In December 2009, just one year after his death, the corpse of former Cypriot president, Tassos Papadopoulos, was dug up from under a slab of marble and stolen from its grave. For three months now, authorities have been searching in vain and coming up with politically-charged theories of "whodunit" -- to no avail.

Then, earlier this week, an anonymous informer tipped-off the police as to the location of the body and laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of none other than Antonis Kitas, a.k.a. "Al Capone" -- an imprisoned criminal mastermind currently serving two life sentences for multiple murders. His motive? Authorities believe he wanted to use the corpse as collateral to ensure his release from prison.

If all this turns out to be true, I'm curious as to why "Al Capone" thought this was a good idea and, moreover, how he thought he could get away with it. Then again, he does seem pretty used to getting his way:

According to former inmates, Kitas enjoys a lifestyle of comparative luxury behind bars, financed by his criminal empire, which he continues to control.

Kitas escaped from custody, briefly, two years ago, giving his guards the slip while being treated for a minor illness at a private Nicosia clinic.

During his six-month stay in the clinic, despite the presence of prison guards, Kitas was frequently joined for the night by his Chinese wife, and had access to a laptop computer and several mobile phones.

A prison guard said Kitas was never handcuffed during his stay in the clinic, and warders were told not to complain about the lax security. "As ever," a retired prison official said: "Al Capone was a law unto himself."

A brand new round of "El Qaeda" warnings from Antonio Maria Costa of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime still requires a pretty big intuitive leap:

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says "there is more than just spotty evidence" indicating a link between drug traffickers and terror groups.

"And before this becomes a very serious problem, it has to be dealt with and nipped in the bud," Costa said in an interview with The Associated Press, on the sidelines of a seven-nation drug summit in the Senegalese capital of Dakar.

Cocaine from South America has been moving through the West African coast for several years, and experts believe drugs are then parceled out to smugglers who move the cocaine north by boats and by road. One suspected smuggling route crosses portions of the Sahara desert controlled by insurgents. The cocaine-for-arms trade is especially worrying given the recent expansion of an al-Quaida-linked terror group, which was once based exclusively in Algeria but now has tentacles in Mauritania, Mali and Niger.

"There is plenty of evidence of a double flow. (Of) drugs moving, arriving into West Africa from across the Atlantic ... and the trading — exchange — of cocaine for arms," Costa said.

Costa did not say how extensive the cocaine-for-arms exchange was thought to be, or which countries were involved.

There seems to be an awful lot of hand-waving happening here. What we know is that drug smugglers are moving cocaine through West Africa, including regions where Al Qaeda linked militants also operate. This, in itself, may be cause for concern. But many, including prominent politicans, seem to be assuming that an established link exists when the only reported case of a suspected al Qaeda affiliate making a coke deal --again trotted out as evidence in this article -- was with someone who turned out to be a DEA agent. Until there's some more evidence, a little more cautious reporting might be in order.

In any event, if al Qaeda is getting into the cocaine business, it would seem to suggest that the organization is moving outside its core competency in order to raise money, and perhaps setting up more opportunities for authorities to infiltrate their networks.

For those of you who don't subscribe to the bimonthly print edition of Foreign Policy, you're missing a great feature: the FP Quiz. It has eight intriguing questions about how the world works.

(Meanwhile, prepare for the Olympics' opening ceremony by taking Slate's national-anthem quiz.)

The question I'd like to highlight this week is:

By how much did opium poppy cultivation change in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2009?

a) up 22 percent      b) remained stable       c) down 22 percent 

Answer after the jump …

Read on

The frequent stories of grusome beheadings and seemingly rand mass-murders coming out of Mexico's drug war can make the country sound like its on the brink of anarchy. But as Alexandra Olson points out, by regional and historical standards, the country's violence is not unusually high:

Mexico's homicide rate has fallen steadily from a high in 1997 of 17 per 100,000 people to 14 per 100,000 in 2009, a year marked by an unprecedented spate of drug slayings concentrated in a few states and cities, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said. The national rate hit a low of 10 per 100,000 people in 2007, according to government figures compiled by the independent Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies.

By comparison, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates of between 40 and 60 per 100,000 people, according to recent government statistics. Colombia was close behind with a rate of 33 in 2008. Brazil's was 24 in 2006, the last year when national figures were available.

Mexico City's rate was about 9 per 100,000 in 2008, while Washington, D.C. was more than 30 that year.

