Guatemala and other Central American nations need urgent international help to confront the increasingly dangerous presence of Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, the head of a UN-backed commission investigating organized crime in Guatemala said on Tuesday.
“Latin America has no time,” UN Assistant Secretary-General Carlos Castresana warned. “This is a situation of emergency.”
Mexican drug cartels are increasingly using Central American nations to move drugs, and are dealing directly with Colombian cartels to obtain cocaine, which is also produced in Peru and Bolivia. Guatemala, with a lightly populated 950km border with Mexico, has become an especially important transit point for cocaine headed north to the US.
“The presence of the Mexican cartels, the Colombian cartels, in Guatemala territory is increasingly dangerous,” Castresana said.
He said countries which suffered from armed conflict like Guatemala, which was engulfed in civil war from 1960 to 1996, have “weak institutions [and] even with the best possible will of the members of the government ... they need to be helped by the international community” to confront and prosecute the drug traffickers.
“If they are left alone, clearly they are unable to do the job by themselves,” Castresana said.
The situation in Guatemala is “much worse” compared with Costa Rica or Panama, he said, “but Honduras and El Salvador are in a very similar situation” because they have organized crime and juvenile gangs that are very dangerous.
What makes the situation in Guatemala worse, however, is that after the civil war ended, the peace agreement that was signed did not succeed in dismantling clandestine groups that permeated every institution in the country, Castresana said.
After 1992 peace accords ended El Salvador’s bloody civil war, “those groups were, in fact, dismantled — and in Guatemala [they] were not, so they have become [involved in] organized crime,” he said.
“The difference today is that in El Salvador, not being a perfect country, you have a response of the judiciary in 50 percent of cases, and in Guatemala in 2 percent of cases. So there is a difference — not in the criminal activity, but in the response of authorities,” Castresana said.
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
FLYBY: The object, appears to be traveling more than 60 kilometers per second, meaning it is not bound by the sun’s orbit, astronomers studying 3I/Atlas said Astronomers on Wednesday confirmed the discovery of an interstellar object racing through the solar system — only the third-ever spotted, although scientists suspect many more might slip past unnoticed. The visitor from the stars, designated 3I/Atlas, is likely the largest yet detected, and has been classified as a comet, or cosmic snowball. “It looks kind of fuzzy,” said Peter Veres, an astronomer with the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which was responsible for the official confirmation. “It seems that there is some gas around it, and I think one or two telescopes reported a very short tail.” Originally known as A11pl3Z before
RSS