26 June 2008
U.S. Kingpin Act Lowers Global Threat of Drug Traffickers
Treasury Department official, terrorism expert cite law’s value
Washington -- A U.S. law enacted in 1999 that freezes the assets in the United States of designated international drug traffickers is proving “very effective” in reducing the threat by those traffickers to countries worldwide, a U.S. Treasury Department official tells America.gov.
Robert McBrien, Treasury’s lead official for the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act -- commonly known as the Kingpin Act -- said the law is having “a growing impact” in disrupting the activities of individuals and organizations involved in the drug trade worldwide.
The United States steadily is gaining cooperation from foreign governments in achieving the goals of the act, which seeks to deny the drug traffickers access to the U.S. financial and commercial system, McBrien said. He is the associate director for investigations and enforcement for Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. The Kingpin Act does not target the countries in which foreign individuals and entities are operating or the governments of such countries.
The Kingpin Act was modeled after a previous U.S. law (“Blocking Assets and Prohibiting Transactions with Significant Narcotics Traffickers”) that proved successful against Colombian drug cartels. That 1995 law applies U.S. financial sanctions against Colombia's drug cartels.
Designations of drug traffickers under the Kingpin Act involve U.S. interagency coordination, with Treasury leading the investigations in conjunction with the State, Justice, Defense and other federal departments.
The Kingpin Act creates two tiers of designated drug traffickers. Under the Tier I category, the president must advise the U.S. Congress by June 1 of each year of any individuals or groups that he has designated as foreign narcotics kingpins.
The White House announced May 30 that four individuals and three organizations were added to the list. To date, 75 foreign individuals and entities have been put on the list.
The individuals added were from Afghanistan, Mexico, Turkey and Venezuela, while the organizations were from Turkey, Mexico and Italy.
The White House said the action underscored U.S. “determination to do everything possible to pursue drug traffickers, undermine their operations, and end the suffering that trade in illicit drugs inflicts on Americans and other people around the world, as well as prevent drug traffickers from supporting terrorists.”
McBrien said the Tier II category is what gives the Kingpin Act “much of its teeth.” Under that category, 332 drug kingpins worldwide have been identified, with that number consisting of 123 companies and 209 individuals.
The U.S. government’s investigative work, McBrien said, identifies a pyramid that spreads out from the illicit dealings of a drug kingpin. An investigation can uncover the workings of supposedly legitimate “front” businesses that serve as the financial and economic backbones for illicit money laundering and drug trafficking activities.
“Part of our objective is to break that backbone” so drug trafficking organizations are “isolated, disrupted, and where possible dismantled,” McBrien said.
Many of the kingpin designations are in Mexico. The country is “the principal funnel through which foreign narcotics enter the United States,” McBrien said. The United States is working closely with Mexican authorities to use the Kingpin Act to help Mexico in its battle with organized crime and drug trafficking organizations.
KINGPIN ACT HELPS REDUCE NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS
Douglas Farah, a senior investigator at the NEFA Foundation, which works to stop global terrorism, told America.gov that while the Kingpin Act has not resulted in “reducing the net flow of drugs into the United States, it has helped significantly reduce the power of individuals and organizations in the countries where they operate.”
This, said Farah, a former Washington Post reporter, has made the trafficking organizations “much less of a threat to the state, and therefore a much more manageable phenomenon.”
Farah said the Kingpin Act has been “a valuable tool in allowing law enforcement and intelligence agencies to target major threats to the United States.” NEFA, which stands for Nine/Eleven Finding Answers, is a nonprofit organization created after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
Farah said the Kingpin Act is “a recognition that individuals within an organizational structure matter.”
Countries worldwide differ in their reaction when the United States designates a drug kingpin in their nation, said Farah, whose experience with this issue is primarily in Latin America. Farah said Latin Americans have experienced a positive “sea change in recent years” in their reaction.
Where drug kingpin designations were “once largely seen as a U.S. tool trying to deal with a U.S. problem” of drug consumption, Farah said, “I think there is now a far greater awareness that these organizations actually threaten the states in which they operate,” such as in Mexico and Colombia.
See the new names added to the Kingpin list on the White House Web site.
More information on the Kingpin Act, including a list of the individuals and entities designated as drug kingpins since June 2000, and the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s “Impact Report” on economic sanctions against Colombian drug cartels are available in PDF documents on the Treasury Department Web site.
More information on the NEFA Foundation is on the group’s Web site.
