Category Archives: Drugs trade

Sheinbaum denies reports US will send troops to Mexico: ‘It’s not going to happen’

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President says she’s repeatedly rejected such offers from Trump for US to confront Mexico’s powerful drug cartels

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has flatly denied reports that the United States is planning to send troops into Mexico to confront the country’s powerful cartels, noting that she had repeatedly rejected such offers from Donald Trump.

“It’s not going to happen,” Sheinbaum said during her daily morning news conference on Tuesday. “We do not agree with any process of interference or interventionism.”

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British woman on death row in Bali for drug smuggling to be repatriated

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Lindsay Sandiford, 68, has been on death row in Indonesia since 2012, after authorities found 3.8kg of cocaine in her suitcase

A British woman will avoid execution for drug smuggling in Indonesia under an agreement between the two nations to repatriate her and another Briton serving a life sentence.

Lindsay Sandiford, 68, has been imprisoned in Bali since 2012. She was arrested at the resort island’s airport after authorities found 3.8kg of cocaine worth $2.5m hidden in the lining of her suitcase. During the trial, she said she was forced to carry the drugs by a gang that threatened her children.

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Bolivia to vote in presidential runoff that will turn it to the right

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End of almost two decades of leftist rule could revive ‘war on drugs’ in change of approach to coca cultivation

Bolivians go to the polls on Sunday in an election that, whatever the result, will mark a complete shift to the right after nearly 20 years under the rule of the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas).

The country’s first-ever presidential runoff pits the centre-right senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira, 58, who won the first round in August, against the rightwing former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, 65, who in recent weeks has overtaken Paz Pereira in the polls.

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Trump says he authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela as Maduro decries the move as ‘coups d’etat’

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Move marks escalation in Maduro pressure campaign as president says US mulling strikes on Venezuelan territory

Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in his administration’s pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Trump further suggested he was considering strikes on Venezuelan territory, a dramatic step that would go beyond a series of recent lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean, which Democrats and United Nations experts have forcefully condemned as unlawful.

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Men in wet clothes claiming to be Camino pilgrims arrested over alleged ‘narco-sub’ plot

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Three men had fled in taxi after allegedly piloting vessel carrying 3.65 tonnes of cocaine to Galicia, Spanish police say

Police in Spain have arrested three men thought to have piloted a “narco-submarine” carrying more than 3.6 tonnes of cocaine from South America to the north-western region of Galicia, after the trio’s wet clothes and claims to be pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago raised suspicions.

The investigation, which has led to a total of 14 arrests, began in August after Policía Nacional officers, working with the US Drug Enforcement Agency, detected an alleged drug-smuggling gang based in the Galician town of Outes that was said to be concealing its activities by posing as a company selling and repairing nautical equipment.

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Drug traffickers livestream torture and killing of young Argentinian women and girl

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Brenda del Castillo, Morena Verdi and Lara Gutiérrez were lured with a promise of a $300 payment for a ‘sex party’

The murder of two young Argentinian women and a girl whose torture by suspected drug traffickers was livestreamed on a private Instagram group has sent shock waves through a country unused to such extreme levels of narco violence.

Brenda del Castillo, 20, Morena Verdi, 20, and Lara Gutiérrez, 15, went missing on Friday, after they were lured to a house in the outskirts of Buenos Aires by a promise that they would be paid US $300 for taking part in a “sex party”.

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Colombia’s Petro urges ‘criminal process’ against Trump for Venezuelan strikes

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At UN, Gustavo Petro says ‘poor young people’ died in US strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats off Caribbean coast

Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro addressed the UN general assembly Tuesday to call for a “criminal process” to be opened against counterpart Donald Trump for US strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean.

Petro said unarmed “poor young people” died in the strikes that Washington said were part of a US anti-drug operation off the coast of Venezuela, whose president Washington accuses of running a cartel.

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Rodrigo Duterte, former Philippines president, charged with crimes against humanity at ICC

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Three charges against Duterte stem from his years-long campaign against drug users and dealers that rights groups say killed thousands

International criminal court prosecutors have charged the former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte with three counts of crimes against humanity over bloody campaigns carried out during his “war on drugs”.

A charge sheet, dated 4 July but made public on Monday, laid out accusations against the 80-year-old former leader, who has been in ICC detention in The Hague since March.

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Trump sends 10 stealth fighter planes to Puerto Rico amid war on Caribbean drug cartels

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Move comes after accusing Venezuela of buzzing US warship and a deadly US missile strike in Caribbean Sea

Donald Trump is sending 10 F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region, it was reported on Friday.

If follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers, and comments by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Wednesday that such attacks “will happen again”.

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US conducts ‘kinetic strike’ against drug boat from Venezuela, killing 11, Trump says

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Trump says ‘we took it out’ referring to the operation in international waters, amid US-Caracas tensions

The US military has killed 11 drug traffickers from Venezuela during a “a kinetic strike” in the Caribbean Sea, the US president, Donald Trump, has claimed amid growing tensions between Washington and Caracas.

Trump trailed the announcement during an address at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, telling reporters the US had “just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out … a drug-carrying boat”.

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Mexican drug lord ‘El Mayo’ pleads guilty to racketeering in New York

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Ismael Zambada was co-founder of Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, now imprisoned in US

The Mexican drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges as well as running a criminal enterprise on Monday, more than a year since he was arrested in Texas after what has been described as a kidnapping.

