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Money laundering case takes on US, RP political dimensions

Urrego alleges that VP is trying to grab his land
by Eric Jackson

The buzz about the DEA connections in the drug and money laundering case against José Nelson Urrego was first heard from outside the mainstream of the US press, in the alternative Narco News and then in the corporate but Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, the sister paper to the Miami Herald.

Yes, Urrego is a convicted drug trafficker, who allegedly played a role in payoffs to former Colombian President Ernesto Samper, served time in a Colombian prison and was something of an electronic communications whiz for diverse smuggling operations. But what is apparent but something that the US government won't admit is that Urrego was also an undercover informant or agent --- in the year prior to his September 2007 arrest here he was allowed by a special permit to enter the United States seven times, which is something that ordinary convicted drug dealers are not allowed to do. According to the Narco News, Urrego was providing bugged satellite phones to Colombian drug lords, in particular those connected with the leftist FARC rebels, which were equipped to allow US authorities to listen to the conversations held on them.

Now Urrego has told El Nuevo Herald that he had left his criminal activity behind in 2002 and was working with US authorities when he acquired Chapare Island in the Perlas Archipelago, and that he had met in Panama City with the former DEA station chief here, Art Ventura, Vice President Samuel Lewis Navarro, former banker and the treasurer of former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares's winning 1994 campaign Mayor Alemán. Urrego says that at Ventura's suggestion he saw Lewis Navarro and Alemán at the latter's office, and later had a second meeting with Lewis Navarro on a yacht in Panama Bay. The subject, Urrego claims, was an offer to buy Isla Chapare for substantially less than what he thought it was worth.

However, Ventura denies that Lewis Navarro was present at Urrego's meeting at Alemán's office. Alemán says that he just briefly met Urrego, that Lewis Navarro was not present, and that he made an offer for the island that the Colombian rejected. Lewis Navarro, in the standard press relations fashion of the Torrijos administration, refused to talk to El Nuevo Herald --- apparently miscalculating that declining to talk to a mainstream medium would kill a story pertaining to his conduct as it would do in the Panamanian corporate media.

The story was published in Spanish in El Nuevo Herald, then in English in the Miami Herald, then picked up by La Prensa. In the wake of all that, Lewis Navarro issued a press statement categorically denying that he knew or had met with Urrego or has or had any interest in acquiring Isla Chapare. The vice president and foreign minister did not submit to any questions about the matter by reporters that the Torrijos administration does not control.

Also after the story was published, a new law went into effect that will allow the government to auction Isla Chapare and deposit the proceeds from the sale into a bank account, to be returned to Urrego in the event that he is not found guilty of the charges against him. Given the notorious land sale practices of the Torrijos administration, there would be a high chance of a manipulated process in which a politically connected individual would get the island at far less than market value.

So is the US government annoyed about Panama displacing one of its DEA informants? Outwardly, there is no comment being made, nor is there any admission that Urrego's association with Ventura or post-prison comings and goings into the United States imply any relationship between Urrego and US law enforcement. Privately, American authorities are rejecting what Urrego alleges as the desperate tactics of a criminal who has been caught and will tell any lie to beat the rap.