Big cash seizure puts light on Nicaragua drug role

The Guardian
Adriana Gomez Licon

Most days the only vehicles on Highway 15 are battered trucks shuttling grain, coffee beans and cooking oil through the lush, mountainous highlands on the Honduras-Nicaragua border.

Then one recent morning, a convoy of six vans cruised down the two-lane road. All were emblazoned with the logo of the world's largest Spanish-language television network, Televisa, and inside were 18 Mexicans with press badges, high-definition video cameras, microphones and a satellite dish.

Nicaraguan police were waiting. Acting on an anonymous tip from Honduras, officers pulled over the vans and after two days of investigation determined the occupants were falsely posing as employees of Televisa's news division. Hidden beneath the sound boards and screens in three of the vans, officers found black gym bags stuffed with $9.2 million in cash.

The Aug. 20 seizure has pulled back the curtain on Nicaragua's role as a conduit between South American cocaine producers and the Mexican drug cartels that move their product into the United States. It also shows how the gangs are resorting to ever-more inventive ways to move their profits out of the U.S. as authorities crack down harder on suspicious bank transfers and other relatively easy ways of moving money.

"It's been a case that has drawn our attention. We are studying the way organized crime is operating," said Nicaragua's National Police spokesman, Commander Fernando Borge. "Organized crime is powerful and has many resources and it will try in every different way to get across our country."

Nicaraguan police say the cash was destined for Costa Rica, where the fake journalists planned to pay for a load of drugs that had been smuggled into the United States.

Authorities here aren't saying which cartel employed the woman and 17 men arrested — most of them in their 20s or 30s and most with addresses in Mexico City or its suburbs. Testimony in a high-profile trial in progress in Nicaragua has alleged, however, that Nicaragua and Costa Rica are being used as transfer points in the trade between Colombian drug traffickers and the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is one of Mexico's two most powerful criminal organizations.

Costa Rican authorities say the woman arrested, 30-year-old Raquel Alatorre, who is believed to be the leader of the group, had crossed from Nicaragua into their country at least 15 times since 2006, though it was unclear if she had traveled in similar convoys previously.

"We were not investigating them," said Costa Rica's vice minister of security, Celso Gamboa. "We were not very shrewd."

Nicaragua's Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policy, which tracks how much money is seized from suspected criminals in the country, says a total of $40 million in cash has been confiscated by police over the past seven years, including $7 million last year alone.

"Normally drug dealers don't function like this. This isn't the usual way they operate," said Roberto Orozco, a researcher with the group. "However, it is possible that we're seeing new techniques emerge, with drug dealers disguising themselves as journalists."

The seized 2011 Chevy Express vans, five white and one yellow-and-blue, bore custom-made stickers with Televisa's orange sun logo. The logo was also embroidered in the neck lanyards of the suspects' supposed press badges and stamped on their microphones.

Nicaraguan prosecutors say police had received an anonymous call the previous day from a man in Honduras who said he had overheard the group talking suspiciously about crossing into Nicaragua.

So 13 officers waited south of the border checkpoint and stopped the convoy inside Nicaragua.

The people in the vans gave inconsistent accounts about what stories they were planned to cover in Nicaragua, with some saying they going to produce a piece on tourism, and others saying the topic was crime.

Local media have cited unidentified Nicaraguan authorities as saying the fake journalists claimed they were going to cover the current trial of a Nicaraguan who allegedly helped the Sinaloa cartel smuggle drugs and money through his country to Costa Rica and Colombia. The defendant, Henry Farinas, was charged after a 2011 attack apparently aimed at him killed Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral, who was being driven by Farinas to a Guatemala airport.

The indictment against the 18 people, obtained by The Associated Press, says they had no way to show authorities that Televisa sent the large contingent on assignment. So police escorted the suspects to the capital city of Managua and kept them at the Holiday Inn for two days while investigators contacted the Mexican Embassy to find out more information about them.

Embassy officials reported that the 18 people were not employees of Televisa, and that justified a thorough search of the vans, the indictment says.

Nicaragua's courts and treasury are now fighting over who gets to keep the money. The archbishop of Managua has also put in a bid, saying the Roman Catholic Church could use the money to help the poor of Nicaragua, the second-poorest nation in the hemisphere. In previous cash seizures, the money was held by the courts until trials were finished and then distributed among law enforcement agencies.

