ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — Even Paraguay’s antidrug chief couldn’t believe what was happening.
In October, officials there said they had foiled a plot to deploy a car bomb packed with 187 pounds of explosives to free a jailed drug lord.
Days later, heavily armed men threatened in a video to kill the country’s attorney general. “There is a price on your head,” the men warned.
Then came two chilling murders: A lawyer who represented drug king pins was assassinated as she stepped out of a meeting, and a young woman was stabbed to death with a dinner knife while visiting a drug trafficker in prison.
“These past incidents are like scenes you only see in movies,” said Arnaldo Guizzio, the head of Paraguay’s counternarcotics agency.
These crimes have one thing in common: The chaos is spilling over from Brazil. After fueling a record level of violence in Brazil, the drug war is spreading beyond the border, preying on Paraguay’s already weak institutions.
Much of the mayhem in the region has been fueled by American guns. So many American weapons were being shipped into Paraguay that officials in the United States took the rare step of halting commercial arms exports to the country this year.
American officials took action after noticing that arms suppliers in the United States had sent nearly 35 million weapons and rounds of ammunition to Paraguay in 2017 — more than three times the amount sent the year before, according to United States government data obtained by The New York Times.
Many of those weapons were then secretly funneled to parts of Brazil’s biggest cities — Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo — that were under the control of drug gangs with tens of thousands of foot soldiers.
Paraguay shares a thinly policed, 848-mile border with Brazil, and has long been a hub for smuggling and money laundering. The country is a major producer of marijuana, has a vibrant arms market and acts as a conduit for cocaine shipped from neighboring Bolivia.
But now, powerful gangs from Brazil are exploiting Paraguay’s lax gun laws, police corruption and weak justice system to establish a more permanent foothold. These criminal organizations “no longer treat Paraguay like a foreign country, but rather part of their criminal domain,” Mr. Guizzio said.
Eradicating the gangs’ influence poses a significant institutional challenge for Paraguay, senior officials say.
“Organized crime is permeating Paraguay,” said Senator Georgia Arrúa, who represents a border state that has become an increasingly deadly battleground as rival drug gangs square off for control of smuggling routes. “The only way to battle that is with laws and a strong judiciary. But the judicial branch has become one of our most corruptible.”
Paraguay’s interior minister, Juan Ernesto Villamayor, who oversees the country’s police forces, said President Mario Abdo Benítez, whose term began in August, had taken the reins of a government awash in corruption.
“Putting the system in order entails purging the system of a number of powerful actors,” Mr. Villamayor said.
Signs that Paraguay faces a worsening organized crime problem have been mounting for years.
In April 2017, criminals set cars on fire across Ciudad del Este, a city close to the border with Brazil and Argentina, to divert police attention while they stormed a Spanish cash transporting company and used a bomb to blast into the safe room. After stealing millions of dollars, some of the assailants fled on boats across the river into Brazil.
But nothing has highlighted the scope of Paraguay’s security challenges and the weakness of its institutions more than the events set off by the detention last December of Marcelo Pinheiro Veiga, a Brazilian drug lord at the center of much of this havoc.
Mr. Veiga, known by the alias Marcelo Piloto, had been a fugitive from Brazilian law since 2007, when he fled from prison 10 years into a 26-year sentence. He became a top target for Brazilian and American law enforcement officials after escaping to Paraguay in 2012 and escalating the smuggling of weapons and drugs into districts of Brazilian cities controlled by the Comando Vermelho gang.
In the final weeks of 2017, after months poring through intercepted communication and gathering intelligence from human sources, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration at the American consulate in Rio de Janeiro discovered that Mr. Veiga was operating out of a nondescript house in Encarnación, a small city in southern Paraguay.
The Americans passed the coordinates of the house to their counterparts in Paraguay, and waited to hear back.
On Dec. 13 of last year, Paraguayan counternarcotics agents stormed Mr. Veiga’s three-bedroom home and found him in his living room, crouched next to a Christmas tree decked with twinkling lights. They placed him in handcuffs without incident. Officials celebrated the arrest in the American consulate in Rio de Janeiro, which in recent years has come to play a more assertive, if largely invisible, role in Brazil’s drug war.
“There were high fives all around,” said a senior American official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the raid. “It was a big deal for us.”
Paraguay’s counternarcotics agency billed the capture as a watershed moment in the fight against organized crime. But Brazilian and American officials grew impatient as the request to extradite Mr. Veiga — who was being held on document forgery charges in Paraguay — seemed to stall.
Early last month, Mr. Veiga held a news conference in an apparent bid to further stall his extradition to Brazil, which had become an urgent priority for officials in Paraguay after they unraveled the car-bombing plot to free him. Holding court surrounded by a crowd of journalists, Mr. Veiga angrily denied any complicity in the plan to attack the police compound where he was detained.
Then he rattled off a number of crimes he said he had committed in Paraguay, an admission of guilt that appeared intended to avoid being sent to Brazil. He accused a top police commander of having been on his payroll, acknowledged trafficking weapons for years and admitted killing people in Paraguay.
In an interview in his jail cell several days later, Mr. Veiga said Paraguay was eager to extradite him to Brazil because prosecuting him locally would expose the thick web of collusion between politicians, the security forces and drug dealers.
While Mr. Veiga said he was resigned to spending a long time behind bars, he said his detention conditions in Paraguay — where he was held in a small room with a refrigerator, a television set and a private bathroom — were superior to what he would face in a maximum-security facility in Brazil.
“I am a trafficker, but there are many,” he said. Men like himself, according to Mr. Veiga, are relatively low-level, easily replaceable links in the chain. “They don’t want to find the real traffickers,” he said, referring to government officials.
Shortly after the interview ended around noon, Lidia Meza Burgos, 18, from a poor village in southern Paraguay, signed in as a visitor and was led into Mr. Veiga’s cell. The authorities in Paraguay said she was working as a prostitute.
Once she was inside, police officials said, Mr. Veiga stabbed the teenager in the neck and torso 16 times with a dining knife, killing her.
The authorities described the crime as an audacious attempt to force the Paraguayan government to put off extradition and prosecute him for murder.
The government did the opposite: President Abdo Benítez invoked a legal mechanism that gives the state the right to expel people on national security grounds.
Two days later, Mr. Veiga was flown to Brazil to serve out the remainder of his 26-year sentence and probably face a long list of new charges.
Explaining his decision, Mr. Abdo Benítez said, “May our country not serve as a land of impunity for anyone.”
Source : Nytimes
