Israeli Embassy connected Uri Roitman jailed by UN. CICIG is one who would benefit from the destruction of CICIG and release of all those conicted of war crimes of which he mist surely was with ex President General Perez Molina in holocaust of the Maya with Israeli weapons.Even the Rio Negro hydroelectric dam built on the bodies of raped and murdered Maya residents of that area all had Galil rifle bullets in and and around their corpses,a legacy of the Abrams era that Tump brings back from Iran Contra era and the 9/11 Bush war on Iraq for Israel era.Uri Roitman major WATER FRAUD PROFITEER JAIED BY CICIG STILL HAS INTEREST IN DAMS BEING BUILT ON MAYA INDIGENOUS LANDS AND BLOOD ON HIS HANDS FROM HIS PROFITS ON THE ABRAMS APPROVED ISRAELI MASSACRES OF 1980'S GUATEMALA..
by R Rozak
Oct 24, 2018 - Counted amongst the nine individuals charged in the “Magic Water” scandal were ... officials, and Uri Roitman, the businessman in charge of the Israeli company ... He has also dismissed pro-Cicig officials, which include the ...
Feb 25, 2016 - 9/11,Guatemala,Uri Roitman:U.S.State Department,Embassy Allows ... http://www
https://www.opendemocracy.net/democraciaabierta/steven-dudley-jeremy-mcdermott-insight-crime/year-crime-became-ideology-in-america
Still, two years of Donald Trump’s strange, haphazard foreign policy has had a
devastating impact on foreign relations in the region and has opened the door
to transnational organized crime.
To begin with, Trump has largely abandoned years of anti-corruption efforts in
Central America, while his administration faces near constant accusations of
corruption inside his own regime.
Specifically, 2018 will be remembered as the year the US government stopped
supporting the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala
(CICIG), the UN-backed adjunct prosecutor’s office in that country.
During nearly 10 years in Guatemala, CICIG-led cases have imprisoned
presidents, vice presidents, vice presidential candidates, former ministers,
bank owners, hotel owners, and many more.
But this year, current Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales - who is also
under CICIG investigation - began lobbying the White House and its allies
directly and eventually succeeded in cobbling together a coalition of accused
elites.
commissioner, despite pressure from US Congress to keep the judicial
adjunct in the country.
Other presidents, most notably Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández,
has played a similar game and largely succeeded in neutralizing that country’s
version of the CICIG, the Support Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in
Honduras (MACCIH).
In February, Juan Jiménez Mayor, the head of the MACCIH, abruptly resigned.
In an open letter published on his Twitter account, Jiménez said he left
because of lack of support from MACCIH’s progenitor, the Organization of
American States (OAS), and concerted efforts by the Honduran congress to
undermine the Mission.......................
2018 was the year crime became an ideology in the
Americas
2018 was a year in which political issues were still often framed as left or right
in the Americas, but the only ideology that mattered was organized crime.
Some of the worst news came from Colombia, where coca and cocaine
production reached record highs amidst another year of bad news regarding
the historic peace agreement with the region’s oldest political insurgency, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The demobilization of ex-FARC members has been plagued by government
leaders’ involvement in the drug trade. And it may have contributed directly
and indirectly to the surge in coca and cocaine production.
Duque and Uribe's alliance in Colombia could impact not just what's left of the peace agreement but the entire structure of the criminal underworld.
It was during this tumult that Colombia elected right wing politician Iván
Duque in May. Duque is the protégé of former president and current Senator
Álvaro Uribe.
Their alliance could impact not just what’s left of the peace agreement but the
entire structure of the underworld where, during 2018, ex-FARC dissidents
reestablished criminal fiefdoms or allied themselves with other criminal
factions.
The last remaining rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), filled
power vacuums in Colombia and neighboring Venezuela, making it one of out
of three criminal winners last year.
Meanwhile, a new generation of traffickers emerged, one that prefers
anonymity to the large, highly visible armies of yesteryear.
Also of note in 2018 was a surge in synthetic drugs, most notably fentanyl.
The synthetic opioid powered a scourge that led to more overdose deaths in
the United States than any other drug.