Last Friday, police showed off 16 of the 18 suspects to the news media.

Sirens blaring, ski-masked police officers dressed in black drove the five white vans with the orange Televisa logo onto the parking lot of Nicaragua's National Police headquarters in Managua. Some officers took wads of cash from gym bags for the cameras. Prosecutor Javier Antonio Morazan said in court documents that at least one wad of cash underwent a narcotic trace detector and tested positive for cocaine.

Alatorre and the 17 men will have their first hearing next week on charges of organized crime and money laundering.

Televisa has said since the arrests that the detainees were not its reporters and the vehicles were never in its car fleet. A statement this week said the company may sue the group for pretending to be its reporters.

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Associated Press writer Cesar Barrentes in San Jose, Costa Rica, contributed to this report.

Marines vs. Zetas: U.S. Hunts Drug Cartels in Guatemala

Wired
Robert Beckhusen

A U.S. Marine during a jungle patrol exercise in Guatemala on 
Sept. 12, 2010. While the Marines have helped train Guatemalan troops
 to hunt for drug traffickers in the past, the service is now 
expanding into chasing traffickers directly.

The war on drugs just got a whole lot more warlike. Two hundred U.S. Marines have entered Guatemala, on a mission to chase local operatives of the murderous Zeta drug cartel.

The Marines are now encamped after having deployed to Guatemala earlier this month, and have just “kicked off” their share of Operation Martillo, or Hammer. That operation began earlier in January, and is much larger than just the Marine contingent and involves the Navy, Coast Guard, and federal agents working with the Guatemalans to block drug shipment routes.

It’s a big shift for U.S. forces in the region. For years, the Pentagon has sent troops to Guatemala, but these missions have been pretty limited to exercising “soft power” — training local soldiers, building roads and schools. Operation Martillo is something quite different.

The news comes as two U.S. agents wounded in an attack in Mexico last week were discovered to be likely working for the CIA. The attack appears to be a case of mistaken identity after the agents fled from a Federal Police checkpoint, thinking the plain-clothed Mexican cops were cartel members. Police, seeing the agents’ bulletproof SUV flee their checkpoint, presumably thought the same thing, followed them and shot up their car. The agents have now been discovered as likely working for the CIA, as one of the wounded agents’ false identity was linked to a post office box in Virginia previously tied to CIA rendition flights.

The Marines’ share of the operation involves chasing drug traffickers with UH-1N Huey helicopters. The Marine contingent has four of the choppers, and the Marines are carrying weapons. “It’s not every day that you have 200-some Marines going to a country in Central and South America aside from conducting training exercises,” Staff Sgt. Earnest Barnes, the public affairs chief for Marine Corps Forces South, tells Danger Room. Prior to the Marines’ deployment, there were only a “handful” of Marines in the country, Barnes says.

However, the Marines can’t technically use their guns except in self-defense, and Barnes wouldn’t say whether they’re authorized to pursue drug traffickers on the ground. The description of what they’re doing, however, suggests that they probably can’t. Instead, they’ll be looking out for suspicious boats — including crude narco-submarines — and then radio the Guatemalans, who do the work seizing their drugs and arresting cartel members. That could be on rivers, or along Guatemala’s two coastlines, reports the Marine Corps Times.

“Overall the Marines are there to provide aerial detection and monitoring, and aerial surveillance, and so the appropriate authorities can do their job, whether it being Guatemalan military or some other form of law enforcement agency or authority to perform their duties,” Barnes says. Among the force are pilots and communication teams, as well as combat engineers to build landing sites.

On the other hand, just because the Marines may not be officially authorized to stop drug traffickers — instead only spot them — doesn’t mean they won’t be drawn into a conflict. The drug war is messy and involves going after criminal groups that don’t for the most part wear uniforms or identify themselves as cartel members. Nor is it true to say the U.S. isn’t already involved in a shooting war in Guatemala, with potentially ill consequences.

On the night of May 11, Honduran troops along with Drug Enforcement Administration agents allegedly killed two civilians — possibly four according to local accounts — including a pregnant woman. According to a report released this month by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, Honduran troops and U.S. agents seized a boat on a river containing cocaine near the town of Ahuas, when another boat — containing civilians — rammed into the first boat in the darkness. DEA agents and Honduran troops circling in a helicopter then fired on the second boat (.pdf). The U.S. has denied that any of its agents took part.

