The White House

Attn: Dr. Barack Obama J.D. Esq.

President of the United States
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

Our family comes before you today, having futilely written your
predecessor in 1989, to place upon you, and this nation, the responsibility
not just for this innocent family’s destruction at the hands of criminal
ideologues acting under color of law, but for all of the good and decent
people of Latin America where the national fabric of our societies has been
devastated as a direct consequence of the black market legislated into
existence by the Acts of the Congress of the United States. The legislature of
the United States had extensive experience with the tragic consequences of
black markets since at least Prohibition and Al Capone’s Chicago, your own
hometown, except this time the victims are not predominantly white nor
represented in Congress while some ethnic groups actually profit
economically and politically at the expense of the destruction wrought upon
the living environment of other ethnic groups in America and innocent
citizens in countries like Colombia and Mexico which have paid the bloody
price over and over again.

The reason this burden has been placed upon this family is because we
have lost more than most in this farcical situation whereby in order to
prevent somebody from using a substance that is harmful but hardly as lethal
as cigarettes, people’s lives need to be destroyed and the funding of all kinds
of massacres are justified; absurd. Our family owned and operated ships in
the Caribbean city of Cartagena since the early 1950s. Our ships plied the
fluvial and maritime waters of Colombia and the Caribbean engaged in
legitimate commerce, for clients such as Cementos del Caribe S.A.
(http://www.argos.com.co) and the Colombian government
(http://www.maritimasjustice.blogspot.com). They called on American ports
primarily to transport raw material for Monomeros Colombo-Venezolanos
(http://www.monomeros.com/), a chemical manufacturer headquartered in
our, by the early 1970s, hometown of Barranquila, Colombia. Our city was
the most peaceful place imaginable with only a few murders per year, crimes
of passion mostly really, and our land was fertile and bountiful.
 As the 1970s came to a close, the black market created by legislation of
the Congress of the United States and implemented domestically and
internationally (http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?page=drugscoca-
docs_coca - who) by the executive branch for which you now are
responsible for, President Obama, became the first man made life and death
peril our ships, our office staff, our crew, our company, and our family had
ever faced. At first, the phenomena manifested itself as lower ranked
crewmembers detained while on shore leave with small quantities of cocaine
in the early 1980s and our company, Maritimas Internacionales Limitada
(Maritimas), being fined for something we were never able to control as a
ship has many possible hiding places, the kind of profits associated with this
behavior corrupted many, and security on Colombia’s docks was non-
existent; we did, however, hire a private security firm to help with
controlling these incidents. Then, sometime around 1983 or 1984, U.S.
Customs Service agent Victor Thompson, based out of the U.S. Customs
Service Tampa office, a regular port of call for our ships for decades by then,
contacted Julio Zakzuk; this man had already investigated the Zakzuk family
as he stated that he was aware we were not involved in the drug trafficking
on board our ships but he requested, in the name of the U.S. government, the
cooperation of our company against “those who would poison American
youth”. Julio Zakzuk agreed to cooperate as any decent person would and
visited the Tampa offices of the United States Customs Service in 1983 or
1984 at the request of U.S. Customs Service agent Victor Thompson ;
according to the testimony of one of our captains, Captain Carlos
Rubio(whom we have finally found after 5 years of searching), Victor
Thompson was the U.S. Customs official who regularly inspected the Don
Alejo upon its arrival at the Port of Tampa during the early 1980s.

The scope of the cooperation rendered to the United States Customs

Service included, but was not limited to:

A network of observers at all Colombian ports; Julio Zakzuk and family

were the oldest and biggest private ship owning enterprise in Colombia and
knew the industry and its key aspects in a way which must have been very
valuable to the United States Customs Service. These observers were tasked
with photographing and reporting on all ships leaving Colombian ports for
years; this activity went on for years.

