Drug gangs terrorizing Central America alarms United Nations
Posted on | maart 8, 2012 | 1 Comment
Drug-gang violence poses a security threat to Central American nations with violence increasing at an alarming rate, according to the United Nations narcotics group’s report released this week.
The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) also said Honduras, Costa Rica and Nicaragua had become major transit countries for traffickers.
According to the INCB report:
“The region of Central America and the Caribbean, because of its strategic geographical location, continues to be used as a major transit area for smuggling drugs from South America into North America. Some Mexican drug cartels, under pressure from Mexican law enforcement authorities, have moved their drug trafficking operations to Central America, which has resulted in increased levels of violence, kidnapping, bribery, torture and homicide in that sub-region. Drug trafficking organizations have increased their operations in Central America and the Caribbean, posing a serious threat to human security, affecting everyday life, in the region.”
North America remains the largest marketplace for illegal drugs, the INCB’s report states. The analysts also warned that illegal internet pharmacies are increasingly using social media to target consumers.
In addition, a Law Enforcement Examiner source, New York City Police Academy adjunct instructor Dominick Perrota, who specializes in cyber crime, believes that what’s more sinister than prescription painkillers and tranquillizers being sold on the Internet is the counterfeit pharmaceuticals sold to cancer, heart, kidney and other diseases being suffered by American patients.
“Law enforcement has traced some of these Internet drug mills to Latin American countries as well as European, Asian and African nations,” Perotta told the Law Enforcement Examiner.
DRUGS AND VIOLENCE
Drug-related violence in Central America involving trafficking organisations, local and transnational gangs, and other criminal groups “has reached alarming and unprecedented levels”, the INCB’s annual report says.
The report notes that El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, together with Jamaica, now boast the world’s highest murder rates. Central America is home to some 900 “maras”, or streets gangs, which have 70,000 members, such as Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 of El Salvador.
In 2010, Honduras together with Costa Rica and Nicaragua, had significantly lower levels of crime, until they became major transit countries for drug smuggling gangs, the INCB said. The US, Canada and Mexico remain the biggest market for drugs, with all three countries continuing to have “high levels of illicit drug production, manufacture, trade and consumption”.
The INCB also expressed concern at steps taken by Bolivia to seek to legalize the chewing of coca leaf. The practice went against international drug conventions, the report states.
Bolivia wishes to have the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs to amend the prohibition of chewing coca chewing which officials claim is part of Bolivian culture among the indigenous population.
The INCB also notes that illegal internet pharmacies are turning to social networking sites to publicize web sites and thereby targeting the youth audience.
This is particularly dangerous as the World Health Organization has found that more than half of medicines from such sites are counterfeit, the INCB says.
AUTHOR: Jim Kouri
URL: http://www.renewamerica.com/
E-MAIL: COPmagazine [at] aol.com
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Tags: Central America > coca leaf > Costa Rica > Dominick Perrota > El Salvador > Guatemala > Honduras > INCB > Jamaica > Mara Salvatrucha > maras > MS-13 > narcotics > Nicaragua > pharmaceuticals > streets gangs > traffickers
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One Response to “Drug gangs terrorizing Central America alarms United Nations”
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maart 8th, 2012 @ 16:40
Jim, your Sub-Header should have said ‘PROHIBITION AND VIOLENCE’ – Why the smoke and mirrors?
* Colombia, Peru, Mexico or Afghanistan with their coca leaves, marijuana buds or poppy sap are not igniting temptation in the minds of our weak, innocent citizens. These countries are duly responding to the enormous demand that comes from within our own borders. Invading or destroying these countries, thus creating more hate, violence, instability, injustice and corruption, will not fix our problem.
* A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, sugar, or caffeine.
* The massive majority of adults who use drugs do so recreationally – getting high at the weekend then up for work on a Monday morning.
* Apart from the huge percentage of people addicted to both sugar and caffeine, a small minority of adults (nearly 5%) will always experience the use of drugs as problematic. – approx. 3% are dependent on alcohol and approx. 1.5% are dependent on other drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine, heroine etc.
* Just as it was impossible to prevent alcohol from being produced and used in the U.S. in the 1920s, so too, it is equally impossible to prevent any of the aforementioned drugs from being produced, distributed and widely used by those who desire to do so.
* Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the drugs it prohibits.
* Due to Prohibition (historically proven to be an utter failure at every level), the availability of most of these mood-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.
* Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement – even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.
* Apart from the fact that the DEA is the de facto enforcement wing of the pharmaceutical industry, the involvement of the CIA in running Heroin from Vietnam, Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, and Cocaine from Central America has been well documented by the 1989 Kerry Committee report, academic researchers Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the late journalist Gary Webb.
* It’s not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste trillions of dollars in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.
* The United States jails a larger percentage of it’s own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by the worst totalitarian regimes, yet it has far higher use/addiction rates than most other countries.
* Prohibition is the “Goose that laid the golden egg” and the lifeblood of terrorists as well as drug cartels. Both the Taliban and the terrorists of al Qaeda derive their main income from the prohibition-inflated value of the opium poppy. An estimated 44 % of the heroin produced in Afghanistan, with an estimated annual destination value of US $ 27 Billion, transits through Pakistan. Prohibition has essentially destroyed Pakistan’s legal economy and social fabric. – We may be about to witness the planet’s first civil war in a nation with nuclear capabilities. – Kindly Google: ‘A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF NARCOTICS-FUNDED TERRORIST GROUPS’ Only those opposed, or willing to ignore these facts, want things the way they are.
* The future depends on whether or not enough of us are willing to take a long look at the tragic results of prohibition. If we continue to skirt the primary issue while refusing to address the root problem then we can expect no other result than a worsening of the current dire situation. – Good intentions, wishful thinking and pseudoscience are no match for the immutable realities of human nature.
* Many important advancements in human society (even the reasonable requirement that gynecologists wash their hands before examining a patient) have been vehemently resisted by unconscionable, selfish individuals who were willing to use outright mendacity, specious logic and fear mongering to sacrifice the well-being of the rest of us.
Never have so many been endangered and impoverished by so few so quickly!
* The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it. – H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, essayist and philologist.