He has been turned into a drug lord Paraguay. Drug traffickers are heavily armed while the police are doing absolutely nothing. «We have become a regional hub for cocaine leaving the Andes“A country from which cargo leaves for Europe, through the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo,” said Juan Martens, a criminologist at the National University of Asuncion.
Two homicides in as many weeks, with victims of a drug prosecutor and an anti-corruption mayor, seem to sound the alarm for Paraguay’s slow slide toward consolidation, one way or another, and its arms organized crime and drug traffickers.
“They are armed and no one is doing anything. How can they travel on the road armed with AR-15 or AK-47? (…) We know a lot. “People know what is happening here” but apparently “the police did not hear anything, the prosecution did not learn anything”. In this bitter, ironic way, Jose Carlos Acevedo, 51, mayor of the city of Pedro Juan Cavagiero (north), expressed his indignation during a press conference he gave a few months ago. It was one of his last interviews before being strangled on the street by strangers on May 17, as he was leaving a city council meeting. He succumbed after a few twenty-four hours of agony.
One week earlier, 45-year-old prosecutor Marcello Pesci, right-hand man of the Paraguayan attorney general, was at the forefront of cases drug trafficking and money laundering, he was murdered in front of his wife on the beach of the island of Colombia where they were spending their honeymoon.
One of the scenarios under consideration, according to imgs close to the investigation, concerns Sergio ji Aruda Quincilian Neto, or “Minotaur”, allegedly a member of the Brazilian gang First Administration of the Capital (Primeiro Comando Capital, PCC), who was arrested in 2019 and is currently imprisoned in his homeland. The PCC and the so-called Red Command (Comando Vermelho) were targeted by Prosecutor Pesci, especially their long-distance operations in Paraguay.
In the small, enclosed subtropical country of 7.3 million people, between Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil – which shares a 1,300-kilometer border with the latter – it is known to produce marijuana. But “we have become its peripheral node cocaine “which leaves the Andes, a country from where cargo departs for Europe, through the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo,” said Juan Martens, a criminologist at the National University of Asuncion.
Drugs
The northeastern part of the country, which borders Brazil – Pedro Juan Cavagiero, 452 km from Asuncion, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul – is experiencing a recent boom, amid intensified anti-government protests. drugsclearing accounts between gangs seeking to fill the gap left by the imprisonment of criminal leaders, the extermination of non-compliant courts or politicians, or even their relatives.
The niece of the mayor Jose Carlos Acevedo was assassinated in 2021.
In the province of Amabai, of which Pedrojuan is the capital, as the locals call it, the homicide rate reached more than 70 per 100,000 inhabitants by 2020 – in other words, ten times the national average.
In the same area, police, according to the Athens News Agency, destroyed 600 tons of marijuana just last week during an operation that was widely covered by the media, in the aftermath of the murder of prosecutor Pesci.
More than 10,000 acres of marijuana crops were destroyed
More than 10,000 acres of marijuana and 3,400 tonnes of marijuana were destroyed during the year, either in the form of plants or after harvesting and processing, which meant a “loss of $ 103 million for drug traffickers,” the French government said in a statement. Francisco Agiala, a spokesman for Paraguay’s Drug Enforcement Administration. Also seized were 2.2 tonnes of cocaine, valued at $ 15.7 million.
Conservative President Mario Abdo Benitez, who has been criticized for lacking tangible results in the fight against drugs, praised last week the record numbers and the fact that “big fish” continue to be caught.
But at the same time, he outlined a worryingly blackboard, that of a country where “organized crime pays politicians, pays parliamentarians, pays prosecutors, judges, pays various authorities,” without naming anyone.
The diagnosis, however, is confirmed by Professor Martens, according to whom a “progressive occupation of the control of various institutions”, public or not, by drug traffickers is unfolding. “Here in Paraguay we have drug farmers, drug addicts, drug sports, drug churches, drug universities.”
For the head of state, the murdered are “victims of the war” carried out by drug trafficking gangs, an indication of the fact that a frontal conflict is taking place which, as he warned, “will be fierce and will last”.
Parliament debates this week a bill to intercept – or even shoot down – small tourist aircraft that do not submit flight plans, or fly in a “hostile” Achilles’ heel of Paraguay, whose “open skies” are highly regarded from drug-trafficking gangs, as Professor Martens ironically comments.
But with Air Force chief Arturo Gonzalez first, the armed forces are calling for radar and aircraft, not bills.
Source: News Beast
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