Rotting wood heave, as many barefoot Wayuu Indians washing machines, fans and sound on their backs from the hull of the ship docked at the northern tip of Colombia.
Throughout the night, they unloaded, thousands of boxes piled 30 feet high, and put them down and wait for the truck battered slopes.
From the torch, the customs officer Claudia Gaviria ripped a box, in a makeshift pier in Puerto Nuevo La Guajira Peninsula. She counted on documents provided by the ship number of fans.
Gaviria said: "If there are more than instruments that we will seize the goods and investigation, as it may be contraband, and even money laundering, recording boxes, to another." We found that some of the papers on this ship tampering. "
Contraband smuggled into Colombia is a multi-billion dollars as part of money-laundering operations, damages legitimate businesses, destroy Colombia's bid to reposition itself as a booming economy after decades of political and drug violence.
In a complex program, drug money from Colombian drug dealers in the form of goods overseas, often accompanying legitimate merchandise. Once the goods are sold and the sales receipt, drug money is clean.
Money from the trafficking of drugs, weapons and human estimate of the amount of money-laundering in Colombia by an expert as much as $ 17 one billion in 2011 - more than 5% of the total value of the economy, and exceeded last year's total foreign direct investment.
Most uninstall Wayuu goods - most of it legitimate - make way in the desert town of Maicao, wild west where half of the retail sale price of brand name perfume and whiskey, next knock take Shepulada and Giorgio Armani label merchandise.
"At a lower price than they are in the factory production of goods sold, said all of this, said:" The national tax agency head Juan Ricardo Ortega.
Last year, up to 128 million contraband seized by the authorities to Colombia to estimate the amount of less than 10%, according to government data released.
Taxes Maicao northern head of the Office Luiz Carlos Canas said, "This is an impossible task," he checked aluminum ingot 18 crossed the border from Venezuela. "We just do not have the manpower to check everything."
Exports are also part of money-laundering operations. False paperwork to establish overseas sales does not exist. Once you have submitted the paperwork at customs offices, the international drug trade cash can be entered without causing suspicion.
Colombia's official reporting year gold exports will reach 700,000 tons, Ortega said that although the industry can only produce 150,000 tons. Although there are a considerable number of artisanal mining, consider some additional suspect Ortega mostly fictitious sales.
Distortion
Thus, although Colombia continue to change their image, from a violent troubled country, magnet and booming oil and mining industry investment, economic and foreign sales tend laundering cocaine traffickers.
Colombia for decades has been in the efforts to reduce crime and the drug trade, the Marxist rebels, the right-wing paramilitaries and cocaine cartels waging a US-backed war. But criminal gangs have become more wily deceive authorities.
In the 1980s, the most famous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, back in the day, so much cash to a simple cleaning of the aircraft from the U.S. distributor just bury it around their homes. Now, things are more complicated.
Gang clean up their own money, there are three main ways: physical smuggling undeclared cash across the border, through the financial system, and through contraband.
This is not only drug trafficking proceeds - about $ 880 million a year - to be cleaned. Earned money to corruption, gun running, prostitution, illegal gold mining also need cleaning.
Once it makes it a $ 33 billion U.S. dollars in Colombia's economy, which can consist of several basis points, exaggerate economic growth data, the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit leader Luis Edmundo Suarez said the government agency that looks suspicious money movement, and send them surveys.
"Money Laundering is only interested in money injected into the system, Suarez said:" He's office in Bogotá. "It's the pain of creation, which distorts the economy and changing the reference price, because he does not care if he lost the money, but it is clean."
Ortega estimated that a large range of inflation, real estate, retailing, export, import and agricultural output may be different than the official data reported that due to money laundering fake or exaggerated sales.
Ordinary Colombians question Ortega said, money laundering goods mostly sold at below market prices, elbows out, often blinds competitors.
On the contrary, it can create bubbles in the prices of certain industries, when criminals pay too much for goods, such as farm or additional bill of restaurants and shops.
Ortega said: "For a poor country, and its impact on society is cruel." "This limits economic growth and undermine legitimate business opportunity."
Cattle, for example, is a common financing tool with both leftist rebels the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, and other drug cartels drugs.
Cut beef cattle prices
They tend to pay more than the value of cattle and, in turn promoted the neighboring property prices. Then they sell assets, cattle, get fast cash, cuts in the price of livestock in the region.
Many in the central province of Meta agricultural enterprises, for example, is looking to sell out, because they can not compete with low livestock prices quoted.
"You can beef prices in some rural areas, a gang of cattle being sold their shares, the" Suarez said.
Intimidate farmers to sell their land, and they can not refuse to provide a cash payment, for security reasons, according to the land element ranchers who requested anonymity.
"It is difficult to reject the drug traffickers," rancher said. "And we are still faced with illegal immigrants from Venezuela as contraband cattle, slash the price of beef."
Government says the FARC is one of the largest owners of cattle - assets easily converted into cash to buy their 8,000 strong fighting force of weapons or food and clothing.
Surprisingly, Colombia's financial system is among the most rigorous and successful prevention of money laundering. Cash and red flag up any unusual movement.
Bank charges a monthly customer complaints mountains of paperwork required to open an account, but Maria Mercedes Cuellar head bank union Asobancaria, said it is to maintain system security. "Colombia in their systems to have more control than most places in the world, even more than in the U.S.," she said.
However, this also leads to its own set of problems, she said, because it is conducive to a cash-based economy, the money laundering. They just outside the system, she said.
Even so, Interbolsa, Colombia's largest financial institutions, until it is the authorities seized last year, are undergoing investigation of suspected money laundering.
Although the authorities detect smuggled goods has proved tough, turn to accountants to seize smugglers, as the U.S. authorities did in the 1930s with the legendary gangster Al Capone.
"If we can not pursue their contraband or money laundering, tax evasion, we will pursue them," 克劳迪亚吕 Kang, the tax authority's legal department official said, arduous task. One of her agent was assassinated a few weeks ago, with her job as a tax investigator.
Attorney General's Office said that with government money laundering has become more difficult cases piling up, the judiciary needs more personnel to be tried.
"Admittedly, we need to commit this crime of money laundering lawyers and investigators to triple the number of" Attorney General Eduardo Montealegre told Reuters reporters.
Economic morphine
This seems huge cash into the economy - to luxury cars, real estate, clothing - will lead to economic prosperity, but experts disagree.
, "Suarez said:" It's like when you're a cancer patient morphine. "At first, you feel good, you have less pain, but then you die, but absolutely no way that you can consider the economic positive money laundering."
Underdog smuggling do the leg work of the people must not see most of the profits, but they say, there are few other ways to make a living.
"How else can we feed our families?" Hu said in the Guajira Ancho a highway police car was pulled from his post. Police confiscated plastic jerry cans of fuel, more than one billion dollars in gasoline running business thrive along the porous border with Venezuela as part of.
Cheap fuel, 2 cents per gallon, from Venezuela cars with fake tanks, hollowed seat and double paneled doors smuggled across the border, in the lucrative pumping stations in Colombia and $ 5 for sale.
As Hu ancho being questioned police car, his partner accelerated increase in their red Renault 18, tear the spiked barricades, police training their rifles.
Hu ancho later released. He said he only earned $ 13, braved four hours endurance race in the south and gasoline, but he did not intend to give up.
 
 



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