RIO DE JANEIRO - Fans were lining up to watch an American beach volleyball duo square off against Mexico on the alluring sands of Copacabana Beach. But across town, far from the Olympic excitement, the crackling of gun battles echoed through the colossal favelas that envelop Rio de Janeiro's hillsides. As soon as he heard the bullets whizzing by early on Tuesday, Richard Conceicao Dias, 9, knew what to do. "I lied down on the floor, hugging my mom," said Richard, who lives in a one-room home in the sprawling Complexo do Alemao group of favelas with his mother and his three sisters. "She told me, 'Get away from the window, close your eyes, dream about something nice.'" [continues 1104 words]
SANTIAGO, Chile - Uruguay's Senate approved legislation on Tuesday that will allow the country to legalize the cultivation and sale of marijuana on a nationwide scale. Uruguay's leftist president, Jose Mujica, a supporter of the measure, has signaled that he will enact the legislation in coming days. Under the legislation, approved by a vote of 16 to 13, Uruguay would create a state-run Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis to oversee the planting, harvesting and sale of marijuana. The drug would be sold at pharmacies, with buyers signing up in a state registry, a process enabling them to purchase up to 40 grams a month at $1 a gram. [continues 336 words]
TINGO MARIA, Peru -- Coca cultivation is surging once again in this country's remote tropical valleys, part of a major repositioning of the Andean drug trade that is making Peru a contender to surpass Colombia as the world's largest exporter of cocaine. Mexican and Colombian drug trafficking rings are expanding their reach in Peru, where two factions of Shining Path guerrillas are already competing for control of the cocaine trade. The traffickers -- fortified by the resilient demand for cocaine in the United States, Brazil and parts of Europe -- are stymieing efforts to combat the drug's resurgence here and raising the specter of greater violence in a nation still haunted by years of war. [continues 978 words]
CALI, Colombia - Of all the animals that come to die under Ana Julia Torres's saman trees, the ocelots are among the most numerous. There are eight of them here, seized from the estate of a murdered cocaine trafficker, who apparently collected them in the belief that any self-respecting drug lord should always have eight ocelots in his dominion. Ms. Torres's sanctuary houses hundreds of animals rescued largely from drug traffickers and paramilitary warlords, as well as from circuses and animal-smuggling rings, offering a strange window into the excesses and brutalities carried out in this country's endless drug wars. [continues 1046 words]
Cultivation of coca, the plant used to produce cocaine, fell 18 percent in Colombia last year, largely because of manual eradication efforts, the United Nations said in a report issued Friday. Cocaine production in Colombia, the world's largest producer of the drug, also fell 28 percent from a year earlier. These declines were partly offset by increases in coca cultivation in Bolivia, up 6 percent, and in Peru, up 4.5 percent, the report said. The declines in Colombia point to a return to cultivation levels of earlier this decade. [end]
NUNCIDO, Colombia -- Up and down the rivers of western Colombia, a new breed of criminal armies is pressing deeper into this isolated jungle, fighting with guerrillas for control of the cocaine trade and forcing thousands of Indians to flee. It is the kind of nightmarish ordeal that is an all-too-common feature of Colombia's long war: peasants being terrorized by gunmen seeking dominance in the backlands. But as Colombia's war for control of the drug trade intensifies in frontiers like this one, with new combatants vying for smuggling routes and coca-growing areas where Indians eke out a meager existence, it is adding to the already grave toll on the nation's indigenous groups. At least 27 of the groups are at risk of being eliminated because of the country's four-decade conflict, according to the United Nations, and human rights organizations worry that the new violence is pushing even deeper into the Indians' ancient lands. [continues 981 words]
EL ALTO, Bolivia -- President Evo Morales seemed assured of an easy victory in a referendum on Sunday over a sweeping new Constitution aimed at empowering Bolivia's Indians. The vote capped three years of conflict-ridden efforts by Mr. Morales to overhaul a political system he had associated with centuries of indigenous subjugation. Citing preliminary vote counts, reports on national television said about 60 percent of voters had approved the new Constitution. If that margin holds or goes higher, it would strengthen Mr. Morales's mandate, political analysts here said. [continues 941 words]
CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela said Thursday that he was expelling the American ambassador, Patrick Duddy, giving him 72 hours to leave the country. Mr. Chavez took this step after he said his government had discovered an American-supported plot by military officers to topple him. He also recalled his ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, and explained his decision by expressing solidarity with Bolivia's embattled president, Evo Morales, who on Wednesday expelled the American ambassador there, Philip S. Goldberg, accusing him of supporting rebellious groups in eastern Bolivia.. [continues 375 words]
CHIMORE, Bolivia -- The refrain here in the Chapare jungle about Americans is short but powerful: "Long Live Coca, Death to the Yanquis!" So when President Evo Morales recently came to the area, raising his fist and shouting those words before his supporters, the irony was not lost on an elite wing of the Bolivian military that survives on American support. "We depend on the Americans for everything: our bonuses, our training, our vehicles, even our boots," Lt. Col. Jose German Cuevas, the commander of a Bolivian special forces unit that hunts down cocaine traffickers, said at a military base here in central Bolivia. [continues 1674 words]
Eradication Efforts Elsewhere Have Pushed Coca Cultivation into Rural El Rosario, Where Workers Processed Coca Leaves Recently. PASTO, Colombia -- Along with Colombia's successes in fighting leftist rebels this year, cities like Medellin have staged remarkable recoveries. And in the upscale districts of Bogota, the capital, it is almost possible to forget that the country remains mired in a devilishly complex four-decade-old war. But it is a different story in the mountains of the Narino department. Here, and elsewhere in large parts of the countryside, the violence and fear remain unrelenting, underscoring the difficulty of ending a war fueled by a drug trade that is proving immune to American-financed efforts to stop it. [continues 1554 words]
