Who are the big American drug bosses? How about the Ex-Im Bank?!

We've been wondering on this blog who are the big American drug bosses and American drug financiers, and Byron Harris at WFAA in Dallas yesterday offered up another clue: A first-rate piece of broadcast journalism ("Drugs tied to $243 million bogus loans," Dec. 27) analyzing records obtained under FOIA to show that:

small business loans sponsored by the Export-Import Bank of the United States were made to non-existing companies for equipment that wasn't even real.

Now, New 8 has discovered that some of the people who got the Ex-Im Bank loans may have drug connections. The $243 million worth of bad loans were originally made to help trade with Mexico.

The loans have been linked to the Juarez drug cartel, which is known for its brutal murders. The cartel killed one dozen people and buried them in a suburban backyard across the border fro El Paso.

Another loan was linked to the Sinaloa drug cartel, whose business is smuggling heroin into the United States.

The federally funded Ex-Im Bank apparently backed loans to people affiliated with both cartels and the Mexican drug trade.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, News 8 asked for all documentation related to defaulted small business loans made to Mexico from 2002 to 2005. Although there were nearly 200 bad loans, so far, information on only 34 cases has been turned over.

But the bank did give a list of the defaulted loans and the names and addresses of the people who got them in Mexico.

"They have drug connections, which is very disheartening to think that the U.S. government is lending money to documented traffickers in the drug trade that are tied into the cartels in Mexico," said Phil Jordan, the former head of the El Paso Intelligence Center for the DEA and Border Patrol in El Paso.

Jordan ran background checks of the borrowers with two federal sources and found borrowers from Juarez and Sinaloa with criminal ties to money laundering, organized crime or drugs in Mexico. Jordan said he was surprised to find that the Ex-Im Bank didn't do similar checks before guaranteeing the loans.

"To lend them millions of dollars and then to not be a fail safe system of checks and balances is just throwing money away," he said.

Between these revelations and the questions about US ownership of a drug plane downed earlier this year, not to mention the raft of official corruption, you have to seriously wonder whether at least some of the "drug bosses" on the American side might just reside quietly in the bowels of government?

UPDATE: Ex-Im Bank looks like tip of corruption iceberg.