Honduras Drug-Czar Murder: Gonzalez Is Buried. The assassins came for Honduras' antidrug czar moments after he dropped his daughter off at school.
His car was still in front of the schoolhouse when the two men drove up on a motorcycle and fired 11 bullets into Julian Aristides Gonzalez's body. His devastated wife rushed to the scene and kissed the corpse of the 57-year-old former general. He had been planning to retire within two months and move his family to Canada. Gonzalez's murder last month is the latest sign that drug-related violence has intensified across Latin America, wreaking havoc from Mexico to Peru.
And Honduras — a strategic transit point for U.S. TIME conducted an in-depth interview with Gonzalez five days before he was murdered. Such accusations against the government of Hugo Chávez are not new. Zelaya was overthrown earlier this year in a military coup and remains holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. Mexico Takes Down a Drug Lord, but Narcotics War Goes On. Ski-masked marines invited photographers into the shrapnel-ridden apartment to snap photos of the corpse late into Wednesday night.
The graphic images of the bullet-ridden 51-year-old man, clothes hanging off and hands grasping religious beads, were soon plastered across the Internet alongside triumphant declarations from Mexican officials. The marines had shot Arturo Beltrán Leyva, or "The Beard," one of the bloodiest and most powerful drug traffickers in Latin America, they said. This death, they claimed, marked a major victory in the war against the drug cartels that are wreaking havoc south of the Rio Grande. "This is a crushing strike against one of the most dangerous criminal organizations of the continent," an upbeat President Felipe Calderón said in a televised statement from the Copenhagen climate-change conference on Thursday, Dec. 17. There is little doubt that Beltrán Leyva was a bona fide kingpin and a genuine threat to the Mexican security services.
France : Le plan français de lutte contre le trafic. Chaque année, plus de 150 tonnes, d'une valeur de 9 milliards, sont écoulées en Europe.
Saisies records, consommation en hausse… la cocaïne progresse dans sa conquête du Vieux Continent. Et la France veut prendre la tête de la lutte contre la mort blanche. Le 30 novembre dernier, à l'occasion du dernier Conseil européen des ministres de la Justice et des Affaires intérieures, le ministre de l'Intérieur Brice Hortefeux a proposé à ses collègues de l'Union un véritable plan de bataille pour couper les routes de la cocaïne. Et Paris veut aller plus loin encore en décrochant un engagement de coopération renforcée au Conseil européen de Tolède, à ma mi-janvier, qui marque le début de la présidence de l'Union par l'Espagne.
Une action sur deux fronts La situation est plus que préoccupante. La France imagine donc une action sur deux fronts. «Sur terre aussi, il faut agir», explique l'ambassadeur Michel Duclos, conseiller diplomatique au cabinet du ministre de l'Intérieur. «Test opérationnel» Africa drug trade fuelling terrorism and crime, says. The head of the UN drugs agency (UNODC) has warned that widespread drug trafficking is transforming Africa into a major crime hub.
Antonio Maria Costa said huge amounts of heroin and cocaine were being traded by "terrorists and anti-government forces" to fund their operations. He called for a trans-Saharan network to be set up to tackle criminal groups. Last month the wreckage of a Boeing 727 was found in Mali with up to 10 tonnes of cocaine from Venezuela on board. "It is scary that this new example of the links between drugs, crime and terrorism was discovered by chance," Mr Costa told the UN Security Council.
He said 50 to 60 tonnes of cocaine were trafficked every year across West Africa while another 30 to 35 tonnes of Afghan heroin was being trafficked into East Africa every year. Rising addiction He said the flow of drugs through East Africa was being facilitated by Somalia's collapse, and in West Africa Guinea-Bissau was becoming a trafficking hub.