ECO commentary on U.S. Dolphin-safe sellout and Organized Crime aspects The bulletin ECO is sponsored by more than a dozen conservation organizations at each year's annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). This year it was written by Paul Spong of Orcalab and Ben White of Animal Welfare institute. (full text in Breakers). The following two excerpts bear on the U.S. sellout on the dolphin-safe issue, as well as the organized crime aspects. It's pretty informative. Strike two The unholy Clinton/Gore U.S. Administration revealed its God of Free Trade stripes early on when it refused to impose economic sanctions against Japan and Norway for defying the IWC's ban on commercial whaling. The sacrificial altar has become bloodier by the year as fear recedes and the pirates' confidence grows. This year, Japan and Norway will reap record post moratorium harvests of death in the Antarctic "Sanctuary", the North Pacific and North Atlantic... certain of not even a slap on the wrist. America the brave. Recently, the U.S. Administration has come up with a new idea to kick start a dirty (profitable) old business... a novel interpretation of the science of catching tuna by terrorising dolphins. According to an April 29 ruling by president Clinton's Secretary of Commerce, the deadly nets which killed 7 million dolphins over four decades in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) tuna fishery do NOT adversely impact dolphins, at least not "significantly". This must have been startling news to scientists of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service who had told Congress that ETP dolphin populations weren't recovering despite the low "kill reports" (body counts) of Mexico, Venezuela, and other tuna fishing nations. Even more wierdly, several enviros (Greenpeace U.S.A., Center for Marine Conservation, World Wide Fund for Nature U.S.A.) announced their support. Their reasoning was vague to say the least. Perhaps the testimony before Congress of CMC's Nina Young helped understanding when she revealed that CMC received grants totalling $2 million in 1997 from the Clinton Administration. Could this grovelling have been a wooing of the esteem of the U.S. Commander in Chief? The immediate effect of the bizarre decision is to gut standards for American "dolphin safe" tuna. Tuna from dolphin-killing nations can now be labelled "dolphin safe" even if dolphins were chased, harassed, injured or even killed... as long as an on-board observer is willing to claim no dolphins died. Sounds to us like there'll be no need to advertise for observers, they'll be lining up. Free trade, not dolphin safety, is the lurking premise behind this political sell-out. Fortunately for dolphins, the major U.S. tuna processors (StarKist, Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea) have declared continuing support for true "dolphin safe" standards regardless. Since these companies comprise 90% of the U.S. canned tuna market, "dolphin deadly" tuna is unlikely to find shelf space in U.S. grocery stores soon. Equally fortunately, some U.S. enviros are still willing to stand up and fight for dolphins. Expect them to file a lawsuit that will return sanity to "dolphin safe" standards. ETP dolphins may be down, but thanks to their true defenders, they're not out. You may be wondering, if this was strike two, what was strike one? That happened the day the Dolphin Death Act ball whizzed by Greenpeace USA, closely followed by a hound baying "woof woof". Organized Crime and Dolphin Safety The dirty secret behind the massacre of dolphins by tuna fishermen in the eastern tropical Pacific is that organized crime syndicates own virtually all of the tuna fleets and canneries in Latin America-- and use these companies to smuggle cocaine and heroin throughout the world and to launder narco-profits. The Cali and Medellin cartels of Colombia, the Mexican drug gangs, and even the Sicilian Mafia have bought into the Latin American tuna industry over the past 25 years as ideal fronts for their criminal activities. When the US, Canada, and the European Union banned imports of dolphin-deadly tuna in the early 1990's, they inadvertently crippled the major drug-smuggling pipeline of the crime syndicates. The gangsters- -and the governments they control- - have fought bitterly to overturn the dolphin-safe tuna regulations. They even persuaded the World Trade Organisation to rule that the US embargo is an illegal restraint of "free trade." The "tuna/cocaine connection" was organized in the 1970's when two Sicilian Mafia families, the Cuntreras and the Caruanas, set up operations in Venezuela to smuggle heroin into the Western Hemisphere. Because the Mafia controls Italy's tuna industry, the Sicilians established tuna fleets and processing plants in Venezuela and nearby countries as cover for their narco-trafficking. In the early 1980's, the Sicilians entered into partnerships with the Medellin and Cali Cartels to smuggle cocaine into Europe, where the Mafia had an established heroin network. By the early 1990's, the Cuntreras and Caruanas were annually shipping 200 tons of cocaine, worth more than $10 billion, to Europe, most of it hidden in cans or frozen blocks of tuna. The Sicilians made so much money off the tuna/cocaine connection that they have invested heavily throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Law enforcement sources report that they have bought control of Aruba, effectively turning that island state into a criminal enterprise for drug-running and money-laundering. The flood of cocaine through the ports of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and other nations became so pervasive that the colloquial term for the drug became "atun blanco"- -white tuna. The largest tuna/cocaine operation was set up in the late 1980's by the Cali Cartel and the Mexican drug cartels. A Cali underboss, Jose Castrillon, formed dozens of companies and banks in Panama, which bought tuna fleets and canneries. The Colombians even bought into the Mexican tuna industry when it was privatized by President Carlos Salinas. Raul Salinas, brother of the president, became a secret partner in several Mexican tuna fleets and canneries that fell into the hands of the Cali Cartel and the Tijuana Cartel. For the past decade, two-thirds of the cocaine entering the US has come through Mexico, and almost all that was smuggled into Mexico on tuna boats sailing from South America to Mexican ports. Large cocaine shipments are even sent on to Europe from Mexico. And now Colombian heroin is flooding into this pipeline. Remarkably, both the Mexican and US governments have chosen to ignore the tuna/cocaine connection because of the corruption at the highest levels of the Mexican and Panamanian governments. The leading candidate of Mexico's PRI ruling party in next year's presidential election, Interior Minister Francisco Labastida, helped to set up the tuna/cocaine connection in the late 1980's when he was governor of Sinaloa State, the center of Mexico's tuna industry, according to a top-secret report leaked by America's CIA last year. The Clinton/Gore Administration has apparently turned a blind eye to the tuna/cocaine connection because it is desperately trying to prop up the ruling regimes in two strategic nations, Mexico and Panama, and because "free trade" in narcotics and narco-dollars is vital to their economies. Environmentalists, meanwhile, are asking all cetacean activists to help expose this dirty deal dooming dolphins. The USA's oldest and original Greenpeace, proudly unaffiliated with Greenpeace USA