All three of our ships, the Don Julio, the Don Alejo, and the Don Nicky
were outfitted with hidden remote tracking devices supplied and installed by
the U.S Customs Service in order to be able to know exactly where our ships
were at every moment; this too went on for years.

Undercover U.S. Customs Service agents were assigned to fictitious duties

on board our ships, even placed on the payroll, in order to observe and report
any illegal activities onboard, as well as participate in the entrapment of
Colombian traffickers. This went on for years and on one occasion one of
the undercover agents was discovered and was about to be assassinated; he
appeared at the doorstep of our Barranquilla home in the middle of the night
and Julio Zakzuk saved his life by getting him out of the country.

Julio Zakzuk, at the request of U.S. Customs Service agent Victor

Thompson, would carry out the entrapment of drug traffickers, which he
would approach, trick into placing their narcotics on our ships, and help
capture them in the United States as they attempted to claim their cocaine or
the cocaine was handed over to U.S. Customs upon arrival of the ship. We
can document many such operations through the testimonies of Captain
Rubio and Yolanda de Zakzuk who herself witnessed the mid-April 1987
arrest resulting from one of these entrapment schemes on the Miami River.

We believe that this conduct in and of itself was completely out of line,
ethically and morally, and the only explanation we can come to as to why
Julio Zakzuk would agree to such a dangerous request is that the inevitable
violence that accompanies black markets, as your own hometown of
Chicago suffered during that tragic American experiment with Prohibition,
had not yet reached the epic proportions it did in 1987 as Pablo Escobar
battled other drug families, extradition, and the governments of the United
States and Colombia. Other factors that surely must have influenced this
fateful decision, and which at the same time also gave U.S. Customs
leverage when soliciting cooperation from foreign ship owners, were the
changes in the law introduced by the Congress of the United States in 1984
which became progressively more controversial and ideologically driven
culminating with U.S. Customs Commissioner William von Raab’s
discretionary policy of “zero tolerance” during the summer of 1988 (our Don
Alejo was seized in the midst of this ideological sophistry and feeding
frenzy), as chronicled by the Journal of Commerce on January 2, 1987:

“…new tougher law renders a ship or aircraft subject to seizure simply

if unmanifested illegal drugs are found.”

“Until October, US Customs could seize vessels only if the district

director had evidence the line was intentionally involved in the
smuggling.”

“Despite the toughened law, which also boosted the fines to

$1,000 from $50 an ounce of cocaine seized and to $500 from $25 an
ounce of marijuana”

A few years later, United States 9th Circuit Judge Reinhardt:

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge, concurring:
15

I concur in the result. Although I believe that Commissioner von Raab's zero 
tolerance policy was arbitrary and capricious and served to deny innocent 
persons their constitutional rights

The other factor we know must have served Mr. Thompson well was his
simplistic and Manichean cry,” They are poisoning American youth”; Julio
Zakzuk, who had been cigarette and liquor free since the age of 25 and an
avid sports fan, provided many career opportunities in sports and financially
sponsored, in toto, 3 professional baseball teams, was the Colombia National
Baseball federation President, supported boxing, asylums for the old, little
league teams in lower income neighborhoods as well as at the country club,
was the Danish Consul in Barranquilla for 20 years, was knighted by the
Queen of Denmark in 1986, and like any other decent but misguided and
uninformed citizen believed U.S. Customs agent Victor Thompson’s
simplistic way of framing the issue: “We are the good guys”. Julio Zakzuk’s
reputation was such that he did business transactions worth millions
routinely with only a handshake; a different time, place, and culture than
modern day America, and we charge that this U.S. Customs agent took
advantage of his naïveté and good faith.

