The U.S. government targeted the support networks of the FARC’s 48th Front on Thursday by naming several of its members as “specially designated narcotics traffickers,” who are banned from doing business with U.S. companies.
According to a press release from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) “designated the 48th Front’s finance chief Olidem Romel Solarte Ceron and key leaders of the Jefferson Ostaiza Amay drug trafficking organization as specially designated narcotics traffickers for acting for or on behalf of the FARC.”
OFAC alleges that Solarte Ceron is responsible for distributing drugs for the FARC’s 48th Front, and is that front’s “chief of finances and logistics.”
The office also says that Ceron “worked closely” with former commander of the FARC’s 48th Front Gentil Gomez Marin, alias “Edgar Tovar,” and with the Jefferson Ostaiza Amay narco-trafficking group in Ecuador.
The U.S. also added alleged FARC arms trafficker Gilma Montenegros Vallejos to the list, on the grounds that the guerrillas paid him “to gather weaponry in Peru and transport it to the FARC’s Southern Bloc.”
OFAC director Adam J. Szubin said that the additions to the list of narco-traffickers “build on Treasury’s longstanding campaign against the FARC by exposing their key support networks in Ecuador and Costa Rica.”
Other individuals designated as drug traffickers include Ecuadoreans Miguel and Edison Ostaiza Amay, “key members of the Jefferson Ostaiza Amay drug trafficking organization.” Two agricultural companies located in San Jose, Costa Rica, owned by previously designated FARC financial associate Jose Cayetano Melo Perilla, were also added to the list.
Szubin said that OFAC will work to “continue to dismantle the FARC’s financial and logistical networks and reveal its facilitators.”
The list began in 1995 when former U.S. President Bill Clinton issued an executive order to prevent foreigners who traffic drugs and launder money from doing business in the U.S. or with American citizens. All assets of individuals on this “Clinton List” within U.S. jurisdiction are frozen.
