Police raid a "prostibar" in Puerto Maldonado

Peruvian National Police forces rescued almost three hundred women and girls from forced sexual exploitation this weekend in the jungle town of Puerto Maldonado and nearby locations, according to that nation’s Interior Ministry.

Vice Minister for Internal Order Luis Otarola, who supervised the rescue, said that the liberated women included ten minors, one of whom was only thirteen.  He said the operation was ordered by Interior Minister Oscar Valdes as part of President Ollanta Humala’s campaign to improve citizen security and protect human rights.

Otarola claimed that the women were forced to provide sexual favors against their will in over 50 clandestine night spots, an illegal business which has been expanding along with the growth in small-scale mining in the area.

The police also rescued five children who were worked into the early morning at the nocturnal clubs, as well as four people involved in trafficking the victims.

Last September international charity Save the Children denounced the sexual exploitation of over 1,100 underage girls at illegal mining camps in the Madre de Dios region of southeastern Peru.  As gold prices have increased,  so has illegal mining and the growth of business catering to miners.  Girls are often recruited by women who travel to their communities offering jobs in retail or domestic labor, but then force them to work in bars doing something else entirely.

Otarola said that the sweep also confiscated almost 95,000 board feet of lumber from illegal logging operations.  The 440 agents involved included 150 from Lima and 100 from Cuzco.

The Moreira Brothers (leaders of PRI) and Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón

Besides being an advisor of the Organization of American States (OAS), and directly involved in the peace process in Colombia, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón has been very active in other matters related to Latin American politics.

Recently in Mexico, Judge Garzón was invited to an international Conference on Money Laundering. During the event, the famous Spanish judge said “the fight against money laundering should be rigorous and global, otherwise it will fail”.
Global War on Money Laundering .- During the closing ceremony of the Forum “Democratic legality, Ethics, Human Rights and Security”  held at the Mexican Congress ,  Judge Garzón also said that “money laundering is an international phenomenon so it must be combatted on a multilateral basis as it would otherwise be a failure.”
Legislators, officials and Mexican specialists agreed with Garzon on the importance of globally combatting organized crime and money laundering, and also agreed on fighting it both locally and internationally.

Garzon recommended Mexico modernize their traditional organized crime research and invest in new technology to combat money laundering.

“A money laundering law must be rigorous and it is urgent to establish launderer´s behaviors and mechanisms, such as those imposed in other countries,” he said.

Against decriminalization of drug trafficking.- In a press conference after the event,  Judge Garzon spoke against drug decriminalization.  He said that in Mexico decriminalization is not  going to end organized crime, because besides drugs, cartels and criminal gangs are also engaged in kidnapping, extortion, trafficking and vehicle theft.

First, Garzón said, is necessary to create “a joint policy of prevention to reduce the risk of consumption.”

Judge Garzón also advisor of the opposition Mexican Political Party PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) .-

Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon is active in Mexico.

Humberto Moreira, national president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) held the first of several meetings that will take place with judge Baltasar Garzon as advisor of the PRI, in order to polish the PRI’s political platform on the issue of human rights, public safety and combatting organized crime.

The National Executive Committee (NEC) of the PRI, as well as the former governor of Hidalgo, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, secretary of political operations of the PRI, are having this round of consultations with Judge Garzón as well as other international experts to ensure a viable anti-crime proposal.

During the meeting, Garzón declared himself in favor of strengthening institutional frameworks against drug trafficking before talking about new laws. Garzón has a more practical and hands on point of view.
Moreira Valdes (PRI) said in an interview that the party’s central concern is how to ensure respect for human rights in the fight against organized crime.

He also revealed that this is the third meeting he has with Baltasar Garzon, in an attempt to define the direction of the security strategy that the country should take.

Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon also called for strict control of rating agencies Moody´s. Standard  Poor´s and Fitch.-

Last Tuesday, Judge Garzón  called on all countries to establish control and oversight over the rating agencies to avoid possible “organized criminal activity” affecting the investment markets and countries.
“There is no control on them on such activities that have become landmarks,” said the judge at the close of the forum “democratic legality, ethics, human rights and security” that took place in chamber of Deputies in Mexico City.
International agencies such as Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, are allegedly responsible for aggravating the global financial crisis by lending support to controversial downgrades against many countries.
“I’m disturbed by the justice system´s inaction from the various judicial actors” on the role and control of the rating agencies in today’s volatile markets that “are about to bring many countries to ruin,” he said.
Garzon said he was not sure that these agencies perform criminal acts but said the rating agencies “should have a strict regulation” to be sure that “there is no organized criminal activity around the constant speculation on markets and investments.”
Addressing more than a hundred legislators, academics, officials and experts from Mexico and other countries, Garzon said that economic and financial crime is “produced by large corporations through mechanisms of corruption” and market operations.
The judge said that the actions of the rating agencies “can lead countries to ruin or a rising cost of public debt or external debt, to unsuspected limits.”

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter can be misused for crime, violence and terrorism

In the beginning, social networks were just a new way of socializing among friends and business people. In the last few years, some people have begun using these networks for other purposes than family and friends.  Using facebook some people started a political movement that ended in the Egyptian revolution against Mubarak.

Others organize urban riots like some British youngsters recently did in London and Birmingham.

Others organize groups in Facebook to sell  illegal narcotics, as recently happened in Brazilian slums.

Facebook and social networking now often play a role in teen violence, school harassment, gang activity and organized crime.

That is why police are concerned about violence generated through online social networks, which then moves to the streets and result in dead and wounded people.

Some say there is a need to have a strategy for the treatment of such antisocial behavior.  That there is a need to form cyber patrols, composed of undercover policemen with support of sociologists and psychologists.

For example it is now quite usual that young people socializing in the web have been provoked and challenged to street confrontations, violence and crime.

A few days ago, in Uruguay a Facebook challenge also ended with a 19 year old killed in the vicinity of the Montevideo Shopping Mall.  These challenges to violence are also common in association with sports and football games.

On Wednesday, in Montevideo, the 11th World Meeting of Cyber ​​Cops opened with the participation of police specialists from 20 countries.

During the Police Conference , the cyber cops will exchange their experiences and views on the subject. Some proposals include the following: to research more about the “dark web”,  to cyber patrolling the net when there is evidence of criminal activity, to research the misuse of social networking like Facebook, to form a virtual patrol (with cyber cops, sociologists and psychologists) who do prevention work on these violent groups as done in sports.

But violence cannot be resolved by limiting the Internet or social networking technology. In that sense, during the inauguration of the conference, the Interior  Minister of Uruguay Mr. Eduardo Bonomi said that “the problem has clear social roots and cannot be only solved by police action. Police must intervene when something serious happens,  but this does not help to eliminate crime. We must fight the causes that lead to such violent or criminal activity. The solution must also come from a better education,  the role of the family, the role of the school and not by always looking after the police, “said  Bonomi.

Joaquín -Chapo- (Shorty) Guzmán, druglord of Sinaloa Cartel

Mexico’s network of drug cartels is nebulous and complex, with organizations merging, splintering and shifting alliances in their quest to control drug-trafficking routes. Below is a rough overview of some of the major groups involved in the country’s drug trade, although there are numerous other affiliate groups and smaller players. READ MORE HERE

State of Tlaxcala within Mexico (Photo Credit Wikipedia).

Many of the traffickers gangs for sexual exploitation in America, Asia and Europe are led by citizens of  Tlaxcala in Mexico. That is why the mexican authorities launched investigations to detect the native  “pimps”  of the smallest state in the Mexican Republic, according to the announcement of the President of the Special Commission for Combating Trafficking of the Chamber of Deputies, Rosie Orozco.

In an interview at the end of the launching ceremony of the book “From Heaven to Hell in a Day”, its co-author and federal congresswoman Mrs Orozco said that the networks of traffickers have expanded its Tlaxcala origin, since there are cases in Spain, Germany, India and the United States, countries from three of the five continents.