Of course, all of that is cold comfort to residents of Ciudad Juarez, which had a mind-boggling homicide rate of "173 per 100,000 in the city of 1.3 million, or more than 2,500 murders last year."

Mexico's relative national stability combined with what can only be described as out of control carnage in the drug war zone, supports Jorge Castaneda's argument that Mexico should be looked at not as a state under seige, but as a country increasingly embroiled in a military quagmire inside its own borders.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger went a little off-script yesterday and floated a novel solution for his state's overcrowded prison system:

"We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. ... And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons," Schwarzenegger said, predicting it would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

About 19,000 of the state's 171,000 prisoners are illegal immigrants, according to the most recent statistics available online. The state spends more than $8 billion a year on the prison system.

Aaron McLear, spokesman for the governor, said later that Schwarzenegger's comments did not represent a concrete proposal, but "a concept somebody mentioned to him" and he could not say where the governor came up with the $1 billion figure.

Aside from the troubling fact that Schwarnegger seems to have just made up the $1 billion figure and not consulted anyone before bringing up this idea, his timing is a bit unfortunate given that just five days ago 23 Mexican inmates were killed in a prison riot in Durango. Two other riots last year killed at least 20 inmates each. Here's how the Los Angeles Times described the country's penal system:

Mexican prisons have grown more crowded and dangerous as the government carries out a war against cartels, with more than 67,000 drug arrests in three years. The increased incarcerations have often created an incendiary mix by jamming members of rival gangs inside the same walls.

The penal facilities also have seen dramatic breakout attempts as drug gangs seek to rescue captured members, sometimes with success. In May, a convoy of men dressed in what appeared to be police uniforms cruised into a prison in the northern state of Zacatecas and calmly led 53 inmates to freedom as surveillance cameras rolled. Authorities said it was an inside job.

Yes, definitely sounds like a place that could use another 19,000 prisoners. 

Since the Pants Bomber thankfully failed to blow up Nortwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, the United States has taken a long, hard look at the security failures that allowed him onto the plane -- particularly given that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's own father, a prominent Nigerian banker, had alerted U.S. authorities to his 23-year-old son's radicalization. Increasingly within Washington, there are calls for heads to roll. So, a straw poll: Who's it going to be?

1. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. In a epic foot-in-mouth moment, she said the "system worked," just after the attack. 
2. Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center. His agency failed to analyze the intelligence that might have stopped Abdulmutallab before he got on the plane. Today, the New York Daily News ran an editorial calling for his firing, noting that he did not return from vacation when the news broke on Christmas Day. It turns out that is untrue, and wagons are circling.
3. The director of the Transportation Security Administration. Alas, the position is unfilled, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint. The conservative senator is holding up security expert Errol Southers' nomination over concerns he might allow TSA employees to unionize.

For the first time, alleged al Qaeda members are being charged by U.S. prosecutors on narcoterrorism charges. Oumar Issa, Harouna Toure and Idriss Abelrahman were arrested in Ghana last week in a sting operation coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Agency and Ghanaian authorities and were hoping to move hundreds of kilograms of cocaine through West Africa to finance al Qaeda and its North African offshoot, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb. 

U.S. attorney Preet Bharara says the arrests "reflect the emergence of a worrisome alliance between al Qaeda and transnational narcotics traffickers," but if these guys represent the vanguard of a new generation of narcoterror, we probably don't have too much to worry about:

The operation took shape in August, when a paid DEA informant posing as a Lebanese radical encountered Issa, an alleged fixer for a criminal organization that operated in Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali, according to a sworn statement from veteran DEA agent Daria Lupacchino.

The two met in September in Ghana. The informant said he represented members of FARC, which has targeted U.S. citizens with bombings, kidnappings and other violence in recent years. Issa told the informant, in a conversation recorded by authorities, that his associates had circumvented customs agents and could ensure "safe passage" through the African desert, the affidavit said.

The informant later met with Toure, identified by Issa as "the main guy," and verified Toure's identity using a passport he mistakenly left at a hotel that served as the meeting site, the DEA agent wrote.

"Toure stated that he has worked with al Qaeda to transport and deliver between one and two tons of hashish to Tunisia and that his organization and al Qaeda have collaborated in the human smuggling of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian subjects into Spain," the Lupacchino affidavit said.

Toure also allegedly described efforts to kidnap European citizens and to obtain foreign visas, the court papers said.

Granted we don't many details, but I doubt that most serious high-volume traffic drug smugglers -- even if they got taken in by the agent's Lebanaese radical/FARC story -- would brag about all of the other nefarious criminal enterprises they're involved with or be sloppy enough to leave their passport behind when meeting with a cocaine supplier.

