Candido Figueredo sits on his bullet-riddled porch holding the tools of his trade: a reporter’s notepad, a mobile phone and a black 9mm submachine gun.
“I’m a rare species of journalist,” says Figueredo, the regional correspondent of Paraguay’s largest daily newspaper, ABC Color, who also boasts a 24-hour security detail and a collection of 11 bones and two human skulls he has personally dug up from clandestine cemeteries.
After seeing his newsroom machine-gunned twice and suffering a barrage of death threats as the result of his reports on organized crime in the border region between Paraguay and Brazil, Figueredo is taking no chances.
“I’m not an idealist, I’m a pragmatist. I don’t want to become a martyr,” he says. “I’m a product of the environment in which I’m working. If a drug trafficker is going to shoot me, I won’t hesitate in shooting him first. I’d prefer to kill him than to die.”
Figueredo, probably South America’s most heavily armed journalist, also covers one its most perilous news beats.
The last 15 years have seen Pedro Juan Caballero — a dusty town where drugs are cheap and life cheaper — transformed into Ground Zero for South American gangsters, known here as “peces gordos” or “big fish.”
“I consider Paraguay my second fatherland,” Brazil’s most notorious drug lord, Fernandinho Beir-Mar, told Figueredo in a 2003 phone interview while he was on the run from police.
Authorities openly admit that Paraguayan and Brazilian traffickers have overrun Pedro Juan Caballero, putting this town of just under 90,000 residents at the center of one of South America’s most important trafficking routes.
“We have information that more and more people are working in this [area],” says Juan Bartolome Ramirez, an ally of Paraguay’s leftist President Fernando Lugo and governor of Amambay state, which is at the heart of the marijuana growing region and is an entry point for Bolivian, Peruvian and Colombian cocaine and weapons.
“If the traffickers lose 1,000kg [of cocaine to the border police], 20,000kg are getting through,” he says.
The trade in illegal weapons is also booming along the border, fueling bloody shoot-outs between cocaine traffickers and police thousands of kilometers away in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
“All of the guns that come through here are all going to the favelas,” Figueredo says. “Pistols, machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons. Everything.”
The recent shooting down of a police helicopter in Rio de Janeiro has cast the spotlight on places such as Pedro Juan Caballero, along 16,000km of “dry border” between Brazil and its neighbors. Police in Rio say they have seized nearly 800 rifles since January 2007 and 3,500 firearms since 2000. Many are thought to have passed through the town.
Last month, Brazilian authorities announced they were sending 20 members of the National Security Force to beef up security on the border, creating an anti-trafficking base close to Pedro Juan Caballero. Paraguayan authorities say much more is needed.
“We can’t control it all,” said special agent Mariano Baez, who heads a 12-man US-backed anti-drug taskforce in Pedro Juan Caballero.
Baez said the profits involved in drug and gun trafficking were simply too great.
“Here an AR-15 assault rifles costs between US$3,000 and US$5,000. A light assault rifle costs US$5,000. A Glock costs US$1,500,” he says.
In Rio de Janeiro, police say such weapons can fetch up to 10 times those values.
“Here you pay 3 to 3,500 dollars per kilogram [of cocaine],” Baez said. “In Europe this cocaine is worth US$30,000 or US$40,000.”
So far this year Figueredo has recorded nearly 80 homicides, making Pedro Juan Caballero statistically one of the most murderous towns on Earth, with a homicide rate that is more than three times that of Rio de Janeiro.
Ramirez said the only solution was for Latin American leaders to rethink their drug laws.
“Cocaine is a lost war — the way we are fighting it. Brazil spends trillions and can’t solve the problem of the favelas. Mexico spends even more and they have lost control. As long as people can make millions out of cocaine, repression will not solve the problem,” Ramirez says.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS