RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) - Thousands of police swarmed into slums across Rio de Janeiro state Friday, cracking down on the drug trade in the largely lawless zones, officials said. The operation came after violence between rival factions in the drug trade left 17 people dead last weekend, but police denied the operation was motivated by that fighting. A police spokeswoman said the operation, ordered by state police chief Col. Wilton Ribeiro, would continue indefinitely in the slums, known as favelas. [continues 149 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- An escalating drug war has left 17 people dead in the past three days, including four men shot to death Monday in a slum near the capital, police said. The four were believed to have links to drug traffickers in the slum known as Juca's Hole, said police in Niteroi, across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro. On Sunday, police found 13 bodies in a parked minivan in the Vila da Penha district on Rio's poor north side. The eight men and five women were shot and stabbed to death in what police said was a vendetta between rival drug gangs. Police believe the victims died late Saturday or early Sunday. [continues 272 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - An escalating drug war has left 17 people dead in the past three days, including four men shot to death Monday in a slum near the capital, police said. The four were believed to have links to drug traffickers in the slum known as Juca's Hole, said police in Niteroi, across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro. On Sunday, police found 13 bodies in a parked minivan in the Vila da Penha district on Rio's poor north side. The eight men and five women were shot and stabbed to death in what police said was a vendetta between rival drug gangs. Police believe the victims died late Saturday or early Sunday. [continues 271 words]
SAO PAULO, Brazil, July 10 (Reuters) - Brazilian police arrested two Paraguayans caught smuggling 100 kilos (221 pounds) of marijuana into the country on bicycles, a common occurrence in the southwest region, police said on Tuesday. The 18- and 24-year-old were arrested on Monday as they cycled to the city of Dourados 120 kilometers (75 miles) inside Brazil after sneaking over the border cross-country near the Paraguayan city of Pedro Juan Caballero, a major marijuana trafficking route. "They do the run at night and sleep hidden in jungle during the day," said Dourados police chief Elasaro Moreira da Silva. [continues 97 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO - There is a deadly new drug problem in Latin America's largest country: cocaine consumption. Brazil once was mainly a transit point for cocaine from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru bound for the United States and Europe. But today, Brazil has become one of the world's largest markets for illicit drugs, particularly cocaine. That has changed an important dynamic in the drug war: a belief in Latin America that U.S. demand alone has fueled the vast illegal-drug industry. [continues 730 words]
Once a Transit Point, Country Is Now a Big Consumer There is a deadly new drug problem in Latin America's largest country: cocaine consumption. Brazil, a sprawling country of 170 million, once was mainly a transit point for cocaine smuggled from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru and bound for the United States and Europe. But today, Brazil has become one of the world's largest markets for illicit drugs, particularly cocaine. The sharp increase in Brazilian consumption has changed an important dynamic in the drug war: a belief in Latin America that U.S. demand alone has fueled the vast illegal drug industry in countries where coca leaves are grown and transformed into cocaine and from which the drugs are smuggled north. [continues 390 words]
CUBATAO, Brazil, June 26 (Reuters) - Brazil on Tuesday incinerated what it claims is the biggest batch of dope ever torched, vying for a place in the Guinness Book of Records and highlighting its drug fight on its national anti-drug day. Guarded by 300 police agents in 25 vehicles and helicopters buzzing overhead, a convoy of seven trucks carried the stash 652 miles (1050 kilometers) from Brazil's southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul to Sao Paulo state for destruction. [continues 307 words]
Complexo da Mare, sprawling over the flatlands behind Rio's sparkling Guanabara Bay, has long been a desolate place. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of poor people have flocked to the slum in search of work and a better life. Few found either and, packed into shanties, many of the most desperate residents turned to crime to make a living. But in the past two years, Mare and other favelas--collectively home to 17 percent of Rio's citizens--have become killing fields. Teenagers armed with AK-47s, AR-15s, Walthers, Uzis, hand grenades, even rocket launchers, shoot it out night after night, destroying homes and shops and killing civilians. What has made a tough neighborhood almost maniacally violent? [continues 2089 words]
BRASILIA, Brazil--Brazil's most powerful drug lord, Luiz Fernando da Costa, arrived here Wednesday, five days after he was captured in Colombia. Da Costa arrived in Brasilia aboard a Brazilian air force plane and was taken to police headquarters. Da Costa, with one arm in a sling tucked under a bulletproof vest, was briefly shown to reporters at the headquarters, his first public appearance in Brazil in five years. Da Costa is accused of buying tons of cocaine from the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, paying about $10 million a month. He also faces homicide charges in Brazil. [end]
BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil's most powerful drug lord arrived under heavy police guard in the country's capital on Wednesday, five days after his capture in Colombia for alleged arms and drug links with leftist rebels. Luiz Fernando da Costa, 33, left Bogota in the middle of the night aboard a Brazilian Air Force plane for Brasilia, where he was bundled into a vehicle and taken to Federal Police headquarters in a four-car motorcade with a helicopter flying overhead. [continues 342 words]
