Brazen strikes by organised crime leaders have left bystanders killed as many question the president’s security policies
For Carlos Holguín it was supposed to be just another day of toil.
After leaving the factory where he works morning shifts in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, the 24-year-old began his nightly routine last Thursday as a food app delivery driver.
Continue reading...Four radio station employees among dead as alleged gang members rampaged through Ciudad Juárez
A prison confrontation between members of two rival cartels spilled on to the streets of the border city Ciudad Juárez, where alleged gang members have killed nine more people, including four employees of a radio station.
The violence began on Thursday, when Los Chapos, members of the infamous Sinaloa cartel formerly led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, clashed with the local group Los Mexicles, in a Juárez prison, the deputy security minister, Ricardo Mejía, said.
Continue reading...The rapper was released on $75,000 bond on Saturday after being booked into jail in Fort Lauderdale
Rapper Kodak Black has been arrested in south Florida on charges of trafficking in oxycodone and possession of a controlled substance.
The rapper, whose legal name is Bill Kapri, was previously pardoned by Donald Trump on the last day of his presidency for a previous conviction on a weapons charge. He was booked into jail in Fort Lauderdale on Friday and released on Saturday after a $75,000 bond was negotiated at a bail hearing, his lawyer Bradford Cohen told Rolling Stone.
Continue reading...Actor talks of time in Paris before she became highly paid star when she was asked to carry a suitcase
Before she was a blockbusting Hollywood actor and before she was a “clean” wine entrepreneur, Cameron Diaz may have been an unwitting drug mule, she has revealed.
Diaz has told the story of when, as young woman starting out in the world, she moved to Paris to pursue a modelling career.
Continue reading...Coalition government consults health experts, economists and growers in race to clear legal hurdles within two years
Germany is mulling over the consequences of soon becoming the world’s largest potential market for legally sold cannabis, as the country’s left-liberal government presses ahead with plans to allow the controlled distribution of the drug among adults.
Olaf Scholz’s coalition government has in recent weeks reiterated its 2021 coalition-deal vow to legalise for recreational use what its Green and liberal party minister have taken to referring to as Bubatz, a slang word for weed popular among German rappers.
Continue reading...Truth commission’s report, touted as a chance to heal after half a century of bloodshed, called for a ‘substantial change in drug policy’
The punitive, prohibitionist war on drugs helped prolong Colombia’s disastrous civil war, the country’s truth commission has found, in a landmark report published on Tuesday as part of an effort to heal the raw wounds left by conflict.
The report, titled “There is a future if there is truth” was the first instalment of a study put together by the commission that was formed as part of a historic 2016 peace deal with the leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).
Continue reading...Czech police searching more stores on same delivery route while contacting overseas counterparts about shipment from Central America
Employees at a supermarket in the Czech Republic found 840kg of cocaine worth 2bn Czech crowns (£68m) inside boxes of bananas that were delivered to the store.
The delivery, which was sent to supermarkets in the towns of Jicin and Rychnov nad Kneznou in the northern region of the country, is believed to have been sent to the stores by mistake.
Continue reading...A key police outpost lies in ruins after a daring raid – a sign of the growing danger on an increasingly lucrative smuggling route
In the crime-infested tri-border region where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira disappeared, rumours abound over what happened at Puerto Amelia in January this year.
Were Brazilian drug traffickers responsible for burning the Peruvian police outpost on the River Yavarí to the ground?
Continue reading...Rodríguez Orejuela, 83, was a rival of Pablo Escobar and controlled 80% of the global cocaine market
Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, an elderly leader of the Cali cartel – and bitter rival of Pablo Escobar – has died in a US prison, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
Sometimes known by his alias ‘The Chessplayer,’ Rodríguez Orejuela, 83, helped lead the Cali cartel, which once controlled 80% of the global cocaine market, according to a report from the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
Continue reading...Increase in coca plantations could give rise to a new generation of drug traffickers, and refortify the clans of old
After an hour-long hike from the nearest road, a Honduran anti-narcotics inspector with a shotgun slung from his shoulder led the way into a mountainside clearing littered with wilting coca bushes his unit had uprooted in the days before.
Black irrigation hoses crisscrossed the roughly four-acre field down to the confluence of two creeks, where, under a canopy, lay the charred remains of a makeshift laboratory for processing the coca leaves into paste – the precursor of cocaine.
Continue reading...Shooting of Marcelo Pecci in front of his wife decried by Paraguayan president as ‘cowardly murder’
A Paraguayan public prosecutor who led a string of high-profile cases against organised crime and drug trafficking has been shot dead as he honeymooned on a Colombian beach.