Colombia extradited 14 jailed paramilitary leaders to the United States on Tuesday, in an effort by President Alvaro Uribe to take a hard line against the warlords and defuse a scandal that has tied them to senior lawmakers in the Colombian Congress and members of his own family. The extraditions of so many paramilitary leaders at once was unprecedented in Colombia's long history of trying to dismantle the hydra-headed syndicates that export cocaine to the United States. They come at a delicate moment for Colombia's government, which is trying to win approval of a trade agreement with the United States. [continues 992 words]
Ecuador - The scene at the Manta Ray Cafe, a mess hall here at the most prominent American military outpost in South America, suggests all is normal. A television tuned to Fox Sports beams in a golf tournament. Ecuadorean contractors serve sloppy Joes near refrigerators bulging with Dr Pepper and Gatorade. Air Force personnel in jumpsuits preparing to board an Awacs surveillance plane leaf through dog-eared paperbacks. But by next year, if President Rafael Correa gets his way, this base will be gone, and, with it, one of the most festering sources of controversy in Washington's long war on drugs. [continues 933 words]
CARACAS, Venezuela -- Colombia's Defense Ministry announced Saturday that security forces had killed a senior commander of the country's largest guerrilla group in combat along the southern border with Ecuador. The death of Raul Reyes, one of the rebels' highest-ranking commanders, was a severe blow for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been waging an insurgency against the government for the last four decades. "This is the most important strike yet delivered against this terrorist group," Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said to reporters at a news conference in Bogota. [continues 450 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia -- President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia lashed out on Tuesday at claims in a new book that he had close ties to the cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. He said he never aided Mr. Escobar's drug dealings or benefited from his political patronage. Mr. Uribe's comments were in response to the book, "Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar," by Virginia Vallejo, Mr. Escobar's former mistress. Ms. Vallejo repeats claims that Mr. Uribe, as head of the civil aviation authority in the early 1980s, helped Mr. Escobar's cartel secure licenses for landing strips used to transport cocaine. [continues 447 words]
BUENAVENTURA, Colombia -- Visitors to this city can be forgiven for thinking no place is safe here. Gunfire often echoes through the slums surrounding its port, the country's most important on the Pacific coast. As larger cities have calmed, Buenaventura has emerged as the deadliest urban center in Colombia's long internal war. Soldiers search almost every car at checkpoints on the winding road from Cali. Guerrillas recently fired mortar shells at the police headquarters. The stately Hotel Estacion, a neo-Classical gem built in 1928, where executives come to hammer out deals to import cars or export coffee, is guarded by dozens of soldiers in combat fatigues. [continues 1081 words]
CARACAS, Venezuela -- Faced with allegations of government ties to paramilitary death squads and criticism from prominent Democrats, President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia is heading to Washington this week to try to unlock frozen American aid and salvage a trade agreement with the United States. It is not clear whether Mr. Uribe will succeed, despite having the best relations with President Bush of any South American leader. Mr. Uribe boasts high approval ratings in Colombia, but a scandal over links between outlawed paramilitary groups and his close political allies has eroded his credibility in Washington. [continues 902 words]
CARACAS, Venezuela -- Colombian officials said over the weekend that they would consider seeking the extradition of senior executives of Chiquita Brands International after the company pleaded guilty in United States federal court to making payments to paramilitary death squads. Chiquita, one of the world's largest banana producers, agreed to pay a fine of $25 million last week to the United States Justice Department to settle the case. Chiquita told the Justice Department that from 1997 to 2004, a subsidiary in Colombia had paid $1.7 million to right-wing paramilitary groups, which are classified by the United States government as terrorist organizations. [continues 460 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia -- The government of President Alvaro Uribe, the largest recipient of American aid outside the Middle East, has found itself ensnared in a widening scandal as revelations surface of a secret alliance between some of the president's most prominent political supporters and paramilitary death squads. Testimony this week from Salvatore Mancuso, a former paramilitary commander who admitted to orchestrating the killing of more than 300 people, as well as a document made public on Friday implicating more than a dozen politicians in the pact with paramilitaries, have injected fresh detail into a slow-burning scandal that has caused Colombia's elite political class to shudder in recent weeks. [continues 859 words]
A former undercover narcotics agent whose testimony led to drug convictions of 38 people, nearly all of them black, in a small, predominantly white Texas Panhandle town was indicted yesterday on three felony perjury charges, a development further damaging the credibility of his investigation. The indictment of the former agent, Thomas Coleman, brought yet another chapter to a racially charged case that divided the town, Tulia, after almost a tenth of its African-American population was arrested on the drug charges in 1999. [continues 661 words]
Unreliable Testimony From Officer Is Cited TULIA, Texas - Prosecutors, saying they made a catastrophic mistake in relying solely on the uncorroborated testimony of a dubious undercover officer in a 1999 drug sweep, moved Tuesday to overturn the convictions of 38 people, almost all of them black, who were caught in the arrests that tore this town apart. A judge agreed with the prosecutors, and defense attorneys, that the Texas courts should vacate every conviction arising from the drug sting, including those in which the defendants pleaded guilty. [continues 535 words]
