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RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov. 25 (Xinhua) — With the assistance of the Brazilian Navy, the Rio police are carrying out a mega raid in one of the city’s largest shantytowns, Vila Cruzeiro, to arrest the criminals responsible for the crime wave that has been devastating the city since last weekend.

A total of 350 policemen, as well as 30 marines, are participating in the raid. Four police armored vehicles, nine Navy M113 armored personnel carriers and a helicopter are providing support to the officers. A local TV station managed to film dozens of criminals trying to escape the shantytown through a back entrance.

The crime wave started on Sunday. Since then, at least 55 vehicles, including buses and trucks, were set on fire. The criminals also shot at several police cabins. The attacks left the city in complete chaos, the bus lines stopped circulating and schools and shops were closed in several neighborhoods.

According to the police, the attacks show the despair of the criminals, who have been losing territory with the establishment of permanent police units in several shantytowns in the past year. The criminals want to incite panic in the population, the police stated.

Since Sunday, at least 23 people died in the several police operations in Rio’s shantytowns. At least 176 people were arrested, and over 30 weapons were seized, including rifles and grenades.

By xinhuanet.com

Gunmen sprayed bullets into a family birthday party in the violent Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, killing 13 people and wounding 20, authorities said on Saturday.

It was the second massacre at a party this month in Ciudad Juarez, which borders El Paso, Texas, and is one of the world’s most violent cities as drug cartels battle security forces and each other over smuggling routes into the United States.

“I threw myself down on the floor and then a lot of other people piled on top of me,” a young man who survived the shooting late on Friday told Reuters, declining to give his name out of fear of reprisals.

The celebration was for a boy’s 15th birthday, he said.

At least four of the people killed at the house party were teenagers and a 9-year-old boy was among the wounded, officials said.

“A group of heavily armed men arrived in two minivans. At least 10 men burst into the party,” Carlos Gonzalez, a spokesman for state prosecutors, told the Reforma newspaper.

It was not clear whether the shooting was related to Mexico’s drug war, which has killed more than 6,900 people in Ciudad Juarez alone since early 2008.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon condemned the shooting, saying it caused “deep outrage.”

Calderon is under pressure to show the military-led campaign he launched against the powerful drug cartels in December 2006 is working. With the death toll at nearly 30,000 people over the last four years, Washington and foreign investors are on edge as the violence escalates.

On Saturday, a man used buckets of water and a broom to clean the blood-stained patio where the gunmen opened fire.

“I don’t know what happened. I was here with my son, who is a boy,” said the man, who declined to be identified.

Earlier this month in Ciudad Juarez, gunmen raided a party and killed six people. After that shooting, Calderon flew to the city to inaugurate parks and hospitals as part of the government’s plan to increase social spending and rebuild the depressed city.

By reuters.com

Mexican marines captured Sergio Villarreal Barragan, a presumed leader of the embattled Beltran Leyva cartel who appears on a list of the country’s most-wanted fugitives, in a raid Sunday in the central state of Puebla, officials said.

The presumed capo known as “El Grande” did not put up any resistance when he was arrested along with two alleged accomplices, a Navy official told The Associated Press. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with department policy, said federal officials would announce the capture shortly.

Mr. Villarreal appears on a 2009 Attorney General’s Office list of Mexico’s most-wanted drug traffickers and has a reward of just over $2-million for his capture.

He is listed as one of the remaining leaders of the Beltran Leyva cartel, whose top capo, Arturo Beltran Leyva, was killed in December in a raid by marines outside Mexico City.

Mr. Villarreal’s capture comes about two weeks after the arrest of Edgar Valdez Villarreal, or “The Barbie,” another alleged capo linked to the Beltran Leyvas.

The once-powerful Beltran Leyva cartel split following the death of Arturo — known as the “Boss of Bosses” — which launched a brutal war for control of the gang involving mass execution and beheadings in once-peaceful parts of central Mexico. The fight pitted brother Hector Beltran Leyva and Villarreal against a faction led by Edgar Valdez Villarreal. Hector Beltran Leyva remains at large.

Mr. Villarreal’s capture is the fourth major blow delivered to drug cartels by Mexico’s government in the past year. First came the death of Arturo Beltran Leyva on Dec. 16, 2009, then soldiers killed the Sinaloa cartel’s No. 3 capo, Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, on July 29. And on Aug. 30 federal police announced the capture of “The Barbie.”