The first sign that foreshadowed the danger that was to come in this
destructive and parasitic relationship our family and our ships found
ourselves entangled with your government, President Obama, that we can
document, is the incident recorded in Captain Carlos Rubio’s testimony (we
have recently found Captain Rubio who has been able to piece together for
us the Don Julio’s Bahamas incident and other details). He testifies that a
drug trafficker, who had been duped by Julio Zakzuk into placing 30 kilos of
cocaine onboard our ship and which were given to U.S. Customs upon the
ship’s arrival in the United States, was not captured by U.S. Customs nor
where any headlines of the cocaine seizure published; the result is that Julio
Zakzuk is almost assassinated in his own office except he was able to calm
this man down (who can be found even now) by writing him a check for his
lost cocaine, in dollars, from one of our U.S. based banking accounts. (We
have hired an investigator firm to find our decades long banker, Pamela
Cherrington, from 1970s Pan American Bank, and when she transferred to
the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, we followed) President
Obama, we want to see proof that U.S. Customs reimbursed Julio Zakzuk
for this loss and of what happened to that cocaine given to U.S. Customs.

We would also like to know exactly who was supervising this agent as he
devised his schemes, which almost got Julio Zakzuk killed and if there was
any realization of the danger they were placing our family in as the your
government not only exposed us to the violent drug trafficking community
in Colombia as collaborators of American drug law enforcement, a death
penalty on its own, but at the same time the actions of the federal
government were closing off all the traditional trafficking routes through the
blanket radar coverage of the Florida peninsula (through which 75% of the
cocaine entered the country, 80% of which belonged to the Medellin Cartel
according the DEA spokesman Tom Cash), seizing thousands of boats, and
dozens of ships forcing drug traffickers to turn even more to commercial
shipping, such as ours. The result was, where before our ships had been
stalked by low level drug traffickers for years, now they were squarely
between the Cartels, and many other trafficking groups in our own
hometown, and their billion dollar market in the United States, as
documented by the Miami Herald, the Journal of Commerce, and many other
news organizations while reporting on the exponential rise in number of
cocaine seizures on board commercial carriers.
CREW HELD ON DRUG CHARGES
Miami Herald, The (FL)
October 18, 1986
Section: LOCAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: 2B
“Agents on the lookout for cocaine shipments on commercial
vessels”
“Customs agents have been watching for cocaine shipments on
commercial vessels for the past month, O'Brien said. Agents
reasoned that recent Coast Guard and Customs successes in
seizing smugglers' boats coming in from Colombia and the
Bahamas would force smugglers to turn to commercial
vessels”, he said.
"We put a real effort into freighters and their cargos," he said.

HEAT IS ON, BUT DRUG CARTEL SEEMS INVINCIBLE

Miami Herald, The (FL)
November 29, 1987
Section: FRONT
Edition: FINAL
Page: 1A
Memo: THE MEDELLIN CARTEL: America's Cocaine Connection; first
of six; see description of series at end of text.
“By late this year, it was clear that the war against cocaine had
evolved once again. In Operation Beacon, U.S. Customs agents
crushed a cartel air-and-sea transport group that had
developed an infrared/radio beacon for cocaine loads, what
Customs called "the most sophisticated methods yet seen."
The problem was, these methods were already obsolete.
They had been replaced by a simpler, but more effective,
scheme -- smuggling through commercial cargo.
In rapid succession over the past 14 months, three record
cocaine loads were found ingeniously hidden in legitimate
cargo containers arriving from South and Central America --
6,900 pounds in a furniture shipment in West Palm Beach,
5,487 pounds in a tropical fruit shipment in Chicago and 8,052
pounds inside hollowed-out mahogany boards in Miami.
Although the seizures were unprecedented, they were mere
grains of sand in the great stream of cargo imported from
South America.”
“Ochoa was responsible for protection and bribes; Escobar
handled production and transportation.”

