Just when it seemed that the town of Nuevo Laredo, on the Mexican/Texas border, was mercifully dropping out of the media radar due to a relatively quiet period of violent activity, this past week has blown it back into the headlines.
Five teenagers were shot execution-style this Friday, with one survivor, Rene Amador Ramirez, being found at the scene by police. In a statement to police he recounted how they were seemingly set up. Apparently two unnamed friends of his came over to tell him that another friend had been in some kind of accident and needed help. Jumping into a Ford Explorer, in which were sitting some other young men, they travelled along a nearby highyway and stopped at the site of the supposed accident. It was here where they were met by a group of armed men, who forced them on their knees, put their shirts over their heads and shot all six of them, leaving them for dead.
According to a recent article in Australia’s Age Newspaper, the small island nations of the South
Pacific are home to a growing drug production problem.
According to Chris Ellison, a politician from Australia, the islands of the South Pacific are an ideal place for criminal syndicates to take advantage of the weak governments in the region.
“Because it is such a vast area, with many small nations and thousands of small islands, it is just an ideal place for transnational criminal syndicates to operate and base their drugs operations,” said Ellison.
Adan Castillo (see right) and Jorge Aguilar Garcia, the former chief and second in command, respectively, of Guatemala’s leading anti-narcotics police agency, the SAIA (Servicio de Analisis e Informacion Anti-narcoticos), have pled guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to a “charge of conspiracy to manufacture and distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine, knowing and intending that the cocaine would be imported into the United States”.
According to a U.S. Department of Justice press release, whose headline (“Former Guatemalan Senior Anti-Narcotics Officers Plead Guilty to Conspiracy to Manufacture and Distribute Cocaine”, 7 September 2006) somewhat understates their seniority, the two men were caught back in late 2005 accepting $25,000 from an undercover DEA informant, as a first payment to protect a drug shipment on its way to the United States. And then, unbeknownst to them, they were indicted by a federal grand jury, lured to the U.S. by a fake invitation to attend an anti-drugs training and then promptly arrested. They now face sentencing on the 17th of November 2006. As part of their plea bargain they will each face 10 years in jail before being sent back to Guatemala.
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second largest city, is the latest target of a worldwide crackdown on tobacco products being consumed in public places, with the news that an apparently years-old government regulation against the smoking of sheesha – otherwise known as the hookah or water pipe – will start to be enforced.
According to Arabnews.com, from now on the city’s more than 300 cafes that serve sheeshas face being warned, fined and then shut down if caught violating the legislation by roving municipal inspectors. The main reason for the application of the legislation is said to be because of one Jeddah cafe having added more than just tobacco in their pipes, with the municipality also receiving complaints that boys and girls were visiting the cafes; no doubt public health fears have a part to play as well.
The fourth season of HBO’s great show “The Wire” is about to kick off in the U.S. and the critics continue to sing its praises. If you had to pigeon-hole this Baltimore-set show, you would call it a police procedural drama. But you don’t. It’s too audacious and compelling for that.
Created by David Simon and Ed Burns, the drama for its latest season takes place in the crumbling and, by the sound of it, woeful Baltimore school system. And by all accounts, the show’s ability to weave in compelling stories, a disparate array of characters and a damning indictment of institutions and the War on Drugs, is still as strong as ever.
Six of the Bali Nine drug mules are now to be executed by firing squad in Indonesia after losing their latest legal appeal.
In addition to Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran who were supposedly the ringleaders of the group, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Si Yi Chen Scott Rush and Matthew Norman are now also to be put on death row.
The only woman in the group, Renae Lawrence did not appeal her 20 year sentence and so escaped the latest round of harsh sentencing.
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has caught some flack recently for suggesting that the government should intervene early in the lives of problematic families and teenage mothers out of which children could grow up to be a “menace to society” and “a threat to themselves”, even if it means intervening “pre-birth”.
So far it is all a little vague, allowing veteran Laborite and former MP Tony Benn, to respond that “[t]his one about identifying troublesome children in the foetus – this is eugenics, the sort of thing Hitler talked about.” Well, the kind of talk Benn thinks he is hearing actually goes back a bit further than Hitler – see, for example, Edwin Black’s “War Against the Weak” – but until Blair clarifies what he is on about, the accusations will continue to fly. What we do know for now is that the guardians of potential troublemakers – by definition current troublemakers themselves, including those with troubles of a drug- and alcohol-related variety – could be forced to take some form of “help” before it is too late.
Javier Arellano-Felix, an infamous Mexican drug lord has been apprehanded by the US Coast Guard according to media reports.
Arellano-Felix, who had been on a recreational vessel with 7 other adults who were also arrested, is the head of a family who has long been suspected of being major players in the Mexican drug scene and responsible for the export of massive quantities of drugs to the US.
“For over a decade, the Arellano-Felix family
dominated the Mexican drug trade and flooded our nation with hundreds
of tons of cocaine and marijuana, and massive quantities of
methamphetamine and heroin,†according to a DEA officer.
You will remember a few days ago, we wrote about the Guatemalan government suspending constitutional rights in the country in order to execute their war on drugs.
In an operation to eradicate elements of the drug trade on their border with Mexico, the government revoked certain constitutional rights such as the right to hold demonstrations and meetings as well as expanding the rights of the authorities to conduct searches. So too, the press was warned to keep their “rebellion inciting” behaviour to a minimum.
Just as events in the Rahul Mahajan drug case seemed to be settling into the lull before the inevitable storm of the 14th of September trial start date in a special court, police have told court in a progress report on the case that they will be bringing charges of criminal conspiracy, tampering with evidence and giving false statements against the Apollo Hospital in Delhi, the hospital where Mahajan was rushed to on the early morning of the second of June.