The DEA isn’t a military organization, but what the Ahuas shootings represented was a military approach to the drug war gone bad. A case of mistaken identity, sure, as the mayor of Ahuas said following the shootings. But it also reflects a danger of stopping drugs at the point of a gun.

The Ahuas shooting “demonstrates the risks of flooding foreign countries with armed representatives of the U.S. government, to fight an enemy that is largely indistinguishable from the civilian population on unknown terrain,” wrote Patrick Corcoran of InSight, a Latin America crime monitor. ”The Ahuas shooting may not have been inevitable, but as Americans take a more hands-on role, such scandals are likely to be repeated,” he wrote.

On the other hand, as Mexico’s drug violence worsened, cartels like the Zetas began spilling over Mexico’s southern border. Guatemala is now a base for the Zetas, who use the country’s remote northern region shipment route for narcotics and weapons. In February, Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina said his country is “not doing what the United States says, we are doing what we have to do” — in other words, decriminalize drugs. But Molina has also emphasized cracking down on the cartels in a mano dura, or “iron fist,” approach to crime.

Now, on the contrary, the U.S. hasn’t gone anywhere close to suggesting drugs be decriminalized. Gen. Douglas Fraser, the head of U.S. forces in South and Central America, said last year to the House Armed Sevices Committee that “the violence continues to increase in Central America, and that’s where and why we are focusing there.”

That’s where the Marines come in. And as far as the Zetas go, the U.S. hasn’t directly confronted them with troops. Mexico City will absolutely not allow it. Guatemala is different, which means the distance between the gun barrels of a militarized cartel, and that of the U.S. military, could start to get much shorter.

Honduran Farmers Slaughtered In Name Of Global Warming

PrisonPlanet
PaulJosephWatson

23 farmers in Honduras were slaughtered in cold blood by hired mercenaries as they tried to protect their land from being seized by a corporation who wanted to use the land to produce biofuels as part of a United Nations-accredited EU carbon trading scheme.

Obama Buffett“Protests erupted in July when six international human rights advocacy groups presented a report to the EP detailing what they called murders and forced evictions of peasants in El Bajo Aguán Valley of northern Honduras, ” reports the New American.

“The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) report accuses UN-sanctioned palm oil mills of stealing farmland from Honduran natives and killing or wounding them when they attempt to defend their property.

It says the companies, acting with government impunity, regularly target members of local land-rights movements who end up murdered in feigned car accidents or hunted down and shot by private security guards.”

The United Nations’ CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) responded to news of the killings with a collective shrug of the shoulders.

“We are not investigators of crimes,” a board member told EurActiv. “We had to take judgements within our rules – however regretful that may be – and there was not much scope for us to refuse the project. All the consultation procedures precisely had been obeyed.”

The CDM board’s chairman, Martin Hession, also refused to take responsibility and argued that the EU didn’t have the resources to investigate the crimes.

However, members of the European Parliament have promised to visit the area later this month as part of an ongoing investigative mission.

Demanding an end to violence and repression in Honduras

Rabble
Amy Goodman

President Manuel Zelaya returns.

While most in the United States were recognizing Memorial Day with a three-day weekend, the people of Honduras were engaged in a historic event: the return of President Manuel Zelaya, 23 months after he was forced into exile at gunpoint in the first coup in Central America in a quarter-century. While he is no longer president, his peaceful return marks a resounding success for the opponents of the coup. Despite this, the post-coup government in Honduras, under President Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, is becoming increasingly repressive, and is the subject this week of a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signed by 87 members of the U.S. Congress, calling for suspension of aid to the Honduran military and police.

As the only U.S. journalist on Zelaya's flight home, I asked him how he felt about his imminent return. "Full of hope and optimism," he said. "Political action is possible instead of armaments. No to violence. No to military coups. Coups never more."

When Zelaya landed in Honduras, he kneeled down and kissed the ground. He was greeted by tens of thousands of people cheering and waving the black-and-red flag of the movement born after the coup, the FNRP, or National Front of Popular Resistance, "the resistance" that Zelaya now leads. His first stop: a massive rally at the memorial for 19-year-old Isis Obed Murillo, who was killed one week after the 2009 coup when Zelaya first attempted to fly back into the country. Murillo was with tens of thousands awaiting Zelaya's return at the airport. The military blocked the runway and dispersed the crowd with live fire, killing the teenager.