This strategic environment directly caused the following situation: on a

spring 1987 voyage of the Don Alejo, a sizeable amount of cocaine was
found during a routine mid-voyage inspection; an official Act was recorded
in the ship’s log, the cocaine was dissolved in oil drums and dumped
overboard, and the ship continued its voyage to the United States. Following
the ship’s return to Colombia, Julio Zakzuk received an appointment request
from then Colombian Senator Luis Lorduy Lorduy, which he granted.
Unbeknownst to Julio Zakzuk, the owner of the cocaine thrown overboard
came to this meeting, and after attempting to recruit Julio Zakzuk to his drug
trafficking activities and being rebuffed, finally identified himself as Victor
Anichiarico (Pablo Escobar’s man in our hometown of Barranquilla),
pronounced us as financially responsible for the cocaine thrown overboard
(he even knew the coordinates of where the cocaine had been destroyed),
and informed us that, should we not accede to his demand for payment, our
family was dead. (See Graphic Context page on website for graphic context
of this man’s bloody reign in Barranquilla). This incident occurred the week
of April 6-10th, 1987; that Sunday night, April 12th, 1987, Victor Anichiarico,
the drug trafficker who owned the cocaine, along with his Colombian
Senator facilitator, accosted Julio Zakzuk, Yolanda de Zakzuk, and their
teenage children while they were waiting for carryout at a local restaurant.
The situation did not degenerate into their assassination because it was in the
middle of the street as he had backed his Mercedes Benz behind ours and
threatened our lives; the next day, April 13, 1987, as immigration records
can prove, we all fled to Miami.

Upon our arrival to Miami, that same week at the Miami River, Julio
Zakzuk assists U.S. Customs agents in capturing cocaine traffickers that had
been targeted in one of Mr. Thompson’s drug stings onboard the Don Julio.

For the first time since the 1950s our enterprise was left without the
supervision of the pillar of our family and our company: Julio Zakzuk.
On May 16, 1987, one month later, Julio Zakzuk attempted to reenter
Colombia incognito, flying from Miami to Bogota and then to Barranquilla.
The precautions were for naught as the drug traffickers had bribed our
gardener (who by then was working next door at the Londono house) into
informing of any sightings of Julio Zakzuk, which he did on that same night
as he arrived at our home in Barranquilla. This man, Ariel Villareal, a
Venezuelan national, was also the one who opened the door for the
traffickers to come in and torture Julio Zakzuk and steal what they could to
compensate themselves for the loss of their cocaine. (See related Police
Report at the Web site). The information about his involvement came from
the interrogation all household employees were subjected to by Colombian
National Police, which then raided Mr. Anichiarico’s house in search of the
valuables taken with no success. What they did find was more than a dozen
machine guns with permits signed by a general of the Colombian army in
Bogota.

As recorded officially by the 5th Notary of Barranquilla, Colombia, on May

21st, Julio Zakzuk reorganized our enterprise by removing the management
in place and naming two of his sons to positions of authority: Alejandro
Zakzuk, Julio’s first born from his first wife, and Carlos Zakzuk. We had
already had problems with lower level office staff filtering the true
destinations of our ships to drug traffickers who by then had learned that the
destination reports given to port authorities, such as Admiral Ciro Fernandez
at the Port of Barranquilla offices, were purposefully being falsified to throw
off drug traffickers. That same week, U.S. immigration records can prove,
Julio Zakzuk entered the United States for a yearlong exile in Miami and our
ships were left in the hands of a fallible ad hoc management because of
circumstances created by your own legislation.

And then, just weeks later, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bear, on June 3,
1987, seizes the Don Julio in international waters, and after removing the
U.S. Customs undercover agent posing as the oiler on our ship (a Mr. Jorge
Lozano of Ecuadorian nationality) and questioning the crew, the Coast
Guard is given orders to turn us over to the Bahamian authorities and accuse
us of drug trafficking; as if placing us in the crosshairs of drug traffickers
and directly causing Julio Zakzuk’s torture and exile, exactly when we
needed the “good guys”, the government you now lead decides we are more
of a liability than an asset and decide to destroy our ship, which they succeed
in doing as the Bahamian attorney reports (see www.LetItBeKnown.org).

