Brazil & Southern Cone

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• BRAZIL: Combined border operations to become constant

  LatinNews 03 June 2013 Hits: 2075

  The government of President Dilma Rousseff has decided to make its huge combined military-police border operations a ‘constant’, instead of specific actions with particular objectives. This is already raising eyebrows as it appears to give the military a permanent policing role, although the defence establishment justifies it as part of the military’s constitutional mission of protecting the country’s 16,886 kilometres of borders with 10 neighbours.

  This policy shift was announced on 27 May by Vice-President Michel Temer, as he attended an assessment of what had been achieved that far by the seventh Operação Ágata, launched 10 days earlier with the mobilisation of  33,563 members of the three armed services, 10,000 police officers and 1,090 officers of regulatory agencies. All ten of Brazil’s neighbours had been informed beforehand.

  Temer, who coordinates the implementation of the Plano Estratégico de Fronteiras, said, ‘These operations have achieved a reduction of transborder crime, and for that reason will be constant. They scare away the criminal organisations and curb illicit activities [...] The only people who complain about these operations are those involved in illegal activities.’

  This latest edition of the Operação Ágata had a specific aim: to ensure the safety of the Fifa Confederations Cup scheduled for June and the visit in July of Pope Francis to attend the World Youth Day events.

  It also included a novelty: the use of unmanned surveillance aircraft (Vants in the Portuguese acronym) on the border with Uruguay in the area of Chuí, and that with Paraguay in the area of Guaíra. The defence ministry reported that this had enabled the authorities to map the areas and use the information gathered to crack down on crime.

  Both air force and federal police Vants were deployed in the latest Operação Ágata. Brazil’s Vants are equipped with cameras, radars and sensors to monitor movements of people and vehicles, but no weapons.

  The air force currently has four drones but plans to use just the two most recently-acquired models during the Confederations Cup. Operated by the Horus squadron, they will fly above the Mané Garrincha and Maracanã stadiums, in Brasília and Rio de Janeiro respectively, and patrol the surrounding areas during the tournament. Bizarrely, although military drones are free to circulate in the country’s skies, those of the federal police are currently still banned from urban areas due to a lack of civilian regulation on the matter. Rio authorities have recently recognised the existence of illegal landing strips in the city’s suburbs, which are suspected of being used by drug trafficking groups. According to residents the strips in the areas of Itaguaí and Bangu, a short distance away from the Maracanã stadium, are used frequently.

  There are plans to build a Vant operating base in the north of Brazil to monitor and prevent drug trafficking activity in the Amazon region, replicating the role of the São Miguel de Iguaçu drone base in the south of the country.

• PARAGUAY: EPP’s election day raid was more than a pinprick

  LatinNews 03 June 2013 Hits: 2909

  The very day Horacio Cartes was being elected as Paraguay’s new President, the guerrillas of the Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo (EPP) carried out a raid in the north-eastern department of Concepción which, had it succeeded, would have dealt a strong blow to the outgoing government’s claims that the EPP was on its last legs. The outcome was predictable: Cartes has reiterated his campaign promise to deal more decisively with the EPP than either the impeached former president Fernando Lugo (2008-2012), or his successor, President Federico Franco.

  On 21 April in the early afternoon, as voters were going to the polls across the country, two gunmen on a motorcycle rode up to the police station in Kurusú de Hierro, close to Horqueta, Concepción, and opened fire. This was returned by the police: one of the attackers was killed, the other fled. The police also briefly exchanged fire with snipers posted in a nearby cornfield, but no further casualties were claimed. The attacker who fled was captured shortly afterwards, and was taken away, almost three hours after the initial shooting, in a three-car convoy.

  This convoy was ambushed a few kilometres away, in Paso Tuyá. As it came under rifle and handgun fire a rudimentary shrapnel-filled mine was detonated under one of the cars, killing a non-commissioned police officer (NCO). The car that was hit was marked as Delta 1, the vehicle assigned to Concepcion’s chief of police, Antonio Gamarra. Another car carried members of the police’s élite León Pirú ‘jungle assault’ team, and the third, members of the police’s intelligence unit.

