In a WhatsApp chat that quickly devolved into depravity, a group of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents boasted about their “world debauchery tour” of “boozing and whoring” on the government’s dime. They swapped lurid images of their latest sexual conquests. And at one point they even joked about “forcible anal rape.”
Within months of that jaw-dropping exchange, an agent in the group chat was accused of that very crime.
The 2018 arrest of George Zoumberos for allegedly forcing anal sex on a 23-year-old woman in a Madrid hotel room set off alarms at the highest levels of the DEA, beginning with a middle-of-the-night phone call from a supervisor to the agency’s headquarters outside Washington. But U.S. officials never even spoke with the woman and made only cursory efforts to investigate.
The DEA has refused for years to discuss its handling of the arrest, instead telling The Associated Press in response to its questions that “the alleged misconduct in this case is egregious and unacceptable and does not reflect the high standards expected of all DEA personnel.”
Why the fuck are members of the DEA even doing a “world debauchery tour?” Why are they leaving the U.S. on the government’s dime at all?
If they’re working to stop international drug flow, it makes sense for them to deal with the police in other countries. Sometimes that could involve in person meetings.
A “world debauchery tour” is definitely a bad look though.
AKA a job security program since now they need to miraculously stop drugs in every country on the planet instead of just the one that employs them and since they have this vast new jurisdiction to cover, they’ll obviously need hefty increases to their budget to cover it.
I think there’s room for international cooperation that isn’t Team America: World Police. But if you want to argue that the DEA is on the wrong side of that spectrum, I won’t stand in your way.
It’s one of the ways they got Pablo Escobar