The ship was seized in international waters not in Bahamian territorial

waters and without the knowledge or permission of the Bahamas, as stated
to the press by the U.S. Coast Guard. Indeed, Mr. President, in a separate
interview on this incident to the Miami Herald it clearly states:

June 5, 1987
Section: LOCAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: 4C

COAST GUARD SEIZES 64 TONS OF POT

JEFF LEEN Herald Staff Writer

“The tip that broke the case came from the National Narcotics Border
Interdiction System, which coordinates drug intelligence information
among several federal agencies, Diaz said.”

This confirms our crew’s testimony which testify that our ship and the
Coast guard cutter Bear were located closer to the island of Bimini, 50 miles
from Miami and still in international waters, by Friday June 5th, 1987,
slowly on its way to Miami federal court when suddenly the Bear turns
around and starts navigating eastward. Minutes later they are informed that
they are to be taken to Nassau to be charged domestically by the Bahamians
under domestic drug trafficking charges. Standard practice, as reported by
many news organizations, was that ships and vessels of all types were
brought back and forfeited by the self-financing federal law enforcement
agencies in order to keep the proceeds of the sale.

The other reason we believe we were denied American standards of justice

was that your government also must have wished to prevent our plight and
scandalous circumstances from entering American jurisprudence where such
a legal precedent would have ended up creating many future difficulties for
U.S. Attorneys in “civil forfeiture” proceedings; this is no small detail
because one of the most valuable forfeitures U.S. Customs could make was
the that of a foreign ship owner’s property, as the fact that the most absurd
forfeiture “laws” (deodand, in rem) have mostly been confined to the
admiralty laws proves.

What’s even more perverse, Mr. President, is the fact that the 5 kilos of
cocaine our crew and ship were charged with, later struck down by the
Magistrate, belonged to the U.S. Customs undercover agent and
incriminating us with it is a criminal act against our property and the well
being of the Colombian crew for which we hereby legally petition you to
compel transparency and accountability for government actions by ordering
the U.S. Customs Service to comply with our multiple Freedom of
Information Act requests. The failure to comply with our F.O.I.A. requests
on the part of the U.S. Customs Service amounts to obstruction of justice;
since 2005 we have been seeking justice in this country by attempting to
point out to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. government
department overseeing the U.S. Customs Service (see our 2005 email
correspondence with D.H.S. agent Anita Trujillo), the miscarriage of justice
we have been subjected to with no interest shown on their part to investigate
themselves.

We also believe that our situation, Julio Zakzuk’s dangerous proactive

cooperation, his assassination attempts, his torture 2 weeks before this
incident, were not what the supervisors who reviewed this case on June 3-5
1987 wanted public, especially if Julio Zakzuk was assassinated during one
of their ridiculous entrapment schemes which actually created these crimes
and with U.S. Customs legally owing him the cost of the 30 kilos paid by
Julio Zakzuk at gunpoint, with all the resultant lawsuit and negative
publicity. We believe this, and the fact that we had already helped Mr.
Thompson earn all the medals, made us expendable in their eyes; the fact
that they did not bring our ship to U.S. federal court with all its pesky
fairness issues proves that there was no evidence of criminality on our part,
and yet, your government decided, on their own, to exercise “cowboy
justice”, against somebody else’s property, of course, and in a piratical act as
this occurred in international waters.

We respectfully request an official explanation for these acts by the

government you now find yourself responsible for against our family, our
crew, and our property which ended up bankrupting us, as our financial
records online at www.LetItBeKnown.org show; we lost the Don Julio
because when we were finally able to retrieve our ship and free the crew, 2
years later, the ship had been looted and the sea water was above her
engines. No government claiming to be a democracy and purporting to act
within the rule of law, as even the prior administration tried to make
everyone believe, may act so without accountability.