However, she mentioned that in the country’s 32 states, only the authorities of the states of Chiapas, Chihuahua, Puebla, Tlaxcala and Mexico City, have started operations and actions against trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation.

To gauge the extent of responsibility in the crime by “pimps” of Tlaxcala, the federal congresswoman said that through the Special Congress Committee for Combating Human Trafficking , 62 victims have been treated, of which 80% of them accused as perpetrators and pimps certain criminals from Tlaxcala.

Among the victims of this crime, 85% are female children, while 15% are male.

But Mrs. Orozco stressed that the real battle against human trafficking and sexual explotation, is in obtaining judicial sentences against the offenders, in this sense, she said  “in Mexico City there have been 20 sentences, in Chiapas only two sentences while there has not been any sentence in Tlaxcala but we are confident that the president of the High Court of the State (TSJE), Amado Justino Hernandez and all judges of Tlaxcala will dictate sentences and punish these criminals, in Mexico this law in particular against sexual exploitation is very strong and criminals are punishable by 40 years. “

Mexico police present Jesus E. Aguilar alias El Mamito. Allegedly connected to killing of U.S. ICE agent, he was member of Mexico Army and Zetas cofounder. Photo Credit AP Alexandre Meneghini

Mexico: The alleged Zetas drug cartel leader suspected of killing a U.S. customs agent has been captured. His name is Jesús Enrique Rejón Aguilar, alias “el Manito”. He is believed to be the third in command of the criminal organization founded by former elite soldiers.

Over the course of a decade, it went from being the military arm of the Gulf Cartel to its own drug-trafficking organization. Now, the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas are the two most powerful cartels in Mexico. The Zetas control the east of the country, and the Sinaloa gang controls the west and center.  The west and center of the U.S. Mexico border is controled by the Sinaloa group, and the east border by the zetas and also by a weakened Gulf cartel.

Rejón was one of Mexico’s most-wanted men and the U.S. State Dept had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest. There is a possibility that the U.S. wants to extradite Rejón, but it will take time.

Mexican federal police said he was captured “without gunfire” outside Mexico City in the town of Atizapan on Sunday, on his way from Guatemala, which is now the center of all Zetas strategy in the south.  Rejon Aguilar was detained as he was traveling to visit his mother in his home state of Campeche, according to Mexican authorities.

Rejón is allegedly culpable of the killing of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE  agent Jaime Zapata, who was shot to death in February while driving on a highway in San Luis Potosi state.

The first statements of Rejón alias el Manito to the mexican police revealed the current strategy of Zetas in order to smuggle u.S. weapons into Mexico.

The captured Mexican crime boss said his gang purchased weapons in the United States and smuggled them across the Rio Grande river due to increased security at international crossings.

“All the arms are bought in the United States… Before we would transport them over the bridges, but now we transport them across the river, with difficulty,” he said, according to the mexican public security ministry.

The Rio Grande — known as the Rio Bravo del Norte in Mexico — forms the 1,200-mile (2,000 kilometer) border between Mexico and the US state of Texas.

“El Manito”  was one of the founders of the Zetas cartel, an Army gang of former elite soldiers who use of military tactics and weaponry, have a military organization like organized in batalions, and the Zetas worked first as hitmen in the service of the Gulf cartel, and after a few years became independent. This group is the bloodiest of all mexican criminal groups. They have also a “broad portfolio” of criminal activities, drugs, kidnappings, human smuggling, weapons, etc.

The Zetas are accused of two mass killings, one in Mexico’s northeast and one in a Guatemalan border province.

Zetas imprisoned. Photo Credit Vanguardia Archive.260511

According to Vanguardia.com.mx, many of the victims of mass graves have died as gladiators. The goal of Zetas is to force their victims to fight as gladiators and the survivors became their new murderers to be send in suicide missions.