Since then, violence and impunity have been constant. Farmers, journalists, students, teachers and anyone else in Honduras daring to dissent face intimidation, arrest and murder. At least 12 journalists have been killed there since the coup, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Scores of campesinos -- small farmers -- have been killed. High-school students protesting teacher layoffs and the privatization of education were violently attacked by police this week, with tear gas and live ammunition.

At the rally, Zelaya, memorializing Murillo, said, "Blood was not shed in vain, because we're still standing ... resistance is today the cry of victory."

The current Honduran government agreed to allow Zelaya's return to gain readmission into the Organization of American States in an attempt to shed Honduras' pariah status in Latin America for the coup.

Pariah to Latin America, but not the United States. Even though President Barack Obama early on called Zelaya's ouster "a coup," the U.S. government soon dropped the term. But there is no other word for it. On Sunday, I spoke with Zelaya in his home. He recounted what happened.

It was around 5 a.m. on June 28, 2009, when black-hooded Honduran soldiers stormed his house after shooting through the back door.


"They threatened me, that they were going to shoot," he said. "And I said to them: 'If you have orders to shoot, then shoot me. But know that you are shooting the president of the republic.' ... They forced me to go to their vehicles outside with my pyjamas on. We landed in the U.S. military base of Palmerola. ... And then to Costa Rica."

Ultimately, more important to Honduras is not just the return of Zelaya, but the return of democracy. Zelaya was gaining popular support for policies like a 60 per cent increase in the minimum wage, the plan to take over the U.S. Palmerola air base and use it as the civilian airport in place of the notoriously dangerous Toncontin International Airport, plans to distribute land to peasant farmers, and to join ALBA, the regional cooperative bloc developed to diminish the economic domination of the United States. On the day he was deposed, Zelaya was holding a nonbinding straw poll to assess if the population wanted to hold a national constituent assembly to evaluate possible changes to the constitution. That, he explains, is why he was deposed.

Secretary of State Clinton and close friend Lanny Davis, who is working as a powerful lobbyist for the coup regime, have pushed hard for the legitimization of the current Lobo government, despite Clinton's own State Department cable titled "Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup," released by Wikileaks, that the coup was clearly illegal.

As I headed to the airport to leave Honduras after this historic weekend, I passed a group of teachers, one month into their hunger strike outside the Honduran Congress. They, like a broad network of civil society groups in Honduras, while celebrating the return of their ousted president, are clear in their demand, now joined by 87 members of the U.S. Congress, for an end to violence and repression in Honduras.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

Honduran government accused of killing opposition members and using US money to fund corrupt police

Latin American News Dispatch via INN

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.

NEW YORK — While the Honduran government and former U.S. President Bill Clinton

claim that the Central American nation is protecting human rights and combating drug-trafficking, Honduras is actually killing opposition members and using U.S. money to fund corrupt police officials, according to a leader in the Honduran resistance movement.

Speaking at New York City’s Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square Tuesday, Gerardo Torres of Honduras’ National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP, in Spanish) said since the 2009 coup that ousted then-President Manuel Zelaya the Honduran government has violently cracked down on citizens critical of the new administration and failed to advance human rights in the nation.

“All the money is spent on weapons, propaganda and controlling the mass media,” Torres said. “There are no civil rights in Honduras.”

The coup in Honduras took place on the morning of June 28, 2009 when about 100 soldiers stormed the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa, forcibly removed Zelaya from the premises and flew him to San José, Costa Rica. Citing a plot by Zelaya to eliminate presidential term limits and create a socialist state in the vein of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, the National Congress later that day voted to remove Zelaya from office and swore in Speaker of Congress Roberto Micheletti as president.

“Anyone who gets taken down by a coup so easily, he can not be a dictator,” Torres said.

In the next few months there were mass protests and violence between demonstrators and police. Many countries, including the United States, refused to recognize the interim government and the United Nations called for Zelaya’s reinstatement.