As detailed above, the office was abandoned by Julio Zakzuk’s torture on

May 16th, 1987, in order to save our lives and the man we left in charge,
Alejandro Zakzuk, not one month after his father had been tortured, began
his malfeasance against the innocent stockholders of our family corporation
by forging documents which transferred 40 stocks from Julio Zakzuk to
himself; the forgery can be proven because on June 15, 1987, the date used
in the forgery for the legally required stockholders’ meeting, quorum, and
consent cannot be true; Julio and Yolanda de Zakzuk were in the United
States at the time and not present in Barranquilla at this meeting, as the
“Act” purports to record.

The next act by Alejandro Zakzuk not within the scope of his employment,
absolutely without the consent of the innocent owners against whom he had
just committed fraud, and not for the benefit of the corporation which had
owned and operated the Don Alejo legitimately for 15 years in any way, and
while taking advantage of our absence, was to allow a ton of cocaine to be
placed on board the Don Alejo to be taken to the United States. The
traffickers were successful and Alejandro Zakzuk flew to Miami during the
summer or early fall of 1987 where he was given a million dollars in cash by
one Alberto Llinas of Barranquilla. The testimony given by Sylvia Zakzuk,
who was told what had transpired by Alberto Llinas himself at a cocktail
party in Barranquilla, can be found on the In Our Own Words page of our
site.

That same year, 1987, Alejandro Zakzuk flew to Switzerland (he had a
sister living in Lausanne, Rosario Zakzuk) and we believe it is there that he
deposited the funds. What is undeniable is the fact that this man had sold his
stock in Maritimas to a Miryam Sales in February of 1987 (see Don Alejo
Affair page of site), had just gone through a divorce which had left him
without a home, car, or liquidity. Now he owns multiple properties, a
multinational corporation (see http://www.navescolombia.com) and
everything is in his wife’s name; indeed, in September of 1988, the same
month the U.S. visas of the innocent owners of the corporation were
criminally canceled in the middle of the forfeiture proceeding to keep us
from telling this story to a federal judge and jury, Alejandro Zakzuk again
forges documents which transfers “his stock” to his wife’s name in a blatant
attempt to distance himself from the corporation he had just helped destroy.

To be absolutely clear on the events that amount to a violation of our Due

Process of Law rights, under American law (the Due Process Clause of the
Constitution), and under international maritime as well as humanitarian law:

Our ship, the Don Alejo was seized in Port Arthur, TX. On June 23, 1988,
while we were still exiled in Miami since April of 1987. In the month of July
or August Julio Zakzuk hired Miami “drug bar” attorney Edward Shohat to
represent us, but this man wanted the last of our savings (the Miami Brickell
condo, see Zakzuk Financials online) which we were not prepared to give up
nor should we ever have been placed in this situation; the seizure of our ship
(U.S. Customs was asking for a million dollars to release the ship) imposed
such hardship that this in effect stripped us our ability to defend ourselves
and coming after the Bahamas debacle where we had already sold our
Barranquilla home, at a loss, to pay attorney fees is an abuse of authority.

Sometime around August of 1988, I personally called the Tampa office of

the U.S. Customs Service to insult Mr. Thompson and to let him know that
he was the worst possible kind of human being; the one who willfully
destroys another’s hard work in arrogance. We then flew to Colombia to
seek loans in order to pay for attorney fees and then suddenly we are
notified, no later than October 1988, a few weeks after arriving, that our
U.S. visas had been canceled.

As this Government Accountability Office update on Civil Asset Forfeiture

dated April 24, 1989 detailed:

ASSET FORFEITURE: A BILLION

DOLLAR PROGRAM
Forfeiture law allows the government to take property,
including cash, that has been illegally used or acquired without
compensating the owner. In cases of $100,000 or less, forfeiture
can be handled administratively by the seizing agencies such as .
the Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs Service.
Generally, this proceeding is used on smaller cases involving
cars, boats, planes, and other types of property such as jewelry
and artwork. For amounts above $100,000 and for all real
Property, the cases are handled judicially by U.S. Attorney
offices and the courts.