Fentanyl is no longer consumed as a replacement for heroin. It is now hidden
in counterfeit prescription pills and mixed into cocaine and other legacy drugs.
It is produced in China and while much of it moves through the US postal
system, some of it travels through Mexico on its way to the United States.
During 2018, the criminal groups in Mexico seemed to be shifting their
operations increasingly around it, especially given its increasing popularity,
availability, and profitability.
The result is some new possibly game changing alliances, most notably
between Mexican and Dominican criminal organizations.
Among these Mexican criminal groups is the Jalisco Cartel New Generation
(CJNG), another of the three criminal winners for 2018.
The CJNG has avoided efforts to weaken it with a mix of sophisticated public
relations, military tactics and the luck of circumstance - the government has
simply been distracted.
That is not the say it is invulnerable. The group took some big hits in its
epicenter last year, and the US authorities put it on its radar, unleashing a
series of sealed indictments against the group.
2018 showed that the days of the US using drug policy as a foreign policy hammer may be nearing an end.
Mexico’s cartels battled each other even as they took advantage of booming
criminal economies. The result was manifest in the record high in homicides
this year.
The deterioration in security opened the door to the July election of leftist
candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO, as he is affectionately
known, did not necessary run on security issues, but he may have won on
them, and in the process, inherited a poisoned security chalice from his
predecessor.
While Peña Nieto can claim to have arrested or killed 110 of 122 criminal
heads, AMLO faces closer to a thousand would-be leaders and hundreds of
criminal groups.
The rise in the availability of cocaine and fentanyl greatly impacted the United
States, which remains one of the world’s largest consumers of drugs.
But 2018 showed that the days of the US using drug policy as a foreign policy
hammer may be nearing an end.
In the run-up to the United Nations General Assembly, for example, the Trump
administration’s four-pronged “Call to Action” went largely unanswered by
other countries in the region.
Canada, meanwhile, legalized marijuana, and Mexico’s newly elected
president considered a radical departure from the law and order approach the
Trump administration promotes.
Still, two years of Donald Trump’s strange, haphazard foreign policy has had a
devastating impact on foreign relations in the region and has opened the door
to transnational organized crime.
To begin with, Trump has largely abandoned years of anti-corruption efforts in
Central America, while his administration faces near constant accusations of
corruption inside his own regime.
Specifically, 2018 will be remembered as the year the US government stopped
supporting the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala
(CICIG), the UN-backed adjunct prosecutor’s office in that country.
During nearly 10 years in Guatemala, CICIG-led cases have imprisoned
presidents, vice presidents, vice presidential candidates, former ministers,
bank owners, hotel owners, and many more.
But this year, current Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales - who is also
under CICIG investigation - began lobbying the White House and its allies
directly and eventually succeeded in cobbling together a coalition of accused
elites.
commissioner, despite pressure from US Congress to keep the judicial
adjunct in the country.
Other presidents, most notably Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández,
has played a similar game and largely succeeded in neutralizing that country’s
version of the CICIG, the Support Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in
Honduras (MACCIH).
In February, Juan Jiménez Mayor, the head of the MACCIH, abruptly resigned.
In an open letter published on his Twitter account, Jiménez said he left
because of lack of support from MACCIH’s progenitor, the Organization of
American States (OAS), and concerted efforts by the Honduran congress to
undermine the Mission.
In both Honduras and Guatemala, there have also been constitutional
challenges to the MACCIH’s and the CICIG’s mandates.
But, on a positive note, the re-election of the relatively active attorney general
in Honduras may make efforts to neutralize anti-corruption forces there moot,
most notably on one investigation that inches very close to President
Hernández himself.
None of this seems to bother Trump, who spent 2018 engaged in a near
permanent political campaign in the US, much of which revolved around
conflating immigrants fleeing criminality with the actual criminal groups going
after them, like the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13).
Even worse, his administration’s border policies are actually helping organized
crime. And his administration seems to have abandoned any pretense of
pushing for human rights or a free press, even while the region remains the
most dangerous place on earth to be a journalist largely because of the
organized crime, corruption, and impunity that US allies like Morales and
Hernández foster.
If 2018 is any indication, Bolsonaro bullying his way towards a more secure Brazil may not be so easy.