More than 28,000 people have been killed in Mexico since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive against the cartels soon after taking office.

In the central state of Morelos, police discovered nine bodies in clandestine graves Saturday in the same area where four more were recently found.

The Public Safety Department said in a separate statement that all 13 victims were believed to have been killed on the orders of “The Barbie” in his battle for control of the cartel.

Also Sunday, the military announced that it filed charges against four troops for the Sept. 5 shooting deaths of a man and his 15-year-old son along the highway linking the northern city of Monterrey to Laredo, Texas.

Authorities have said soldiers opened fire on the family vehicle when it failed to stop at a checkpoint, though relatives who were also in the car say they were shot at after they passed a military convoy.

The mother and wife of the two victims was also wounded in the shooting.

A captain, a corporal and two infantrymen are in custody in military prison and have been charged with homicide, the Defence Department said in a statement.

Mexico’s military was already under scrutiny for this year’s killings of two brothers, ages 5 and 9, on a highway in Tamaulipas, a state bordering Nuevo Leon.

The National Human Rights Commission has accused soldiers of shooting the children and altering the scene to try to pin the deaths on drug cartel gunmen.

The army denies the allegations and says the boys were killed in the crossfire of a shootout between soldiers and suspected traffickers.

The scandal renewed demands from activists that civilian authorities, not the army, investigate human rights cases involving the military.

By theglobeandmail.com

Mario Santos likely never made it to the United States.

The 18-year-old set out 10 years ago from his native El Salvador in search of opportunity and a better way of life. But he had to travel north through Mexico first.

A short while after leaving, he called his parents to tell them he had been beaten and robbed in Mexico, left penniless and without shoes or clothes. It was the last they heard from him.

While it’s not certain that Santos is dead, he probably suffered the same fate as 72 migrants from Central and South America whose bodies were found this week in a ranch in northern Mexico, just 90 miles from the U.S. border. Officials are investigating whether they were the victims of human traffickers or drug cartels that prey on migrants.

It’s a fate that officials say befalls thousands of Central and South Americans every year.

“It’s brutal,” says Peter Hakim, president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue, a non-partisan Washington policy institute. “This is very big business. It’s very brutal.”

It is indeed big business. Human trafficking is one of the most lucrative forms of crime worldwide after drug and arms trafficking, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in April.

In Mexico, it is a $15 billion- to $20 billion-a-year endeavor, second only to drug trafficking, said Samuel Logan, founding director of Southern Pulse, an online information network focused on Latin America.

“And that may be a conservative estimate,” Logan said.

That money, which used to go mostly to smugglers, now also flows into the hands of drug cartel members.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan, nonprofit policy institute based in Washington, noted in an August report that human smuggling and other illegal activities are playing an increasingly important role as narcotraffickers diversify their activities.

“The drug cartels have not confined themselves to selling narcotics,” the report said. “They engage in kidnapping for ransom, extortion, human smuggling and other crimes to augment their incomes.”

Some cartels have come to rely more in recent years on human smuggling.

“For the Zetas, it’s been one of their main revenue streams for years,” Logan said about the vicious cartel, which operates mostly in northeastern Mexico.

Cartel involvement has increased the risk for migrants crossing through Mexico to get to the United States, said Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights. An investigation by the commission showed that 9,758 migrants were abducted from September 2008 to February 2009, or about 1,600 per month.

No one knows exactly how many people try to make the passage every year.

The human rights organization Amnesty International estimates it as tens of thousands. More than 90 percent of them are Central Americans, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, Amnesty International said in a report this year. And the vast majority of these migrants, the rights group said, are headed for the United States.

“Their journey is one of the most dangerous in the world,” Amnesty International said.

“Every year, thousands of migrants are kidnapped, threatened or assaulted by members of criminal gangs,” the rights group said. “Extortion and sexual violence are widespread and many migrants go missing or are killed. Few of these abuses are reported and in most cases those responsible are never held to account.”

An indication of how many people attempt the trip can be found in statistics compiled by Mexico’s National Migration Service, which tracks how many migrants are detained and returned to their countries of origin each year. Experts note that these are only the migrants who get caught, and that many — even most — are not apprehended.