I can assure you, Mr. President, that I was not allowed to seek assistance
from an impartial federal judge because of the actions of your government. I
labored at my husband’s side from the time of our marriage in 1969 in the
Dominican Republic (later married in Miami by our corporate attorney John
Corrigan) until 1982, or so, when my husband’s first born son, Alejandro
Zakzuk, came back from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The
taking of my property in this fashion cannot be sanctioned with even an
appearance of legitimacy; a process where the known innocent owners were
not allowed to tell their side of the story, which should not even be the
situation in the first place; what happened to the presumption of innocence?

The proof that we were not in agreement with anything done in that flawed
proceeding are the letters of protest sent by Julio Zakzuk to President
George H. Bush and Colombian President Virgilio Barco in 1988-89, copies
of which we are requesting now (at least the White House letter).

This case informs the outcome of what should have been in a federal
courtroom:

No. 91-1617

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit. - 965 F.2d 311

Argued Dec. 2, 1991.Decided June 2, 1992.Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc

Denied Oct. 6, 1992
Relying on these general principles of agency and their underlying presumptions, we
will not impute Harry III's knowledge of his own illegal activities to Modernaire in
spite of the extent of Harry III's authority. Harry III was dealing drugs to benefit
Harry III not as part of his job at Modernaire. Harry III testified that no proceeds
of his illegal conduct went to Modernaire in any way, and the government offered no
conflicting evidence. Harry III's interest indisputably lay in concealing his own drug
deals from Modernaire thus undermining the presumption that an agent reports his
knowledge to his principal. Consequently, we will not mechanically attribute Harry
III's knowledge of his own drug deals to Modernaire to defeat Modernaire's
innocent owner defense. Cf. 4,657 Acres in Martin County, Florida, 730 F.Supp. at
426-27 (Where a corporate agent allowed a plane carrying narcotics to land on
corporate property as part of a drug trafficking enterprise, the corporate agent's
knowledge was not imputed to the corporation because the agent was not acting for
the benefit of the corporation.).4

The next act attributable to the self financing federal drug law enforcement
agencies is the circulation of a letter among our business and social
acquaintances, in Spanish, alleging that everything Julio Zakzuk had ever
had was the product of drug trafficking and numerous properties in the
United States were slandered to be owned by us; I personally showed a copy
of this letter to our banker of more than 20 years, Pamela Cherrington, who
knew exactly where every penny we had ever made came from and she
responded angrily. As stated above, we have hired investigators to find her.

The final act in this charade by the U.S. Customs Service was the honoring
of one of my husband’s colleagues, Manuel del Dago owner of Agromar, a
shipping concern of much less history and tradition, as “Leading Shipowner
of Colombia” not even 6 months after, frankly, stealing our ship.

My husband requested an appointment with General Maza Marquez, then

head of Colombian government security forces attempting to stop the
offspring of your government’s black market, Pablo Escobar. He told him
the whole sordid story and was assured, as was in fact the case, that the
Colombian government would not investigate him.
We are aware that this situation should have been resolved in a courtroom
but since it was by the acts of the agents in the U.S. Customs Service and the
Department of State, entities you now find yourself responsible for,
President Obama, that not once but twice obstructed justice, while
bankrupting us, to keep this case away from a federal judge and since we can
now prove that the self financing federal drug law enforcement agencies lied
to the Associated Press and the Miami Herald and that they are now guilty,
under any reasonable analysis, of obstruction of justice, we believe that it is
indeed your government’s responsibility to investigate criminal acts whether
committed by regular citizens or agents acting under color of law.

We believe that the only way to make the violent injustices inflicted upon,
not just our family, but upon our neighborhoods and cities, here and in Latin
America right, is for the innocent to die of a hunger strike on your doorstep,
the White House’s doorstep, for it is from here that the black market is
managed, manipulated, and profited from in many ways, so that it may not
be denied forevermore.

Yolanda de Zakzuk
And family