Indeed, Trump’s disregard for law, order and the truth allowed demagoguery
to flourish, and nowhere was this clearer than in Brazil, where the rightward
turn was even sharper than for its Colombian neighbors.
After getting stabbed during a political rally, the military-evangelical populist
Jair Bolsonaro - who was often described as a “Brazilian Donald Trump” -
higher prison sentences, militarization of the war on crime, and turning back
regional efforts to legalize certain illicit substances.
But if 2018 is any indication, bullying his way towards a more secure Brazil -
which saw an astounding record of 63.880 homicides in 2017 - may not be so
easy, even if it was a popular solution.
The year witnessed another round of fighting in different parts of the country,
including a series of battles between the Family of the North and the Red
Command, which effectively ended a 3-year pact between the two groups.
However, it was the First Capital Command (PCC), which continued to pose
the biggest threat, expanding both within Brazil and the region, and putting it
at the top of our list of criminal winners for 2018.
Ironically, it was the leftist government of El Salvador that most resembled the
militaristic Bolsonaro anti-crime strategy in 2018.
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), effectively green-lit a
hardline strategy that reminds many of the same regimes that FMLN guerrillas
once battled against before it turned into a political movement.
In 2018, the party also codified its most draconian measures and largely
protected the intellectual authors of the most egregious human rights
Meanwhile, gangs like the MS13 showed their ability to adapt in 2018, and to
exert their political muscle in ways that continue to surprise, most notably in
the capital city, San Salvador.
Here the former mayor and current leading presidential candidate Nayib
Bukele - himself a political chameleon who swapped from the leftist FMLN to
a rival centrist party -negotiated with the gangs so he could start reshaping the
city’s Historic Center into a more family-friendly - or at least, tourist friendly -
area.
The approach in many respects worked; as violence was down, the center got
some much-needed structural upgrades, and new businesses opened.
A drop in homicides this year suggests that the FMLN and other political
operators may have also noticed the political results and may be seeking to
accommodate the gangs as well in the lead up to the February elections.
Towards the middle of the political spectrum was Costa Rica, which in April
elected Carlos Alvarado Quesada of the center-left Citizens’ Action Party
(PAC) as president. T
here, the election did not seem to turn on citizen security, but the survival of
the new president’s administration may.
Homicide rates are at record levels, in large part because Costa Rica is
playing a greater role in transnational criminal activity, but possibly also
because 2018 showed that the country’s security forces may be more deeply
involved in crime than ever.
Venezuela has effectively become a vehicle for criminal interests.
On a political spectrum all his own was Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, who was
reelected in April in an exercise that seemed to confirm that he has long since
dispensed with any pretense of democracy.
Venezuela has effectively become a vehicle for criminal interests. The reasons
for this center on the emergence of homegrown criminal groups that are both
inside of the government and connected to it; the abdication of the state of its
duties especially as it relates to prisons; and the death of any viable economic
system to support the corruption and ineptitude that prevail in the Maduro
government.
The result was nothing less than chaos, with thousands of refugees who
flowed daily into other countries.
The unprecedented refugee crisis brought with it desperation and, inevitably,
more organized crime. In short, Venezuela became a regional crime hub in
2018, a place where everything from stolen fuel to teenage girls and rotten food was for sale and every space was open for competition.
The government did not seem to mind. It responded by launching a
cryptocurrency tied to its failing oil industry, even while the First Lady was
fighting off accusations of drug trafficking.
Amid the stark zero-sum political squabbles, there is an outlier, a beacon of
hope even.
In 2018, Argentina seemed to be searching for some sort of happy medium in
the battle against crime.
The government made a push to improve data collection and intelligence
gathering, while it punched up its arrest and seizure statistics. It has
implemented a community policing program, even while it has flirted with
using a militarized approach along the borders and elsewhere.
The results are coming in fits and spurts. The dismantling and trial of one of
the co.untry’s most violent criminal groups, for example, was upstaged by its continued ability to operate from prison.
And a new plea deal law opened a window into official corruption, most notably
among politicians connected to the former government of Cristina Fernández
de Kirchner.
