Latinnews Archive
Caribbean & Central America - 10 June 1997
Purge follows row over seized assets; NEW NARCOTICS CONTROL BOSS GIVEN LIMITED POWERS
The increasingly important role played by the Dominican Republic in the drugs and money-laundering businesses, and the authorities' failure to come to grips with the problems, were underlined by a sudden purge of senior police and anti-narcotics commanders on 21 May.
The national police chief, Rear-Admiral Camilo Antonio Nazir Tejada, was replaced by General Jose Anibal Sanz Jiminion, while air force General Juan Rafael Folch took over from Rear-Admiral Julio Cesar Ventura Bayonet as head of the Direccion Nacional de Control de Drogas (DNCD).
Row over seized assets. Ventura had been in the DNCD job since October 1993, but his removal was signalled after a row over the fate of assets confiscated from imprisoned drug-traffickers, which brought him into conflict with public prosecutor Guillermo Moreno.
A few days before Ventura was sacked, President Leonel Fernandez created a new body to take charge of confiscated assets, under the direct control of the Consejo Nacional de Drogas (CND), headed by Marino Vinicio Castillo -- which was another way of saying that the DNCD could not be trusted with the custody of the assets it had seized.
On 13 May, the DCND confiscated US$ 2.5m worth of assets belonging to Maximo Antonio Reyes (alias Tito), a suspected international drug gang boss, who surrendered on the previous day.
The DCND said Reyes ran a money-laundering operation in Santo Domingo, using, among other methods, a car dealership. He had previously operated in New York, where he was allegedly involved in seven murders as the head of a Dominican gang known as 'La Compania', and had returned to the Dominican Republic one jump ahead of the US police.
All five alleged members of La Campania are wanted in New York on charges of drug-trafficking, money-laundering, murder and assaulting the police.
Cali's man. The US authorities are also pressing for the extradition from the Republic of the man they regard as the Cali cartel's top Caribbean representative, Rolando Florian Felix, who is serving a 20 year prison sentence for bringing almost a tonne of Colombian cocaine into the country on a ship intercepted by the DNCD in December 1994.
As far as the DNCD is concerned, Reyes is merely Florian Felix's front man in both New York and Santo Domingo.
CND head Castillo is strongly in favour of extraditing drug-traffickers to the US, even though the 1910 treaty stipulates that criminals arrested on Dominican soil cannot be tried in US courts.
Attorney-general Abel Rodriguez del Orbe advocates negotiating a new extradition treaty, to stop the Republic becoming a bolt-hole for 'thieves and pirates.'
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