New reports of 11,000 people killed by Brazilian police over the past six years are perhaps one indication that violence in the super-star Amazon country has gotten a wee bit out of hand.

Never fear, there is a long term solution already under consideration: prohibit "offensive" video games, with the option to punish their distribution with jailtime. In all honesty, Brazilian Senator Valdir Raupp probably did not have human rights violations in mind when he proposed the bill, which was recently approved by Senate's Education Committee. It follows on the ban last year on violent computer role-playing games "Counter-Strike" and "EverQuest," and Venezuela and China's bans on warlike and mobster-glorifying games respectively.

CNET's Dave Rosenberg has lambasted Brazil's move, suggesting they deal with "larger social issues, including lack of parental oversight," instead. They praise the US system of industry self-regulation, which relies on ratings to isolate children from violent games.

The Brazilian law is probably overkill, but lets not get all starry eyed about the glories of free-market entertainment violence. Did nobody notice a few years back when U.S. generals begged Hollywood producers to stop showing torture in a favorable light, since troops were getting inspiration on prisoner treatment from 24?

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

With more than 2,000 killings this year in Ciudad Juarez, pictures of gunshot victims strewn about the streets and bulletproof-vested shopkeepers attending terrified customers, potential paramilitiary group formation, calls for UN peacekeeping troops and dire predictions of the violence spreading north the United States-Mexico border is increasingly looking like an all out war zone.

Perhaps it is because of this that I was surprised this morning to attend a conference calling for recognition that the transborder region is increasingly more a region than a border. Speakers at "Rethinking the U.S.-Mexico Border," came from both sides of the border, but it's more accurate to see their flawless bilingualism as an expression that they truly do view the area as a region that must work as one in order to harness the potential of what is already a $300 billion economy.

Among the recommendations presented by one group, the "Binational Task Force on the United States-Mexico Border," was the need to target demand for illicit drugs on both sides of the border (20 percent of drugs produced in Mexico are consumed there, most of the rest goes to the US), as well as the creation of parallel border agencies (such as the synergy between Canada and the US) facilitating coordination between the two countries. Importantly, they called for a reinstating of the American ban on assault weapons, and more work on preventing arms and cash smuggling south. They also advocate immigration reform in the US and more focus on development in Mexico to stem flows north. On the flip side, Mexico also needs to start taking illegal immigration seriously.

Given that NAFTA is now 15 years old, none of this should sound very surprising. But remembering that a lot of the talk about the border in recent years has involved walls (electrified or otherwise), vigilantes, and how to make everybody just stay put on their own side, this all sounded pretty good. As most of the speakers emphasized, it's not about philosophically agreeing with unilateral solutions or not, they simply don't seem to work.

Jesus Alcazar/AFP/Getty Images

While being sworn in for a second term as mayor of San Pedro Garza Garcia, Mexico, Mauricio Fernandez jumped the gun a bit in announcing the death of a notorious narcotrafficker:

"Black Saldana, who apparently is the one who was asking for my head, was found dead today in Mexico City," he told his cheering supporters Saturday in San Pedro Garza Garcia, near Monterrey.

The problem was that the barefoot, blindfolded corpse of "Black Saldana" - whose real first name is Hector - wasn't found for another 3 1/2 hours, according to Mexico City prosecutors. And he wouldn't be identified for two days.

When asked about his remarkable foresight, the mayor first responded, "Sometimes there are coincidences in life; it's better to look at it this way." 

The U.S. Department of Justice announced new drug prosecution guidelines today, instructing prosecutors not to arrest medical marijuana users or distributors in states where medical marijuana is legal. Glenn Greenwald puts the announcement in the context of an international developments -- particularly Mexico's recent decision to decriminalize pot for personal use:

[A]lmost every country in the region is now actively re-considering its criminalization approach to drug policy.  Even a modest willingness on the part of the U.S. government to pursue or even tolerate alternative approaches could play a major role in accelerating that process, as countries in virtually every region of the world have long been coerced by Washington to maintain strict criminalization approaches and to embrace the destructive Drug War model.

In a column last May, FP Editor in Chief Moisés Naím called the United States "both the world’s largest importer of illicit drugs and the world’s largest exporter of bad drug policy," despite the fact that most Americans acknowledge that the current approach isn't working:

First, 76 percent of Americans think the war on drugs launched in 1971 by President Richard Nixon has failed. Yet only 19 percent believe the central focus of antidrug efforts should be shifted from interdiction and incarceration to treatment and education. A full 73 percent of Americans are against legalizing any kind of drugs, and 60 percent oppose legalizing marijuana.