As Argentina’s Security Minister Patricia Bullrich puts it, the government’s plan
is almost perfect. “We set into motion what we call the 80/20 model: 80
percent intelligence, 20 percent chance,” she says.
It is a refreshingly candid remark, an admission that not every program is as
advertised.
This article was previously published by InSight Crime. You can read
the original here.
ws the deep roots of corruption in ...
by R Rozak
Oct 24, 2018 - Counted amongst the nine individuals charged in the “Magic Water” scandal were ... officials, and Uri Roitman, the businessman in charge of the Israeli company ... He has also dismissed pro-Cicig officials, which include the ...
Feb 25, 2016 - 9/11,Guatemala,Uri Roitman:U.S.State Department,Embassy Allows ... http://www
https://www.opendemocracy.net/democraciaabierta/steven-dudley-jeremy-mcdermott-insight-crime/year-crime-became-ideology-in-america
Still, two years of Donald Trump’s strange, haphazard foreign policy has had a
devastating impact on foreign relations in the region and has opened the door
to transnational organized crime.
To begin with, Trump has largely abandoned years of anti-corruption efforts in
Central America, while his administration faces near constant accusations of
corruption inside his own regime.
Specifically, 2018 will be remembered as the year the US government stopped
supporting the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala
(CICIG), the UN-backed adjunct prosecutor’s office in that country.
During nearly 10 years in Guatemala, CICIG-led cases have imprisoned
presidents, vice presidents, vice presidential candidates, former ministers,
bank owners, hotel owners, and many more.
But this year, current Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales - who is also
under CICIG investigation - began lobbying the White House and its allies
directly and eventually succeeded in cobbling together a coalition of accused
elites.
commissioner, despite pressure from US Congress to keep the judicial
adjunct in the country.
Other presidents, most notably Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández,
has played a similar game and largely succeeded in neutralizing that country’s
version of the CICIG, the Support Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in
Honduras (MACCIH).
In February, Juan Jiménez Mayor, the head of the MACCIH, abruptly resigned.
In an open letter published on his Twitter account, Jiménez said he left
because of lack of support from MACCIH’s progenitor, the Organization of
American States (OAS), and concerted efforts by the Honduran congress to
undermine the Mission.......................
2018 was the year crime became an ideology in the
Americas
2018 was a year in which political issues were still often framed as left or right
in the Americas, but the only ideology that mattered was organized crime.
Some of the worst news came from Colombia, where coca and cocaine
production reached record highs amidst another year of bad news regarding
the historic peace agreement with the region’s oldest political insurgency, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The demobilization of ex-FARC members has been plagued by government
leaders’ involvement in the drug trade. And it may have contributed directly
and indirectly to the surge in coca and cocaine production.
Duque and Uribe's alliance in Colombia could impact not just what's left of the peace agreement but the entire structure of the criminal underworld.
It was during this tumult that Colombia elected right wing politician Iván
Duque in May. Duque is the protégé of former president and current Senator
Álvaro Uribe.
Their alliance could impact not just what’s left of the peace agreement but the
entire structure of the underworld where, during 2018, ex-FARC dissidents
reestablished criminal fiefdoms or allied themselves with other criminal
factions.
The last remaining rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), filled
power vacuums in Colombia and neighboring Venezuela, making it one of out
of three criminal winners last year.
Meanwhile, a new generation of traffickers emerged, one that prefers
anonymity to the large, highly visible armies of yesteryear.
Also of note in 2018 was a surge in synthetic drugs, most notably fentanyl.
The synthetic opioid powered a scourge that led to more overdose deaths in
the United States than any other drug.
Fentanyl is no longer consumed as a replacement for heroin. It is now hidden
in counterfeit prescription pills and mixed into cocaine and other legacy drugs.
It is produced in China and while much of it moves through the US postal
system, some of it travels through Mexico on its way to the United States.
During 2018, the criminal groups in Mexico seemed to be shifting their
operations increasingly around it, especially given its increasing popularity,
availability, and profitability.
The result is some new possibly game changing alliances, most notably
between Mexican and Dominican criminal organizations.
Among these Mexican criminal groups is the Jalisco Cartel New Generation
(CJNG), another of the three criminal winners for 2018.