Marcelo Pecci married Claudia Aguilera, a well-known journalist, on 30 April and they were spending their honeymoon at a hotel on the Barú peninsula on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
Continue reading...Former president Juan Orlando Hernández’s also suggests he may seek testimony from Mexican drug lord El Chapo in New York trial
Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández has pleaded not guilty in a New York court to drug and weapons charges as his lawyer pledged to subpoena three former US presidents – and an imprisoned Mexican drug lord – to testify in his defence.
Hernández, who was extradited last month, wore shackles round his ankles at his arraignment in Manhattan on Tuesday, where he pleaded not guilty to three criminal counts, including conspiracy to import cocaine and weapons possession.
Continue reading...Otoniel’s Gulf Clan militiamen shut down northern regions, blocking roads and holding residents hostage in their houses
Jorge, a community activist from Colombia’s conflict-ridden Chocó province, was already traveling to the city of Medellín when he heard news that made him turn back towards home.
Paramilitary militiamen in balaclavas and military fatigues had thrown up a string of roadblocks and declared an “armed strike”, torching vehicles, forcing businesses to close, and stopping all traffic.
Continue reading...Judge rejects prosecutors’ claim that Andrew Fahie, arrested in DEA drug sting, could flee US if freed from prison
The premier of the British Virgin Islands, whom US prosecutors described in court as “corrupt to the core”, has been given a $500,000 bond that would allow him to be released from prison as he awaits trial on charges tied to a US narcotics sting.
Federal court judge Alicia Otazo-Reyes rejected prosecutors’ argument that Andrew Fahie would flee the US and possibly engage in criminal activity if he is freed.
Continue reading...Juan Orlando Hernández accused of involvement with drug cartels and related weapons charges
US Drug Enforcement Administration agents have extradited the Honduran former president Juan Orlando Hernández to New York, where he will face federal drug trafficking and weapons charges.
Honduran national police delivered a handcuffed Hernández to DEA agents at the Tegucigalpa airport just over two months after he was arrested outside his home on 15 February following an extradition request from the US Department of Justice.
Continue reading...Prosecutors say they cannot determine how many were killed because attackers cleaned up the scene and removed any bodies
Mexicans have been left wondering what happened to about a dozen men who disappeared after they were seen lined up against a wall by drug cartel gunmen.
In a video apparently filmed by a resident of the town San José de Gracia in the western state of Michoacán and posted on social media, bursts of gunfire broke out and smoke covered the scene.
Continue reading...Flor Bressers, on Belgian and Europol most-wanted lists, has been on the run since 2020
One of Europe’s most-wanted drug lords, a Belgian with a master’s degree in criminology, has been arrested in Switzerland after two years on the run.
Flor Bressers, 35, nicknamed “the finger cutter”, has been sought since 2020 when he was given a four-year jail sentence for kidnapping, slashing with a razor and beating a Dutch florist who failed to smuggle drugs past UK customs.
Continue reading...Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández has been arrested, a day after the US Department of Justice requested his extradition over drug trafficking and weapons charges, culminating a spectacular fall from grace for a man who was once considered one of Washington’s top allies in Central America.
On Tuesday afternoon Hernández left his home in a wealthy neighborhood in the country’s capital, Tegucigalpa, where he was cuffed at the hands and feet and provided a bullet-proof vest before being taken away in a police caravan to a special forces base. He will appear before a judge for his first hearing within 24 hours.
According to the extradition request submitted to Honduras, Hernández was part of a “violent drug-trafficking” conspiracy that trafficked roughly 500,000 kilos of cocaine since 2004.
Former boxer Agustín Álvarez jailed for piloting a sub carrying 3,000kg of cocaine across the Atlantic
Twenty-eight months after it began in a clandestine shipyard deep in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the more unlikely criminal voyages of all time came to an end on Tuesday with the seven sentences handed down by a court in north-west Spain.
Agustín Álvarez, a 31-year-old former Spanish amateur boxing champion, was jailed for 11 years for piloting a semi-submersible “narco-submarine” carrying 3,068kg of cocaine worth an estimated €123m (£104m) across the Atlantic. His two crewmates, Ecuadorian cousins Luis Tomás Benítez Manzaba and Pedro Roberto Delgado Manzaba, received the same sentence, while four Spaniards who conspired with Álvarez to help guide the sub ashore were jailed for between seven and nine years.
Continue reading...Officials fear death toll from adulterated cocaine could increase, with 84 people currently in intensive care
Authorities in Argentina are advising drug consumers to throw away any cocaine they may have purchased in the last two days after at least 23 people died after ingesting adulterated cocaine in the Greater Buenos Aires area.
Eighty-four others are are currently under intensive care, of which 20 have been intubated, but authorities fear the death toll could increase as further victims are found to have died alone at home.
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