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.
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