Ex-Spy Chief Says Dictator Also Embezzled SANTIAGO, Chile Gen. Augusto Pinochet's former intelligence chief, now one of his bitterest enemies, has implicated the disgraced dictator and one of his sons in a cocaine manufacturing and smuggling scheme and contends that it was one of the sources of Pinochet's illicit $28 million fortune. Gen. Manuel Contreras, who ran the Directorate of National Intelligence, the Chilean secret police, during the 1970s, made the charges in a document submitted last week to an investigating magistrate here. He also accused Pinochet of embezzling money from secret government accounts that the dictator controlled during his 17 years in power, which ended in 1990. [continues 343 words]
SANTIAGO, Chile -- Gen. Augusto Pinochet's former intelligence chief, now one of his bitterest enemies, has implicated the disgraced dictator and one of his sons in a cocaine manufacturing and smuggling scheme and contends that it was one of the sources of General Pinochet's illicit $28 million fortune. Gen. Manuel Contreras, who ran the Directorate of National Intelligence, the Chilean secret police, during the 1970's, made the charges in a document submitted last week to an investigating magistrate here. He also accused General Pinochet of embezzling money from secret government accounts that the dictator controlled during his 17 years in power, which ended in 1990. [continues 382 words]
Government will shoot down planes used in trafficking. The New York Times BRASILIA, Brazil -- After hesitating for six years, in large part because of pressure from the United States, Brazil has announced it will begin shooting down aircraft used in trafficking illegal drugs in its airspace. Only Colombia, the source of much of the cocaine and heroin sold in the United States, has such a policy in effect. But Brazil's northern Amazon corridor has become an increasingly busy and essential route in the global drug trade and is used for smuggling arms, gold and diamonds. [continues 314 words]
LA PAZ, Bolivia -- On a visit to the White House last year, President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada told President Bush that he would push ahead with a plan to eradicate coca but that he needed more money to ease the impact on farmers. Otherwise, the Bolivian president's advisers recalled him as saying, "I may be back here in a year, this time seeking political asylum." Mr. Bush was amused, Bolivian officials recounted, told his visitor that all heads of state had tough problems and wished him good luck. [continues 1126 words]
RIO de JANEIRO - THE long-standing war between municipal authorities here and the drug trafficking gangs that control many of the city's teeming squatter slums has escalated to the point that tourist sites are affected. Early this month, gunmen fired at the train station where visitors leave for the statue of Christ atop Corcovado Mountain, one day after a bomb went off just outside a luxury hotel in Copacabana. Both incidents took place in predawn hours and no visitors or local residents were injured, leading city officials to argue that the attacks were intended not to disrupt tourism but to intimidate them into easing up on their campaign to crush powerful criminal organizations. But threats have also been made against Sugar Loaf, another tourist site, famous for its spectacular views, and shopping malls, police stations and buses have been attacked. [continues 746 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO - A CAST composed almost entirely of unknown actors, a setting that is none too attractive, a lot of violence and no sex scenes. If ever a studio wanted a formula for a film to fail, that would be it," said the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. As he was shooting in the slums here two years ago, Mr. Meirelles worried about the commercial viability of the movie he was making. Yet "City of God," which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, has become a watershed cultural and political event in Brazil, and has now been seen by more Brazilians than any film in nearly 30 years. [continues 1526 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO - AS voters here pick Brazil's president next Sunday, they can expect to have more than the usual election observers watching them. The governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro has asked that the soldiers who patrolled the streets here during the first round of voting on Oct. 6 be deployed again to protect citizens from the threat that criminal gangs will interfere with the election. Gov. Benedita da Silva wants to prevent a repetition of the "Black Monday" of Sept. 30, when stores, schools, banks, offices and markets in this city of 5.8 million were forced to close on the order of jailed gang leaders unhappy with their living conditions. Gang members also burned buses, paralyzing public transport. [continues 807 words]
In a show of strength said to be aimed at securing better living conditions for its imprisoned leader, Rio de Janeiro's most powerful criminal gang has forced schools, businesses and public transport throughout the city to shut down. Followers of Fernandinho Beira-Mar, a drug lord with ties to Colombian guerrillas who has been indicted in the United States, have issued such orders before in slum areas they control, but this action, which was successful despite police efforts to encourage shops to stay open, also affected exclusive neighborhoods, including Ipanema and Copacabana. [end]
After a siege of more than a week, the police in Rio de Janeiro have arrested a powerful gang leader, Elias Pereira da Silva, and charged him with the murder of Tim Lopes, a prominent television reporter. Mr. Lopes was kidnapped and killed early in June, just as he was beginning an investigation of drug trafficking in slum neighborhoods controlled by the gang. His death became a symbol of the government's inability to control criminal groups, generating street demonstrations and demands for a reorganization of the police. [end]
