between $30,000 and $50,000, it bought a number of congressmen from other parties. One of them admitted it and, what’s more, he offered an explanation: “That’s what soccer players do when they change clubs.”
Four years later, prices had gone up in Brasilia. Two congressmen received $200,000 apiece for voting in favor of a constitutional amendment to allow President Cardoso to run for reelection.
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You don’t need to be a poli-sci major to realize that political speeches usually have to be read backwards for their real meaning. There are few exceptions to the
rule: politicians promise change and once they’re elected they change … their minds. Sometimes they turn around so fast they get dizzy and you get a stiff neck from watching them spin to the right. “Education and health first!” they proclaim like the captain of a ship crying, “Women and children first!” and sure enough, education and health are the first to drown. Their words praise hard work, and their deeds damn the workers. Politicians who swear, hand over heart, that national sovereignty has no price tend to be the ones who give it away for nothing. And those who proclaim they’ll round up all the crooks tend to be the ones who steal even the shoes off horses galloping by.
In mid-1996, Abdalá Bucaram won the presidency of Ecuador by calling himself the lash of the corrupt. Bucaram, a boisterous politician who thought he sang like Julio Iglesias and was actually proud of that, provoked widespread outrage and was thrown out of office after only a few months. One of the straws that broke the back of people’s patience was the party he threw for his eighteen-year-old son, Jacobito, to celebrate the first million he made performing miracles in the customs office.
In 1990, Fernando Collor became president of Brazil. In a quick and dirty election campaign made possible by television, Collor gave speech after moralistic speech attacking the “maharajahs,” or top bureaucrats, who were looting the state. Two and a half years later, up to his neck in scandal, Collor was impeached for his secret bank accounts and ostentatious displays of instant wealth. In 1993, the president of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez, was also thrown out of office and sentenced to house arrest for embezzling funds. Never in the history of Latin America has anyone been obliged to return the money he stole—neither overthrown presidents, nor the many ministers forced out by overwhelming evidence of corruption, nor the directors of public services, nor the legislators, nor the petty officials who take money under the table. No one has ever returned a cent. I’m not saying they didn’t intend to, it’s just that it never occurred to anyone to ask.