The website reports that the information was revealed by an assassin interviewed and later identified by U.S. authorities as an operator of a cartel in Texas.

“If what you say is true, common criminals who did the beheadings and hangings, have achieved a more cruel twist to their barbarism, ” they say.

According to the article, when the Zetas assault a buss, the elderly are murdered, young women are raped and healthy men are given hammers, machetes and sticks to fight to the death with other kidnapped passengers.

“Who will be the next murderer for hire?” says the gunman who call the new practice that forces its victims to kill each other.

“The victims are probably hundreds of people found in mass graves discovered in recent months, “he said.

The interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity, and he said he has not witnessed the confrontations, but his teammates did and brag about it.

The man said that those who are winners are sent on suicide missions, where ‘The Zetas’know that is unlikely to escape alive against their rivals.

A recent U.S. Senate report says  ‘Los Zetas’ are the most violent of all cartels in Mexico. It is believed that its members are responsible for the death of an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE who was killed in a Mexican road.

A group of people kidnapped by alleged drug traffickers as they were rescued by members of the Mexican army in Sabinas Hidalgo north of Monterrey on April 27. Sixteen people, including a woman and a 2-year-old girl, were rescued during the operation. Photo Credit to Dario Leon/AFP/Getty Images

So far in 2011, Mexico reported 837 cases of kidnapping, a crime that in the past three years shows a rise of 60 percent, said the mexican Interior Minister, Jose Francisco Blake.

During the opening ceremony of the plenary session of the National Conference of Law Enforcement, which meets in the state of Chiapas, the Minister reported that in 2008 the country suffered 1172 kidnappings, as well as he urged prosecutors to speed up the evaluation work in their research units to build trust in society.

“A state that does not guarantee the security of its citizens necessarily faces the risk of its own dissolution, the crime is the shadow that seeks to threaten our future and we must respond with unity and unwavering commitment to serve the nation, ” said Blake .

Blake explained that Tamaulipas, the state of Mexico, Nuevo Leon, Chihuahua and Veracruz states have the largest percentage of abductions of people, “the most lacerating crime that hurts our society. ”

During his speech, the head of Government recalled that the Mexican state’s fundamental duty is to safeguard the security and integrity of its people, so he urged on the governments of mexican federal entities to restore the rule of law.

Marisela Escobedo, Attorney General of Mexico, gave details of the approval mechanism in which work is being done to determine the identification of the bodies victims of criminal rivalry, a phenomenon that already has to his credit the figure of 10.600 people killed.

Photo of massacre occurred in Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Since in 2006 Mexico´s President Felipe Calderón started the war on drugs against drug-trafficking cartel, there were more than 30 000 deaths linked to illegal drug trafficking in the country. The record year in terms of proliferation of massacres, promoted by so-called “drug barons”, was 2008.

Now, a summary of the largest massacres of the last five years occured in Mexico, since 2006. For this article we do not include recent massacres like the one occured in Guatemala, were Los Zetas killed and beheaded 27 peasants.

In 2011, in the City of San Fernando, in the state of Tamaulipas, staged the largest ever massacre led by drug traffickers in Mexico: 183 dead.  The first bodies were found in San Fernando on the last day on April 1. According to the Secretariat of State Government and Tameulipas, the victims were kidnapped while traveling by bus at the end of March. The mass murder was attributed to drug cartel Los Zetas, “one of the three largest in the country”. For the police there are three hypotheses to explain the crime: the passengers may have been kidnapped for use as slave labor  or to serve as a means of extorting money from their families or they could still be illegal immigrants who had paid to cross the border with the United States.

In 2010, August 24th, Mexican authorities found the bodies of 72 victims at a ranch in the same town of San Fernando in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The group of immigrants was murdered by members of the group Los Zetas, one of the largest drug cartels in the country. Only one survived the attack. Luis Fredy Lala, aged 19, was shot in the neck, but managed to escape from criminals pretending to be dead. According to Lala, the immigrants came from Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras, and intending to cross the border with the U.S. when they were intercepted by the Zetas.