Peru Shoot-Down Policy Of Drug Flights Tainted By Revelations Of Bribes, Futility RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- The Peruvian air force's downing of a single-engine Cessna airplane, which killed an American missionary and her infant daughter, is simply the latest chapter in a troubled story of the CIA's tangled connections to Peru's armed forces. The Clinton administration called the Andean nation's 120,000-man armed forces a vital partner in U.S. anti-narcotics efforts, thanks in large measure to an aggressive shoot-down policy that has wiped out at least 30 small aircraft operated by suspected drug traffickers. Production of coca, the raw material used to make cocaine, also dropped sharply. [continues 574 words]
BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) is hoping to meet with the leaders of Colombia's neighbors at a summit in Quebec this week in a bid to win regional involvement for Bogota's U.S.-backed war on drugs, Brazil's foreign minister said. Brazil's foreign minister Celso Lafer told foreign correspondents late on Monday, "my perception is that the Bush government wants to examine Plan Colombia within a vision of regionalization." Colombia's neighbors Venezuela, Panama, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru are suffering from the impact of Bogota's "Plan Colombia" offensive against cocaine to which the U.S. is giving more than $1 billion in mainly military aid. [continues 193 words]
Crime: Before Fleeing Into The Jungle, Boss Showed Entrepreneurial Vision, Cunning--And Cruelty. RIO DE JANEIRO--Weakened by bullet wounds, his empire crumbling, Luiz Fernando da Costa has spent weeks fleeing a military strike force in the jungles of eastern Colombia. But the Brazilian drug lord, nicknamed Fernandinho Beira Mar (Freddy Seashore) for the coastal slum near Rio where he was born, is still dangerous. During the years when he became a new breed of crime boss, forging an unprecedented alliance with Colombian guerrillas, the only weapon Da Costa needed was a telephone. He allegedly used just that to supervise the torture-slaying here of a young man who had a romance with one of the drug lord's girlfriends. [continues 1336 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO, March 3 -- The capture in Colombia of the chief lieutenant and a common-law wife of Brazil's most notorious drug trafficker has exposed what authorities are describing as a flourishing guns-for-cocaine network run with Colombia's rebels. The two, Ney Machado and Jacqueline Alcantara de Morais, were apprehended with four other Brazilians in a counternarcotics operation that the Colombian military began on Feb. 11 in the province of Guainia, which borders Brazil and is a stronghold of the rebel group called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Both are wanted in Brazil on drug-trafficking charges, and the Brazilian government has asked for their extradition. [continues 636 words]
Town Finds Itself On Front Lines TABATINGA, Brazil - The battered minibus lurches over the last speed bump and hurtles down the Avenue of Friendship, past a perpetually closed blue-and-white border post, around a curve and out of Brazil. Suddenly, the sun-baked concrete gives way to shady streets lined with palmettos and red-flowered poincianas. Shop signs are in Spanish instead of Portuguese, a new set of mayoral candidates stares from billboards, and the bars tout Aguila beer instead of Antarctica. [continues 1060 words]
SAO PAULO, Brazil - The Congress is accusing judges, lawmakers, Paraguayan Gen. Lino Oviedo and 826 other persons of drug trafficking and involvement in organized crime. After a 20-month investigation, the Parliamentary Commission for Investigations (CPI), a branch of Brazil's Congress, concluded that federal and state representatives, six judges, ex-governors, mayors, military and civilian police officers, and businessmen from 17 of Brazil's 26 states were part of crime organizations. All are accused of being involved in homicides, money laundering, corruption, tax evasion and perjury. [continues 300 words]
Three congressmen, 12 state deputies and three mayors were named last week in a list of more than 800 people allegedly involved in organised crime and drugs trafficking in Brazil. The list, part of the final report of an 18-month parliamentary inquiry into the drugs trade, includes policemen, lawyers, businesspeople and farmers in 17 of the 27 states. The inquiry was the most probing look yet into drug trafficking in Brazil, worth more than UKP 15bn. "It's a massive indictment of all sections of Brazilian society. It touches almost every part," said David Fleischer, professor of politics at Brasilia University. "It shows us that organised crime and money-laundering is a very sophisticated network, much more sophisticated than we thought." The investigators will hand the 5,000-page report to prosecutors and judges, who are expected to start legal proceedings against the accused. [continues 96 words]
TABATINGA, Brazil (AP) -- The battered minibus lurches over the last speed bump and hurtles down the Avenue of Friendship, past a perpetually closed blue-and-white border post, around a curve and out of Brazil. Suddenly the sun-baked concrete gives way to shady streets lined with palmettos and flamboyants. Shop signs are in Spanish instead of Portuguese, a new set of mayoral candidates stare from billboards, and the bars tout Aguila beer instead of Antarctica. Welcome to Leticia, Colombia. No passport, no visa, no border check. No questions. [continues 1056 words]
Report Accuses Hundreds Of Involvement, Including High-Level Politicians RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- The longest investigation into narcotics trafficking ever carried out in Brazil has found that drug-related corruption has become so common that the country cannot mount an effective attack against the problem. A 1,198-page report was released last week by a legislative commission that spent 14 months investigating organized drug crimes. It accused 824 people of offenses ranging from drug running to arms trafficking to tax evasion. [continues 652 words]
Inside Brazil
