Brasília, May 18, 2004 (Agência Brasil) - Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigations - FBI - (the American federal police) and diplomats and tax and customs officials from Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and the United States are meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, beginning today, to try to discover ways to monitor the illegal transfer of funds to other countries. This activity is classified as one of the forms of money-laundering - a term that covers all attempts to give a legitimate appearance to illicitly obtained gains.
At the last meeting of the Mechanism 3+1 group (a reference to the Triple Frontier, plus the United States), the four countries involved recognized that the border regions - ports, airports, and land borders -, because they are areas with a large volume of exchange operations, deserve a more watchful control by the countries' financial authorities over the flow of goods, people, and funds.
From the perspective of the four countries, illegal transfers of money could be related to narcotraffic, money-laundering, and, especially, the financing of terrorism. A report issued by the US State Department on April 30 informs that Brazil is cooperating with the anti-terrorist campaign, but it emphasizes that this cooperation is limited by the scarcity of funds to combat crime.
Even so, the document assures that the terrorist threat is low on the triple frontier and excludes the region from the areas of "fundamental concern" when it comes to terrorism, despite non-confirmed reports that the Al Qaeda network is present in these border sites.
During a recent debate on defense, Ambassador Luiz Felipe de Macedo Soares, general undersecretary for South America in the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations, said that he considers it unlikely that Al Qaeda has cells on Brazil's southern borders. "There is no evidence that proves that terrorists are present in or financed from that region," he claimed.
In his view, this hypothesis is based on the presence of communities of Arab descendants in southern Brazil. "This suspicion is rejected by Brazil, because it disregards the multiethnic and multicultural reality of the countries on this continent," the Ambassador contends.
BRAZILIAN PARTICIPATION
In the discussion of money-laundering and the war on related crimes, Brazil is a model in the control of transfers. "Nowadays the entire national financial system is monitoring, and banks are required to inform about dubious transfers," explains Antenor Madruga, director of the Department for the Recovery of Illegal Assets and International Judicial Cooperation in the Brazilian Ministry of Justice.
Even with good supervision of what enters and leaves checking and investment accounts, he indicates that the area of judicial investigation and conviction could stand improvement. Therefore, he is betting on the efficacy of the National Qualification and Training Program to Prevent and Combat Money-Laundering, a project that brings together 25 government bodies to deal with this issue and has already produced various seminars since it was created last December.
Madruga explains that financing terrorism is just one of the government's concerns involving money-laundering. "In truth, no country is immune to the financing of terror, but we are also very concerned with crimes that involve corruption," he explains.
According to him, the fact that the Mercosur countries make it easier for people and goods to flow between them facilitates the crime of money-laundering. On the other hand, Madruga indicates the possibility of judicial instruments that can improve the investigations and convictions.
Translator: David Silberstein
