The president echoed the public shock caused by the murder of anti-drug prosecutor Marcelo Pecci, 45, on May 10 in Colombia. And the death a week later of Mayor José Carlos Acevedo, 51, in the city of Pedro Juan Caballero.
Days before his murder, the mayor had criticized bitterly that the gangsters “are armed and nobody does anything. How can they walk down the street armed with AR-15s or AK-47s? We know a lot. Citizens know what is happening here and the Police don’t know, the Prosecutor’s Office doesn’t know”.
Tests
Prosecutor Pecci accumulated evidence in proceedings on captured criminals belonging to the criminal organizations of Brazilian origin Primeiro Comando Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV), as well as Lebanese money launderers from the Triple Border with Brazil and Argentina. Three of the latter were sentenced to extradition to the United States, accused of injecting capital into the Shiite armed movement Hezbollah.
In 2017, the “drug baron” Jarvis Ximenes Pavao was extradited to Brazil, who lived in a special luxury cell -with a jacuzzi included- in the main prison of Asunción before being transferred to his country.
A year earlier, in 2016, in a war between gangs, Brazilian-Lebanese Jorge Rafat, leader of drug trafficking, was shot to death on a central street in Pedro Juan Caballero. But the most fearsome of all, Sergio de Arruda Quintiliano Neto, alias “Minotauro”, accused of being the leader of the PCC on the Paraguayan-Brazilian border, was captured in his department of Camboriú in 2019 in a procedure conducted by Pecci.
One of the lines of investigation of Pecci’s murder points to the Minotaur.
Carlos Alberto de Lima Da Silva, alias “Cascao”, one of the leaders of the Comando Vermelho criminal group, which operates from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, was also captured and handed over to Brazilian authorities in 2019.
Criminologist Juan Martens warns that Paraguay, traditionally a producer of marijuana, has also become a country that distributes drugs.
“We have become the regional distribution center for Andean cocaine. From Paraguay, shipments are sent through the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Europe”, he said, explaining that the phenomenon occurs “because the sky is open. There is no control”.
Currently, Congress is studying the approval of some form of aerial control and closure, while the military demands technological equipment, such as radars and aircraft.
strategic
The country, with an area of 406,000 square km, in which just 7.3 million inhabitants live, “is located in a strategic region for smuggling and drug trafficking operations,” said Arnaldo Giuzzio, former anti-drug chief and former Minister of the Interior. It is “an island of land for traffickers from Colombia, Bolivia and especially Argentina and Brazil,” he said.
The anti-drug police burned 600 tons of marijuana last week alone, after eight days of campaigning, near Pedro Juan Caballero. 86 drug packing camps were dismantled and 183 hectares of plantations were eliminated, according to Francisco Ayala, spokesman for the Anti-Drug Secretariat. The official estimated that 80% of the drug produced in that region goes to Brazil through the CV and the PCC. Reflecting drug trafficking, the homicide rate in the department of Amambay, on the border with Brazil and whose capital is Pedro Juan Caballero, was in 2020 more than 70 per 100,000 inhabitants, ten times more than the national average, according to figures. of the Ministry of the Interior.
Operative
So far this year, the anti-drug police have destroyed 1,022 hectares of marijuana and seized 362 tons of the drug prepared for sale. “These actions allowed a total of 3,428 tons of marijuana to be taken out of circulation, causing a blow worth almost 103 million dollars to drug traffickers,” said Ayala.
In addition, 2,249 kilos of cocaine, valued at 15.7 million dollars, were confiscated.
AFP Agency
Source: Ambito
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