VITORIA, Brazil - Its murder rate is higher than Colombia's, drug trafficking is flourishing, the central government is dithering and just recently a bomb exploded inside the local bar association. So it is hardly surprising that people here have begun referring to their city as "the Medellin of Brazil." Yet many of those responsible for the epidemic of violence and crime here in the capital of Espirito Santo State are themselves officially defenders of the law. According to police investigators and lawyers' and human rights groups, the remnants of the police death squads that once terrorized Brazil's big cities have migrated here and seized power in the state, and they are now operating under the banner of a shadowy group known as the Scuderie Detetive le Cocq, or Shield of Detective le Cocq. [continues 1133 words]
MANAUS, Brazil, July 26 - For as long as Brazil has been a nation, outlaws of every type, from gold smugglers and slave traders to drug traffickers and gun runners, have taken refuge in the Amazon, the world's largest jungle wilderness, secure in the knowledge that they could not be tracked down. As of today, though, that shelter is no longer guaranteed. A new American-financed, $1.4 billion system of radars and sensors has begun monitoring activity in a 1.9-million-square-mile area of trackless rain forest and rivers that is larger than half the continental United States. [continues 916 words]
More than a month after the disappearance of a crime reporter, Tim Lopes, caused a national outcry against drug lords and inept and corrupt police work, his charred remains were recovered from a clandestine cemetery. He vanished on June 2 while pursuing an undercover investigation into gangs that dominate the squatter slums of Rio de Janeiro and was reported to have been executed by a local drug boss nicknamed Elias the Madman, to shield his activities. [end]
RIO DE JANEIRO, June 27 - Gang leaders had taken control of the weekend funk dances in the neighborhood, selling drugs openly and forcing young girls to have sex with them. The police had been alerted but had done nothing, so the residents of the slum known as the Favela da Grota turned, like so many others here before them, to the crusading crime reporter Tim Lopes. Mr. Lopes was last seen on the night of June 2, on his way to one of the raucous dances. The charred remains of the camera he was carrying have been found, but Mr. Lopes never returned, and two gunmen for the drug lord who controls the neighborhood have horrified the city by boasting to reporters and police officers that he was kidnapped and killed on orders of their boss. [continues 906 words]
Rio De Janeiro - Put reason aside, for a moment, and imagine this: American students are taught that the Amazon should be taken away from Brazil and made into an "international reserve" under United Nations administration. United States Army special forces are training in Florida to seize control of that zone once it is established. And, to accelerate the process, Harvard University advocates the immediate dismemberment of Brazil. All of this, of course, is pure imagination. The Brazilian imagination. From birth, Brazilians are taught that "the Amazon is ours." But their government has never been able to exercise effective sovereignty over the region, which in any case remains an exotic mystery to most Brazilians. The result is a national paranoia: a conviction that outsiders - especially the United States, with its checkered history in Latin America - envy Brazil's ownership of the world's largest tropical forest and want it for themselves. [continues 843 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]
QUITO, Ecuador, Jan. 27 A year ago, the government announced that it was 20 abandoning the sucre as the national currency and adopting the American20 dollar as the solution to its chronic economic problems. While the promised 20 benefits have been slow to arrive for ordinary Ecuadoreans, the move has20 proved an unexpected boon to two very dangerous groups: drug traffickers20 and counterfeiters in neighboring Colombia. Colombia, the world's largest source not only of cocaine but also of bogus 20 American currency, produces 40 percent of the fake dollars worldwide,20 American officials say. Almost overnight, its counterfeiters were presented 20 with a new market of 12.5 million people right on their doorstep. Not ones 20 to miss an opportunity, they cranked up the presses. [continues 1343 words]
U.S. Develops Advance Post To Fight Trafficking MANTA, Ecuador -- U.S. Navy P-3 reconnaissance planes are parked at the airfield on the outskirts of town, the Pentagon is spending $62 million to expand and improve runways and hangars, and U.S. military personnel are already mingling easily with their local counterparts. But Jorge Zambrano, mayor of this port city of 250,000 residents, would rather not call the project that promises to transform his city a U.S. "base." [continues 1157 words]
ECUADOR: The military announced the death of "several" drug traffickers and the capture of others in a remote Amazon region bordering Colombia. The clash on Thursday came after an Ecuadorean Armed Forces unit on patrol just across the Putumayo River from Colombia's main coca-growing province discovered a refining laboratory and a warehouse with processing materials. [end]
The military announced the death of "several" drug traffickers and the capture of others in a remote Amazon region bordering Colombia. The clash on Thursday came after an Ecuadorean Armed Forces unit on patrol just across the Putumayo River from Colombia's main coca-growing province discovered a refining laboratory and a warehouse with processing materials. [end]
The supreme court has upheld the constitutionality of a 1999 agreement negotiated with the United States that allows American anti-narcotics surveillance flights over Colombia to operate from an Ecuadorean Air Force base in the coastal city of Manta. Opposition groups that see the American presence as an infringement of Ecuador's sovereignty that will drag their country into the deepening Colombian conflict had asked that the accord be overturned. [end]