“I recognize the great harm illegal drugs have done to the people in the United States and Mexico,” the 77-year-old Zambada said in court through a Spanish-language interpreter. “I apologize for all of it, and I take responsibility for my actions.”

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Son of El Chapo pleads guilty in US drug trafficking case

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Prosecutors allege Ovidio Guzmán López and his brother, Joaquin Guzmán López, ran a faction of the Sinaloa cartel

A son of notorious Mexican drug kingpin “El Chapo” pleaded guilty on Friday to US drug-trafficking charges, becoming the first of the drug lord’s sons to enter a plea deal.

Prosecutors allege Ovidio Guzmán López and his brother, Joaquín Guzmán López, ran a faction of the Sinaloa cartel. They became known locally as the “Chapitos”, or “little Chapos”, and federal authorities in 2023 described the operation as a major effort to send “staggering” quantities of fentanyl into the US.

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Boxer Julio César Chávez Jr was a cartel henchman, Mexican prosecutors claim

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Prosecutors say Chávez treated gang rivals ‘like a punchbag’ after Ice arrested the former world champion in California

The Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez Jr was a henchman for the Sinaloa drugs cartel and used his skills to pummel rival gang members “like a punchbag” before his recent arrest in the US, prosecutors in Mexico have alleged.

Chávez, 39, son of legendary world boxing champion Julio César Chávez Sr and himself a former middleweight titleholder, was arrested in California on Tuesday by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, who cited cartel affiliations, multiple criminal convictions and an active arrest warrant in Mexico for weapons trafficking and organized crime.

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Twenty bodies discovered in Sinaloa as Mexican cartel violence surges

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Grisly finding comes at end of worst month in war between Sinaloa factions as government tries to stop killings

Mexican authorities have found 20 bodies in the state of Sinaloa, a region gripped by a war between factions of the Sinaloa drug cartel that is reaching new heights of violence.

The state prosecutor’s office said on Monday that four of the victims had been decapitated and their bodies had been found hanging from a bridge on a main road near Culiacán, the state capital.

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Sinaloa cartel hacked security cameras to track and kill FBI informants, US says

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Hacker working for cartel run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was also able to access phone records of an FBI legal attaché at the US embassy in Mexico City

A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, according to a new US justice department report.

The incident was disclosed in a justice department inspector general’s audit of the FBI’s efforts to mitigate the effects of “ubiquitous technical surveillance”, a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data.

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Former Venezuelan intelligence chief pleads guilty to US drug charges

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Hugo Carvajal faces narco-terrorism and weapon charges amid accusations he helped lead a drug-trafficking group

A former top Venezuelan military intelligence chief has pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal court to narco-terrorism conspiracy, drug-trafficking and weapons charges, piling further US pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro.

Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, AKA “El Pollo” or “The Chicken”, was the director of Venezuela’s military intelligence under presidents Hugo Chávez and Maduro. On Wednesday, days before his trial was set to begin, he pleaded guilty to four federal counts, related to accusations that he helped lead a drug-trafficking group within the Venezuelan government.

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‘I had 30 Lamborghinis’: Pablo Escobar’s top cocaine pilot gives first interview

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Tirso ‘TJ’ Dominguez says Escobar paid him $20m monthly to fly planeloads of coke

A man who eventually became Pablo Escobar’s go-to cocaine pilot has revealed that he first turned down an employment offer from the notorious Colombian drug lord because he was content with the $4m a month he was earning while flying for a competitor.

But, in a new podcast containing what is believed to be his first interview since authorities arrested him at his Florida mansion in 1988, Tirso “TJ” Dominguez recounted how he changed his mind about working for Escobar when the so-called Patrón – or boss – offered him a salary that was five times higher: $20m monthly.

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Leader in Kinahan drug gang extradited to Ireland from UAE

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Sean McGovern, wanted on charges of murder and directing organised crime, flown to Ireland in military aircraft

A leader of the notorious Kinahan organised crime group has been flown from the United Arab Emirates to Ireland in the first extradition of its kind.

An Irish military aircraft carrying Sean McGovern – who is wanted on charges of murder and directing organised crime – was due to land in Dublin amid heavy security on Thursday afternoon.

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Synthetic opioids linked to spate of overdose deaths found in wastewater across Australia

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Detection of powerful nitazenes in samples from 60 sites a ‘red flag’ amid surging use to lace street drugs

Synthetic opioids a thousand times stronger than morphine and an animal sedative used to lace street drugs have been detected in Australia’s wastewater.

The discovery has been described as a “red flag” and comes as the deadly class of synthetic opioids – nitazines – claims dozens of lives in Australia.

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French prisons hit by wave of attacks after clampdown on drug traffickers

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Terrorism office launches investigation into assaults including gunmen opening fire on entrance to Toulon jail

France’s national terrorism office has launched an investigation into a wave of apparently coordinated attacks at multiple prisons across the country believed to be linked to a government clampdown on drug traffickers.

Gunmen with automatic weapons opened fire on the entrance to Toulon prison in southern France in the early hours of Tuesday, while in recent days cars have been set alight outside four other jails, and in Marseille a residential building housing prison guards was attacked.

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