Nonetheless, the Mexican agency said it detained 64,061 migrants last year, 60,383 of whom were from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. About 20 percent of them were females and about 8 percent were under the age of 18. Some were under 10.

Officials in El Salvador, where the teen-aged Santos started his trip, estimate that about 10,000 Central American migrants suffered some kind of abuse in 2009.

“The vast majority has been committed by these organized crime gangs, such as the Zetas for example, in the route along the Gulf (of Mexico), which is where they operate most frequently,” said Juan Jose Garcia, the Salvadoran vice minister for citizens living abroad.

“But we also have found events in which (Mexican) authorities have participated,” Garcia said.

The Salvadoran Foreign Ministry estimates up to 150 citizens leave each day for Mexico. Some analysts put that figure at closer to 300.

For most Central Americans, that journey begins with a human smuggler, commonly called a “pollero.” In the United States, the smugglers are better known as “coyotes.”

For a set fee, usually ranging from $850 to $5,000 a head, a smuggler will deliver a migrant to the border of the United States or even offer passage across.

Problems often arise when smugglers and migrants approach the border and organized crime organizations get involved.

“This is where things get complicated,” said Logan, who is writing a book on the Zetas and is the author of “This is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13 America’s Most Violent Gang.”

The drug-trafficking organizations charge the “polleros” a price per person for the right to cross over their territory, a practice called “derecho de piso,” or right of passage.

Or they will abduct the migrants and hold them for ransom from their relatives and friends in the United States or family back home.

Often times, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said, migrants who are abducted are subjected to sexual or labor exploitation.

If the migrants are being held for ransom and the money is not paid in time, the situation can get ugly.

“Sometimes the Mexican organized crime group says, ‘The hell with it. We’re not going to deal with these people,’ and they kill them all,” Logan said.

That’s what may have happened, Logan said, to the 72 people whose bodies were found Tuesday in a ranch building in Tamaulipas state, about 14 miles (22 kilometers) from the town of San Fernando, near the border with Texas.

Or the migrants may have refused to work for the cartel, which is one possibility that has been mentioned in news accounts.

A bloody turf war between the Zetas and the Gulf cartels also may have complicated matters because the smugglers may not have known who to pay or may have paid one group and angered the other.

“In Tamaulipas, it’s very hard for a pollero to know who is who,” Logan said. “The Zetas and Gulf cartels were once allied and now have split.”

At any rate, the involvement of the drug cartels has changed the dynamics of human smuggling in Mexico, said Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute.

Selee remembers living in northern Mexico a few years back and knowing that a father-son duo who lived on his block were “polleros.”

“That’s gone,” Selee said, noting that the costs of having to pay cartels for the right to cross their territory has driven out small-time smugglers.

“They now have to be big enough to handle those costs,” Selee said.

Selee and the Inter-American Dialogue’s Hakim point out that increased border security and interdiction by the United States also has led to cartel involvement because of the level of sophistication and complexity now often involved in getting someone across the border. The cartels already have the routes and other facilities in place they use for smuggling drugs.

“We’re no longer talking about a simple process that involves one or two individuals,” Selee said. “This has become much more dangerous.”

As always, profit is the motive.

“The smuggling became profitable the more the United States began to build barriers to immigration,” Hakim said.

On Thursday, Amnesty International called on the Mexican government to take swift action about the slayings of the 72 people in Tamaulipas.

“Amnesty International issued a report in April highlighting the failure of Mexican federal and state authorities to implement effective measures to prevent and punish thousands of kidnappings, killings and rape of irregular migrants at the hands of criminal gangs, who often operate with the complicity or acquiescence of public officials,” the rights group said in a release.

“This case once again demonstrates the extreme dangers faced by migrants and the apparent inability of both federal and state authorities to reduce the attacks that migrants face. The response of the authorities to this case will be a test.”

It’s too late for the families of the victims.

For the parents of Mario Santos, the Salvadoran who disappeared 10 years ago, much of the anguish lies in not knowing what happened.

“If only he would call me on the telephone and I would know he is alive, even if I never saw him again, that would satisfy me,” said his father, Daniel Santos.

For thousands of Central American families, the phone does not ring.

By Arthur Brice