U.S. and Hong Kong (2005)

U.S. Drug Enforcement Official Opens Global Conference in Chile

DEA's Tandy outlines international challenges in combating illicit narcotics

Following is the text of Tandy's remarks, as prepared for delivery:

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DEA Administrator Karen Tandy
Opening Speech, International Drug Enforcement Conference

April 5, 2005
Santiago, Chile

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Colombian cocaine traffickers are now joining with Moroccans and using their hashish smuggling routes and methods to introduce cocaine into Spain and the northern coast of Africa. Similarly, Colombian traffickers have joined with West African traffickers -- particularly from Togo -- to smuggle cocaine into France. And Colombian traffickers have moved into China as well as I learned from my trip to China, a very successful trip a little over a month ago.

In the Philippines there has been a spike in ketamine conversion labs. Known Chinese and Taiwanese meth manufacturers have ventured into converting liquid ketamine into crystalline form in order to form a more potent drug. And to launder their proceeds we are seeing new money laundering trends including the cunning and crafty use of Euros in drug transactions and the placement of money in cash value cards as means of laundering that drug money.

In El Salvador the recently dollarized economy is attracting money-laundering cells that are operating under the cover of the estimated USD 2.5 billion in cash remittances to El Salvador from the United States every year. Argentine cells are being used to move bulk shipments of cash from Europe and Mexico to Colombia through a series of South American countries. And last year we also saw a rapid rise in the amount of black market peso exchange activity in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea.

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From my own country, the United States, I am so very honored to announce that a little over a month ago when I went to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region we signed a memorandum of intent to expand our partnership and begin a new era of intelligence sharing that will allow us to jointly target, jointly investigate and dismantle the international drug trafficking organizations on that continent.

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Drug intelligence sharing had previously been extremely rare among a number of these countries, but through this initiatives we have the opportunity and are seeing changes that reflect that information from hundreds of individual seizures throughout the region are actually being shared among these new re-forged relationships and countries. And in Operation Cold Remedy, Hong Kong, the United States, Mexico, and China joined together in an enforcement tracking operation to monitor pseudo-ephedrine shipments to Mexico for the illicit manufacture of methamphetamine. That outstanding cooperation prevented the diversion of 67 million pseudo-ephedrine tablets that could have produced more than 2 metric tons of methamphetamines to be exported to the United States and elsewhere.

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