Killing of two Paraguayan journalists highlights Narco-corruption issue.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
The double assassination of two Paraguayan journalists reporting on connections between drug traffickers and the government of President Horacio Cartes and other top political leaders highlighted Paraguay's problems of a society forced to live with corruption. Ever since Oct. 16 when Pablo Medina and Antonia Almada, correspondents for the newspaper ABC Color in Canindeyu department, some 300 km northeast of Asuncion on the Brazilian border, were riddled with bullets, the word narcopolitica, a neologism born in Colombia to dramatically paint that country's reality, has become part of the daily lexicon.
Since then, in rapid succession, high-ranking government officials, ministers, legislators, union leaders, and Catholic bishops have added new elements daily, forcing President Cartes, a man accused of having amassed a fortune by negotiating with drug traffickers, and his Partido Colorado (PC) to say they will thoroughly investigate the situation and will push for impeachment of four of the nine Corte Suprema de Justicia (CSJ) justices (NotiSur, Jan. 17, 2014). People openly say that at least 25% of the country's judges are on the payroll of drug traffickers and that one-third of the senators and deputies finance election campaigns with mafia drug money.
The day after the double crime in Canindeyu, Luis Rojas, the government's anti-drug czar, told the Associated Press (AP) that "more than 100 violent gangs that sell marijuana and are associated with similar Brazilian groups" exist in northern Paraguay. Rojas admitted that these gangs have intimate relations with political leaders.
In Canindeyu, the country's greatest hotbed of drug trafficking, there are only eight anti-drug agents, not enough for a region with dozens of small clandestine landing fields and more than 8,000 hectares of marihuana under cultivation. Rojas couldn't explain why the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) recalled specialized agents who three years earlier had been spread throughout the area. It was in this region where the two journalists were killed.
Anibal Gomez, another journalist working in Pedro Juan Caballero, a town near Canindeyu, said, "The work of the press in the border areas is very risky because all news is related to cocaine and marijuana. I received death threats and was given police protection, but after two months they took it away without telling me why, leaving me on my own, leaving me exposed to whatever the drug dealers want to do to me...
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