Carlos
Slim, the Mexican billionaire whose $250 million cash infusion bailed the New
York Times out of a tight cash crunch last week, has long-standing business ties
with wealthy Mexican businessmen suspected of involvement in Mexico's so-called
“Cartel of the Southeast,” the drug trafficking organization (DTO) based in
Cancun which came to light two years ago with
the crash on Mexico’s Yucatan
Peninsula of an American-registered (N987SA) Gulfstream jet carrying nearly four
tons of cocaine.
A long-time lieutenant of
Carlos Slim's, Fernando Chico Pardo, left Slim's employ to take over ASUR, a
publicly-traded corporation which observers accuse of moving large quantities of
cocaine through Cancun International Airport, which the company runs and
manages.
ASUR
controls a total of a dozen Mexican airports, and exemplifies the
“corporatization” which has transformed the drug trade in the same process of
vertical integration and market consolidation which has left, in other large
industries, like automobiles, a handful of global multinational players
dominating market share worldwide.
Slim's big investment
represents an encroachment into the ownership of an icon of American democracy
of a man, and a massive fortune, whose provenance have gone largely
unexamined. But on the topic of Slim's shady dealings, all eyes seem to be
curiously averted. However it seems highly doubtful the Times' ownership is
unaware of them.
The barely-concealed facts
regarding Carlos Slim’s shady connections are well-known to journalists in
Mexico. They deserve to become more well-known here in the U.S., because links
between Mexico's exploding narco-economy and current-world's-richest-man Carlos
Slim don’t end with Fernando Pardo's ASUR.
Too Rich and Too Slim
Regardless
of how his investment in the New York Times does, analysts
say, Carlos
Slim comes out a winner. His
quarter-billion dollar investment buys
him
prestige as an owner of one of the world's best-known and
most-influential
newspapers that his status as the world's
second-richest man cannot.
Owning a piece of the
New York
Times, goes this reasoning, provides
the kind of “cover” which credit card commercials call
“priceless.”
"Carlos
Slim's stake is a danger to the New York
Times,"
said the Seattle Times in a scathing editorial. While calling it
"an
ominous move," the editorial neglected to mention any of
Slim's more unsavory
connections. American newspapers don't mention
"narco-politicos." It
is something approaching a taboo.
Start with a universally
acknowledged fact: Despite occasionally valiant efforts by our Southern
neighbor, Mexico’s chief growth industry is drug trafficking.
Is
Carlos Slim being tainted unfairly for
having risen to the top in a troubled country better-known as a
corrupt cesspool
of gangsters and narco-traffickers than as an incubator for
world-class
entrepreneurs ready to take on Warren Buffett for the title
of "world's
richest man?"
Let's take a look.
We pretend to no great accounting
expertise. We never worked for Arthur Anderson.
(Well, maybe that's a bad example.)
But Carlos Slim's numbers don’t add
up.
The
Narco-Politico's
Start with
a 10-year old wire service story about a former top Mexican drug
lord, Amado Carrillo Fuentes,
which will provides us with some useful
benchmarks. Because of his vast armada of
planes, Fuentes was known in Mexico, as “Lord
of the Skies."
Fuentes died in 1997
while undergoing plastic surgery
during an
attempt to engineer the ultimate “Extreme Makeover.” In wire
service stories reporting his death,
his wealth was compared with that of
Carlos Slim, who had just been named Forbes magazine’s
'Richest Latin American."
When Fuentes died, he was
worth $25 billion,
said
the story. Carlos Slim was worth $6
billion.
Other
published reports at the time agree with this assessment of Slim's
wealth. For
example, the May 7, 1999, Mexico City
newspaper La Jornada fixed Slim's
fortune at “something like $6 billion.”
At about the
same time Latin Trade
magazine pegged Slim as being worth $7.2 billon.
After working hard for more than 40 years, Carlos
Slim was worth a
hefty $6 billion.
A 50 Billion Dollar Decade?