  This marks the episode as the EPP’s most tactically sophisticated armed action against a high-level target, which apparently only failed because their intended target was not at the expected location. Gamarra stated after the event that he had been the target, without disclosing any further details.

  A pamphlet left behind by the EPP indicated that the attack had been a reprisal for the murder [on 18 February] of Benjamín Lezcano, a leader of local rural activists — an act which the EPP attributed to “the deaths executed by Chief Antonio Gamarra and his thugs against the leaders of the Coordinadora Campesina ‘Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia’”.

  There had been, in late March, an alert about possible EPP actions in Concepción. A contingent of national police was sent to the area, but the deployment only resulted in the arrest of one suspected EPP member. On 18 April the EPP claimed responsibility for the murder of a tractor operator clearing a forested area in the central department of San Pedro, owned by Luis Lindstrom, a rancher who was kidnapped by the EPP in July-September 2008. The police played down the incident, suggesting that the murderers might have been escaped convicts.

  Just after the elections, President-Elect Cartes’s security chief revealed that an army NCO had warned about a plot to assassinate Cartes on election day. Police protection was strengthened, but nothing happened.

  The following day, Cartes announced that he would deal with the EPP with a ‘mano dura’ (‘iron fist’) because, beyond their “ideological mantle”, they were no more than a “criminal group”. He did acknowledge, though, that the armed movement had appeared in the northern reaches of the Eastern Region because of the extreme poverty in rural areas, and that he would increase the presence of the State in those areas to promote development and deliver social assistance.

• URUGUAY: Cannabis regulation bill goes back to congress

  LatinNews 03 June 2013 Hits: 2233

  President José Mujica’s bill to legalise and regulate the production and sale of cannabis, shelved last December, is being pushed again through congress in a bid to get it approved before the launch of next year’s presidential campaigns. The bill has been modified to accommodate some of the criticism it had attracted, but its passage remains a sensitive political issue.

  Opposition to the bill (that authorises the State to take over ‘the control and regulation of activities of import, export, planting, cultivation, harvesting, production, purchase, storage, marketing and distribution of cannabis or its derivates’) is considerable. A survey recently released by the consulting firm Cifra shows 66% opposing it.

  Apprehension has been exacerbated by data published by the Junta Nacional de Drogas (JND), the official antidrugs agency, according to which 20% of Uruguayans aged 15 to 65 have used cannabis at least once, and that 8.3% of them had done so in the past year.

  Last December President Mujica shelved the bill and urged his followers to ‘educate the people’. On 16 May he pitched in himself, in an interview granted to the Spanish news agency Efe. Marijuana, he said, ‘is a plague, but drug trafficking is much worse’ because it tends to exacerbate the degree of violence in society.’ Regulating the market, he argued, ‘is an attempt to wrest it away from the drug traffickers [and] it will allow us to treat problem consumers, because if they remain clandestine or hidden nothing can be done for them.’

  ‘I have never smoked marijuana because I’m from another era, and I don’t defend any kind of addiction,’ he said. However, he added, ‘Mankind has been repressing drug consumption for 100 years without proposing any alternative, and the facts show that we are failing [...] What we need is the audacity to propose new variables, because continuing to consume is worse.’

  The FA has a majority in both chambers of congress and so, at least in theory, should be able to secure approval of the bill. However, opposition to the bill cuts across party lines. Prominent among the opponents is former president Tabaré Vázquez (2005-10) who will be running again for the presidency next year on the FA ticket. Some of his supporters say that approval of the bill would prove ‘a heavy burden’ to Vázquez.

  Amendments

  Julio Bango, a legislator of the ruling Frente Amplio (FA) and one of the leading promoters of the bill, announced on 27 May that, amended to incorporate suggestions from the public, it will be discussed by the lower chamber of congress in late June, and if approved swiftly enough would go to the senate in September.