This “it doesn’t work, but don’t change it” incongruity is not just a quirk of the U.S. public. It is a manifestation of how the prohibition on drugs has led to a prohibition on rational thought. “Most of my colleagues know that the war on drugs is bankrupt,” a U.S. senator told me, “but for many of us, supporting any form of decriminalization of drugs has long been politically suicidal.”

In other words, don't expect to see Obama signing federal drug law reform legislation any time soon. At this point, Obama advocating any form of decriminalization at a federal level would be about as politically prudent as pushing shariah law or collective farming. But that doesn't mean the administration can't subtly change the tone of the debate.

In contrast to the Bush adminsitration's explicit condemnations, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske said the U.S. would take a "wait and see" attitude toward Mexico's decriminalization. As far as I've seen, the administration has also been quiet on Gov. David Patterson's recent revision of New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws. Today's announcement, as the Atlantic's Chris Good noted, was actually a traditionally federalist measure, rooted in the right of states to set their own drug laws. 

Officially, Kerlikowske maintains that "legalization is not in the president's vocabulary, and it's not in mine," but the adminsitration also seems to be signaling that while they shouldn't be expected to take the lead on this issue, they're perfectly content to sit back and let the zeitgeist shift on its own.

MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

Italy's highest court may be able to strip Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Teflon coating.

In July 2008, Italian lawmakers "freed" Berlusconi with an immunity law that freezes criminal cases against the prime minister, president and heads of both chambers of parliament while they are in office. (See last week's edition of The List for more.) Now prosecutors are saying this law is unconstitutional, as it goes against the provision that all citizens are equal before the law.

The Constitutional Court could rule by the end of the week; however the Italian media says the decision could be delayed because the 15-judge court is unable to reach a consensus.

Berlusconi would most likely have three cases re-opened against him. The most devastating of these cases accuses Berlusconi of paying British lawyer David Mills $600,000 in 1997 to give false testimony in Berlusconi's corruption trials. Mills was sentenced to 4 1/2 years for taking the bribe in February, however he will likely never see jail because of Italy's appeals system.

Other cases that will likely be re-opened include a tax fraud and false accounting case and a case in which he allegedly tried to corrupt senators.

If his immunity gets taken away, Berlusconi's government will likely survive the fallout, however it will only add to growing dissatisfaction with him after a string of sex scandals.

ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty Images 

"It's war!" cries Brazilian newspaper O Globo, lamenting an article in the latest New Yorker on gang violence in Rio de Janeiro, which comes out mere days before the International Olympic Committee decides the location of the 2016 summer games.

The article, by journalist Jon Lee Anderson, describes the fighting between gangs in Rio's favelas, which he says are spread everywhere in the city: "there is no way to completely escape Rio's misery."  O Globo, which has a section online dedicated specifically to the city's Olympic bid, notes that Anderson said the timing of the article is a coincidence, and that he believes Rio is fully capable of hosting the games.

The paper couldn't help but notice the "sad coincidence" that this same week, Chicago -- Rio's main competitor -- faced its own shocking gang violence moment, with widespread circulation of a cell-phone video footage showing the fatal beating of 16-year-old Derrion Albert.

As Chicago booster Michelle Obama said herself, "the gloves are off".

ANTONIO SCORZA/AFP/Getty Images

Yesterday I mentioned the "hijacked" cargo ship Arctic Sea had been carrying weapons from Russia to the Middle East. Now, the BBC reports that the editor of a Russian maritime journal who proposed the theory has been forced to flee:

Mr Voitenko - who was among the first to cast doubt on official explanations about the ship's disappearance - told the BBC it was nonsense to suggest pirates had been involved.

Instead he suggested the ship may have been carrying a secret shipment of weapons as part of a private business deal by state officials.

Speaking to the BBC from Turkey, Mr Voitenko said he had received a threatening phone call from "serious people" whom he suggested may have been members of Russia's intelligence agency, the FSB.

The caller told Mr Voitenko that those involved in the mysterious case of the Arctic Sea were very angry with him because he had spoken publicly, and were planning on taking action against him, he said.

"As long as I am out of Russia I feel safe," Mr Voitenko told the BBC. "At least they won't be able to get me back to Russia and convict [me]."

 

Guess he hit a nerve.