Maneuver of deputies covers us with shame before the world
Overriding the approval of the protocol for the elimination of illicit trade in tobacco products is more than just a matter of dirty politics. It is a mockery of international agreements that fills us with shame and condemns us to the stigma of a country dominated by organized crime.
The protocol to which the deputies are turning their back is exhaustive when describing in which cases illegality is incurred both in the manufacture and sale of wholesale tobacco derivatives, their import and export and other intermediate steps until the tobacco arrives to the end consumer. It foresees virtually all the maneuvers by which organized crime networks infiltrate cigarettes into consumer markets.
Six Latin American countries have ratified this protocol: Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua,
Panama and Uruguay. Brazil, which has also done so, has already made known its impatience because the
Paraguay is procrastinating on the matter. Federal senator Nelsinho Trad, head of the Brazilian delegation at Parlasur, told the Paraguayan Congress that the aforementioned protocol is a first-order instrument in the fight against cigarette smuggling of which Brazil is a victim. In his note addressed to the President of the Senate, Oscar Salomón, Senator Trad affirms that the low cost of illegal cigarettes sold in his country “facilitates the initiation of young people into smoking with the inevitable dependence on nicotine and the development of diseases widely known”. And he adds later: “In addition to generating significant tax evasion, cigarette smuggling finances arms and drug trafficking, is associated with homicides, money laundering and other crimes of organized crime.”
The honorable ones who systematically close ranks with the local cigarette underworld are
subjecting the Nation to the most degrading ridicule in living memory. They are the first link in the international chain of crime that does not stop, according to the Brazilian senator, only in the smuggling of tobacco products but also includes drug trafficking, contract killings and money laundering.
The deputies have already proven what they are capable of taking away from Seprelad its competence to demand reports of suspicious operations. By freezing this protocol they confirm their misconduct.
Will they ever stop?
