Days after Villavicencio’s murder, a left-wing local party official, Pedro Briones, was shot dead in Esmeraldas province.
Gunfire interrupted Noboa’s caravan on Thursday as he was traveling in Guayas province, but authorities say the presidential candidate was not the target of the incident.
In many ways, this is similar to the CyberTipline for CSAM that requires websites to report details if they come across child sexual abuse material. But, CSAM is strict liability content for which there is no 1st Amendment protection. Demanding that anything even remotely referencing an illegal drug transaction be sent to the DEA will sweep up a ton of perfectly protected speech.
Worse, it will lead to massive overreporting of useless leads. I’ve mentioned just recently that we get a ton of attempted spam comments here at Techdirt, over a million in just the last six months alone. A decent percentage of these appear to be pushing what are likely to be illegal drugs. Now, we catch the vast majority of these in the spam filter, and they never reach the site. And, I don’t think a mere spam comment alone would reach the level of knowledge necessary to trigger this law, but the point is that there’s potential that our lawyers would warn us that to protect ourselves from potentially ruinous liability for failing to report these spam messages to the DEA, they’d recommend we basically flood the DEA with a bunch of the spam messages we received just to avoid the risk of liability.
Brazil‘s president Jair Bolsonaro announced on Monday that human remains had been found in the search, saying ‚something wicked‘ had been done to them.
‚The indications are that something wicked was done to them,‘ Bolsonaro said, claiming that ‚human innards were found floating in the river, which are now undergoing DNA testing.‘
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The two men were on a reporting trip in the remote jungle area near the border with Peru and Colombia that is home to the world‘s largest number of uncontacted indigenous people.
The wild and lawless region has lured cocaine-smuggling gangs, along with illegal loggers, miners and hunters.
Several conspiracy theories assert that the CIA used Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport to smuggle weapons and ammunition to the Contras in Nicaragua, and drugs back into the United States.[19][20] Some theories even invoke the involvement of political figures, including Oliver North and former presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.[20][21]
The CIA‘s self-investigation, overseen by the CIA‘s inspector general, stated that the CIA had no involvement in or knowledge of any illegal activities that may have occurred in Mena.
Haitian President Jovenel Moise was killed last Wednesday in an operation that Haitian authorities say involved at least 28 people, many of them Colombian mercenaries hired through a Florida-based security company.
At least one of the men arrested in connection to the assassination by Haitian authorities previously worked as an informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA said in a statement in response to CNN.
The government had announced that arrest warrants were being prepared against the military for the disappearance in 2014 of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa school in the southern state of Guerrero, but it has not officially reported whether those warrants have already been carried out.
The world‘s top two cocaine producers are neighboring Colombia and Peru, with much of the output passing through Ecuador on its way to either Europe or the United States.
„We cannot forget that the US is the (main) consumer country of drugs in the region and on the planet,“ Arauz said.
Judge Kevin Castel sentenced to life imprisonment Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez, brother of the president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH), on charges of drug trafficking.
he former leader of the Los Cachiros cartel, Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, said that the money was delivered to the president‘s sister Hilda Hernández in return for „protection so that the military police and preventive police didn’t capture us in Honduras.“
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández helped smuggle thousands of kilos of cocaine into the United States, a U.S. prosecutor said Tuesday in opening arguments in the federal trial of alleged drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes in New York.
The 19-year-old war in Afghanistan continues to be a huge sinkhole for US taxpayer dollars. The US government’s oversight authority that monitors waste in Washington’s Afghanistan reconstruction effort released a report this month updating its findings.
Cienfuegos, 72, served under former President Enrique Peña Nieto from 2012 to 2018. He was national defense secretary during an extended conflict between drug cartels and Mexico‘s army.
Afterward, all of the established protocols under the Law of Control for Comprehensive Aerospace Defense were activated, through which they were able to render it inoperable close to a secret runway in the Machiques de Perija municipality. The plane had U.S. tags and entered Venezuelan territory illegally.
The systematic involvement of the CIA in international drug running is as old as the agency itself, created in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. Its function of covert operations is by definition illegal and therefore requires secret funding.