  Among the amendments to the bill are provisions for sanctions against those who drive under the influence of cannabis ‘just as the law applies to drivers under the influence of alcohol’ and a ban on ‘any kind of advertising that induces the consumption of cannabis.’ In tandem with these repressive provisions, the bill stipulates that ‘educational programmes on the problems derived from the use of cannabis and other drugs will be incorporated into school curricula.’

  The bill, says Bango, ‘does not aim to promote the consumption of the drug, but to regulate it and reduce abusive consumption.’

• POINTERS

  LatinNews 03 June 2013 Hits: 2188

  ARGENTINA | Iran accused of regionwide subversion. On 30 May, Alberto Nisman, lead federal prosecutor in the case against those accused of the 1994 bombing of the Amia Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, had filed a 500-page indictment accusing Iran of mounting a hemisphere-wide network of ‘sleeper’ intelligence and action cells to ‘commit, foster and sponsor terrorist acts in furtherance of its policy of exporting its revolution.’  He has built his case, he said in a press conference, on an analysis of evidence and court proceedings from Argentina, Latin America, Europe and the US where Iranian intelligence agents have been convicted.

  Nisman says that cells have been established in the US, Guyana, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago and Suriname. He identifies Moshen Rabbani, the former Iranian cultural attaché in Buenos Aires accused of masterminding the Amia bombing, as the coordinator of Iranian penetration in South America, and particularly in Guyana ‘through his disciple Abdul Kadir’ (the former legislator and mayor of Linden now serving a life sentence in the US for his part in the 2007 plot to bomb the JFK airport, revealed by a ‘sting’ operation).

  He also claims that a number of high-ranking Iranian officials were involved in the plot: former foreign affairs minister and current presidential candidate, Ali Akbar Velayati, former head of the Revolutionary Guard and current presidential candidate, Mohsen Rezaei, defence minister, Ahmad Vahidi, former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former intelligence chief, Alia Fallahian, and former ambassador to Argentina, Hadi Soleimanpour. Inevitably, the list overlaps that of the alleged participants on the Amia bombing.

  The government of President Cristina Fernández, which has entered an agreement with Iran for a joint review of the investigation into the Amia bombing, has so far not commented on Nisman’s allegations. The US-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre says the new allegations should lead to the cancellation of the agreement.

  PARAGUAY-BRAZIL | Comando Vermelho ‘cell’ disrupted. On 21 May Paraguay’s antidrugs secretariat, Senad, announced that five members of the Brazilian drug-trafficking gang Comando Vermelho (CV) had been arrested in raids on eight places in Bella Vista Norte, in the border department of Amambay. The operation, codenamed Soberanía, had been conducted by Senad agents with the support of the Paraguayan army and Brazil’s federal police, an offshoot of the bilateral antidrugs cooperation complemented on the Brazilian side of the border by the massive Ágata and Sentinela combined military-police operations (see page 10).

  The raids yielded a cache of weapons which included military-issue rifles, a bullet-proofed Porsche and four vans, as well as small amounts of cocaine, crack and cannabis. One of those arrested is Brazilian; the rest are brasiguayos, Paraguayan nationals of Brazilian extraction. They have been described as suspected CV regional bosses and ‘enforcers’.

  The CV has been present in border departments of Paraguay (Amambay, Candindeyú and Concepción, heartland of cannabis cultivation) for several years, and has been spreading its influence, at the expense of local trafficking gangs, since it has been evicted from several of its bases in Rio’s favelas. One of the organisation’s top leaders was arrested in Paraguay in October 2011 after the Brazilian police raided the Complexo do Alemão favelas.

  Once the biggest drug gang in Brazil, the CV continues to be run from inside prisons. Senad believes it has become responsible for most of the intergang violence, drug-trafficking and gunrunning in border areas.