Among the turmoil, Zelaya snuck back into Honduras in September and holed himself up in the Brazilian Embassy. Under this atmosphere, Honduras held elections on November 29, 2009. Porfirio Lobo, of the conservative Partido Nacional, won the election and was installed as president two months later on January 27, 2010. That same day Zelaya flew into exile to the Dominican Republic, after a deal was worked out between Lobo and Dominican President Leonel Fernández that ensured Zelaya’s safe passage out of Honduras.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR, in Spanish) was set up in April of 2010 to look into the events surrounding the coup and any human rights abuses that came out of it. However, Honduran and international human rights groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which sponsored Tuesday’s event, said that CVR did not comply with international standards.

“In contrast to international recommendations, the CVR was established by presidential decree allowing for the executive to reserve the ultimate authority to determine the structure of the CVR and the participants in the process,” according to the CCR.

The FNRP also claims that while many in the international community believe Honduras is a functioning democracy, it is not. Governmental violence, corruption and censorship of the media are all ubiquitous features in the country, according to Torres.

Since 2008 ten journalists, 60 lawyers, 155 women, and 59 gays, lesbians or transgender people have been killed in Honduras, according to The Miami Herald.

“Of the ten journalists killed, seven were known members of the resistance,” Torres said. “If this were any other country everybody would hear about this. When they kill ten journalists in Honduras, nobody knows.”

All of those cases have gone unprosecuted and the Obama administration is now sending FBI agents and prosecutors to Honduras to help investigate murders in several of the more prominent cases. The Honduran government claims that drug-traffickers and criminals are responsible for the majority of the murders, but Torres said that it is the government itself that is responsible for the deaths.

“[The Honduran government] does it, because they can do it,” Torres added.

The murder rate in Honduras has risen steadily in the last few years. The country had 4,473 in 2008, 5,265 in 2009 to 6,236 last year, a 39 percent increase and now has the highest homicide rate in the Western Hemisphere.

Hillary Clinton Pleads Case for Coup Leader in Honduras

New York Times

LIMA, Peru — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pleaded Monday with Latin American countries to welcome Honduras back into their circle, a year after the country’s left-leaning president was ousted in a coup that has left a residue of bitterness throughout the region.

Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and other nations refuse to recognize the new Honduran leader, Porfirio Lobo, who was elected after lengthy wrangling between the United States and the coup leaders failed to restore President Manuel Zelaya to power. He had been bundled out of the country in his pajamas last June, and spent months trying to reclaim his job.

Addressing a meeting of the Organization of American States here, Mrs. Clinton noted that the United States had condemned Mr. Zelaya’s ouster. But she said, “We saw the free and fair election of President Lobo,” and she praised him for setting up a truth commission to investigate the coup.

“Now it’s time for the hemisphere as a whole to move forward and welcome Honduras back into the inter-American community,” Mrs. Clinton said, after several foreign ministers inveighed against Mr. Lobo’s government, which they said had violated human rights.

Honduras was expelled from the O.A.S. in the wake of the coup, with the support of the United States. Continued tensions over the coup suffused the discussions here, though Nicaragua failed to get Honduras added to the formal agenda of the meeting.

For her part, Mrs. Clinton was trying to avoid a replay of last year’s O.A.S. meeting, which fell into an even more acrimonious debate over whether to readmit Cuba. She was also trying to marshal support for the Obama administration’s push for sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

“I fully expect Iran to pull some stunt in the next couple of days because they know sanctions are on the way,” she said Sunday. “I think we’ll see something coming up in the next 24 to 48 hours where Iran says, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, look what we’re going to do now.’ ”

In Lima, Mrs. Clinton briefly met with Brazil’s deputy foreign minister, Antônio de Aguiar Patriota, to discuss both Iran and Honduras. Brazil, which tried with Turkey to broker a deal with Iran over enrichment of its uranium, is expected to vote against an Iran resolution.

In a meeting on Monday morning with Peru’s president, Alan García, Mrs. Clinton praised the country’s support for nonproliferation, which she said sent “a message of unity to Iran and North Korea that their actions pose a threat to the peace and stability of the world community.”

Mrs. Clinton faced an awkward moment when Mr. García praised her for her advocacy of women’s rights, then abruptly walked out of the room, leaving her alone in front of a pair of microphones with a bemused smile on her face. Mrs. Clinton explained that the president was running late for his next meeting, and then quickly beat her own retreat from his palace.