More than 200 heavily armed police officers and tactical units began swarming several high-crime neighborhoods in Costa Rica's capital on Thursday in an effort to take back city streets that have become overrun by dangerous criminals, authorities said.
PITAL DE SAN CARLOS, Alajuela – A yucca packing company in the northern Costa Rican community of La Tabla de Pital de San Carlos and a pineapple processor in Chilamate de Sarapiquí were fronts for the Italian mafia to traffic cocaine to the United States and Europe, Costa Rican authorities announced Wednesday following several morning raids.
Gilbert Bell, better known today as "Macho Coca," allegedly used a network of docks, fishermen and bribed public officials to build himself a drug trafficking empire, but until last week no one could prove it.
While Mexican prosecutors declared last year that 43 missing students were incinerated at a landfill, official documents show one gang suspect testified that at least nine were slaughtered elsewhere.
The Honduran government said it would guarantee deposits for the 220,000 customers of Banco Continental, which is being shuttered because its owners are accused in the U.S. of laundering money for drug traffickers.
LIMÓN – The name “Macho Coca” is well-known in Costa Rica’s Caribbean port city of Limón. His real surname is Bell, and for many years locals quietly gossiped about his suspected involvement in drug trafficking. Macho Coca also was a target of a long investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
When Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro closed the border with Colombia, he did it from the presidential palace hundreds of miles away. On the ground, supervising deportations and local officials, was the country's iron-fisted chief lawmaker, Diosdado Cabello.
In a wide-ranging speech at the UN, Pope Francis touched on an array of hot-button topics, including the persecution of Christians, the Iran nuclear deal, drug trafficking -- "silently killing millions" -- and the rights of girls to an education.
