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.
In Rio de Janeiro, police say such weapons can fetch up to 10 times those values.
“Here you pay 3 to 3,500 dollars per kilogram [of cocaine],” Baez said. “In Europe this cocaine is worth US$30,000 or US$40,000.”
So far this year Figueredo has recorded nearly 80 homicides, making Pedro Juan Caballero statistically one of the most murderous towns on Earth, with a homicide rate that is more than three times that of Rio de Janeiro.
Ramirez said the only solution was for Latin American leaders to rethink their drug laws.
“Cocaine is a lost war — the way we are fighting it. Brazil spends trillions and can’t solve the problem of the favelas. Mexico spends even more and they have lost control. As long as people can make millions out of cocaine, repression will not solve the problem,” Ramirez says.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
‘BALD-FACED LIE’: The woman is accused of administering non-prescribed drugs to the one-year-old and filmed the toddler’s distress to solicit donations online A social media influencer accused of filming the torture of her baby to gain money allegedly manufactured symptoms causing the toddler to have brain surgery, a magistrate has heard. The 34-year-old Queensland woman is charged with torturing an infant and posting videos of the little girl online to build a social media following and solicit donations. A decision on her bail application in a Brisbane court was yesterday postponed after the magistrate opted to take more time before making a decision in an effort “not to be overwhelmed” by the nature of allegations “so offensive to right-thinking people.” The Sunshine Coast woman —
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
RSS