In 2009, in September, eighteen people were found dead in a rehabilitation clinic in Ciudad Juarez, a city that also live with high rates of drug addicts. Men invaded the clinic and forced patients to organize themselves in rows before the execution. The city became one of the worst scenes of violence in Mexico. In the week before the massacre at the center, there were 75 murders in Ciudad Juarez. Between late 2008 and September 2009, the city recorded more than three thousand victims of violence.

2008 has its particularities. The year 2008 marked the increase in violence involving drug trafficking in Mexico. The number of killings in the country and increased cases of beheading shocked the country, as f.e. the death of 12 people beheaded in the outskirts of Yucatan state capital of Merida. In the same year, nine people were found decapitated in Guerrero, the capital of Chilpancingo.
The states most affected by the “drug war” was Chihuahua, with 1,649 deaths, and Baja California Norte, with 604 deaths, both north of the country bordering the U.S., besides Sinaloa, which recorded 680 murders. A total of 5376 deaths across the country from January until December 2, 2008, an increase of 117% over the previous year.

In 2007 , about 2,500 deaths were linked to drug trafficking. The regions most affected were those that border the U.S., as the states of Chihuahua, Baja California Norte, Sinaloa and Guerrero as well as in southwestern Mexico. Many of the crimes related to drug trafficking cartels are also associated with illegal immigration to the nearby U.S. and many victims are immigrants (even from other Latin countries) who payed to clandestine organizations to cross the Mexican border.

Presidents Colom (Guatemala) Ortega (Nicaragua) Funes (El Salvador) Lobo (Honduras) with former President Zelaya and current Venezuelan Foreign Relations Minister Nicolas Maduro.Nicaragua last night restored relations with the northern neighbor after signing the "Agreement for national reconciliation and consolidation of democracy in Honduras", signed in Cartagena, Colombia with the presence of Honduras president, Porfirio Lobo, and the former president of that country, Manuel Zelaya. This agreement shall be conducted under the auspices and mediation of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia. This agreement benefits widely Zelaya, as it ensures, among other things, his return together with its partners and all rights that the Constitution confers. In the negotiations it was agreed that Honduras will return to different international organizations and fora, including the Central American Integration System (SICA) and the Organization of American States (OAS). Note that so far only the President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, was the one who opposed the reinstatement of Honduras to these bodies, thus delaying the process of Central American integration. The declaration of the CA-4 presidents agreed to promote the reinstatement of Honduras to the OAS and SICA, on the eve of the annual meeting that the latter body will have in El Salvador from next 5 to 7 June.

The presidents of Central American countries -except Costa Rica- today expressed concern over the recent killing of 27 peasants on a farm in northern Guatemala, a fact attributed to the Mexican cartel Los Zetas.

In a joint statement, signed today in Managua by Presidents Alvaro Colom (Guatemala), Mauricio Funes (El Salvador), Porfirio Lobo (Honduras) and Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), the four Heads of State reiterated their solidarity and support for President Colom (Guatemala). “We express our concern over the slaughter of 27 Guatemalan peasants occurred in recent days in the department (province) of Petén in the hands of the criminal organization known as Los Zetas,” said President Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) to read the statement in the House of the People (Casa de los Pueblos)  , former presidential palace in Nicaragua´s capital.

In the document, the leaders acknowledged that the lack of security, the impact of organized crime and the consequences of these phenomena in the region, “are the major threats to the people and governments of Central America.”

They also noted that crime is affecting the chances of achieving sustainable economic growth, overcoming poverty and social inequality of people. Also admitted that drug trafficking, illegal arms trafficking, human trafficking and related crimes “are affecting the population and undermine political stability, democratic institutions and government management of the region.”

For these reasons, the Central American heads of state considered a “challenge” the next International Conference to Support the Central American Security Strategy, which is scheduled to be held from 22 to 24 July in Guatemala.