Fast
forward to news reports about Slim's New York Times investment
last week. They
state Slim is currently worth, variously, between $57
billion and $60 billion dollars.
After already making six billion
dollars,
a time when
most
might be tempted to relax and enjoy, Carlos Slim made over $50
billion
just in the next ten years.
We can't even begin to imagine what
that works out to
per hour. But we're sure its a lot. But...
is
this possible?
Drug Lord and Lord of the Skies
Amado Fuentes,
recall, managed to
salt away no more than $10 or $15 billion a decade. And he was in
the cocaine business, where counting your money can
be a bigger problem than making it.
Carlos Slim owned Sears.
Was
there an epic sort of run in Mexico on Kenmore washer-dryers?
Has anyone ever made $50 billion before--or
anything close--in just ten years?
We think not. We think something about Carlos
Slim smells fishy.
The Cartel of the
Southeast
Numerous
well-sourced reports
in the Mexican press accuse
Fernando Chico Pardo's
Grupo
Aeroportuario
del Sureste, S.A. de C.V., (ASUR)
of playing ball in
the drug
trafficking major leagues, pointing a finger at the company's
reported complicity in the big "drug move" in September of 2007
which ended
with an American Gulfstream jet carrying 4 tons of cocaine crashing
in the
Yucatan.
Pardo and Slim
are not
casual business acquaintances. Pardo
was Carlos Slim's right-hand man for more than 16 years before
striking out on his own,
with Slim’s blessing. He retained a seat on the board of
Slim’s holding
company. And his
brother, Jaime
Chico Pardo,
remains the President of Slim’s major holding, Mexican
telecommunications giant
Telmex.
Two years ago
Pardo attended
a big conference, along with some top American
"swells" (to use a
word popular during the U.S.'s last Great Depression) on
"North American
Integration" at the Banff Hotel in Canada,
according
to Michel Chossudovsky of the Center for Research on Globalization.
Former
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was there. So too was former
CIA Director James
Schlesinger, and
former Reagan Secretary of
State George Schultz.
These are, of
course, not the kind of guys
one thinks of as sipping a little something apres-ski
while
discussing "Current Trends in Drug
Trafficking."
But then there is the matter
of the provenance of the American-registered Gulfstream, which was caught in the
Yucatan carrying almost four tons of cocaine, which exposed the workings
of the Cartel of the Southeast
As it happens, the Gulfstream
(N987SA) was known to belong to the CIA in Columbia and Central America, and to
fly for the DEA as well, and it had even flown extraordinary renditions,
according to exclusive reporting in Narco
News.
More than the usual number of
unanswered questions
With
all its manifold faults, the
New York Times is an American journalistic institution.
Shouldn't preserving the
tattered shreds of what Walter Cronkite used to call “the people’s right to
know” be worth a few hundred million that might otherwise be going to Wall
Street bonuses?
Shouldn't ownership of the New
York Times be treated as a matter of national security, just like that of, say,
Raytheon?
And most
puzzling of all, why
has a revered (well, semi-revered) institution like the
Times let Slim buy his way to such a large stake?
The
answer to that last questions was answered indirectly last week, by the
Executive
Director of the United Nations' crime and drug watchdog
group,
UNODC.
"Money
made in the illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the
global
financial crisis," Reuters quoted
Antonio Maria Costa.
"In the
midst of the current world financial crisis, drug money is, in
many
instances, currently the only liquid investment capital," said Costa. "With little
unemployment, the drug trade at this time could be the world's only growth
industry."
Most people, perhaps naively, think of drug
money as bad. Carlos Slim's investment in the N.Y. Times, on the other
hand, may illustrate that some don't consider all drug money to be bad.
Does Carlos Slim represent our drug
money? That portion of drug trafficking proceeds which are--of necessity--being
regularly re-invested back into the United States?
TUESDAY:
Why Carlos
Slim's shady connections don't seem to bother the owners of the Times.