The CJNG has avoided efforts to weaken it with a mix of sophisticated public
relations, military tactics and the luck of circumstance - the government has
simply been distracted.
That is not the say it is invulnerable. The group took some big hits in its
epicenter last year, and the US authorities put it on its radar, unleashing a
series of sealed indictments against the group.
2018 showed that the days of the US using drug policy as a foreign policy hammer may be nearing an end.
Mexico’s cartels battled each other even as they took advantage of booming
criminal economies. The result was manifest in the record high in homicides
this year.
The deterioration in security opened the door to the July election of leftist
candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO, as he is affectionately
known, did not necessary run on security issues, but he may have won on
them, and in the process, inherited a poisoned security chalice from his
predecessor.
While Peña Nieto can claim to have arrested or killed 110 of 122 criminal
heads, AMLO faces closer to a thousand would-be leaders and hundreds of
criminal groups.
The rise in the availability of cocaine and fentanyl greatly impacted the United
States, which remains one of the world’s largest consumers of drugs.
But 2018 showed that the days of the US using drug policy as a foreign policy
hammer may be nearing an end.
In the run-up to the United Nations General Assembly, for example, the Trump
administration’s four-pronged “Call to Action” went largely unanswered by
other countries in the region.
Canada, meanwhile, legalized marijuana, and Mexico’s newly elected
president considered a radical departure from the law and order approach the
Trump administration promotes.
Still, two years of Donald Trump’s strange, haphazard foreign policy has had a
devastating impact on foreign relations in the region and has opened the door
to transnational organized crime.
To begin with, Trump has largely abandoned years of anti-corruption efforts in
Central America, while his administration faces near constant accusations of
corruption inside his own regime.
Specifically, 2018 will be remembered as the year the US government stopped
supporting the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala
(CICIG), the UN-backed adjunct prosecutor’s office in that country.
During nearly 10 years in Guatemala, CICIG-led cases have imprisoned
presidents, vice presidents, vice presidential candidates, former ministers,
bank owners, hotel owners, and many more.
But this year, current Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales - who is also
under CICIG investigation - began lobbying the White House and its allies
directly and eventually succeeded in cobbling together a coalition of accused
elites.
commissioner, despite pressure from US Congress to keep the judicial
adjunct in the country.
Other presidents, most notably Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández,
has played a similar game and largely succeeded in neutralizing that country’s
version of the CICIG, the Support Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in
Honduras (MACCIH).
In February, Juan Jiménez Mayor, the head of the MACCIH, abruptly resigned.
In an open letter published on his Twitter account, Jiménez said he left
because of lack of support from MACCIH’s progenitor, the Organization of
American States (OAS), and concerted efforts by the Honduran congress to
undermine the Mission.
In both Honduras and Guatemala, there have also been constitutional
challenges to the MACCIH’s and the CICIG’s mandates.
But, on a positive note, the re-election of the relatively active attorney general
in Honduras may make efforts to neutralize anti-corruption forces there moot,
most notably on one investigation that inches very close to President
Hernández himself.
None of this seems to bother Trump, who spent 2018 engaged in a near
permanent political campaign in the US, much of which revolved around
conflating immigrants fleeing criminality with the actual criminal groups going
after them, like the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13).
Even worse, his administration’s border policies are actually helping organized
crime. And his administration seems to have abandoned any pretense of
pushing for human rights or a free press, even while the region remains the
most dangerous place on earth to be a journalist largely because of the
organized crime, corruption, and impunity that US allies like Morales and
Hernández foster.
If 2018 is any indication, Bolsonaro bullying his way towards a more secure Brazil may not be so easy.
Indeed, Trump’s disregard for law, order and the truth allowed demagoguery
to flourish, and nowhere was this clearer than in Brazil, where the rightward
turn was even sharper than for its Colombian neighbors.
After getting stabbed during a political rally, the military-evangelical populist
Jair Bolsonaro - who was often described as a “Brazilian Donald Trump” -
higher prison sentences, militarization of the war on crime, and turning back
regional efforts to legalize certain illicit substances.
But if 2018 is any indication, bullying his way towards a more secure Brazil -
which saw an astounding record of 63.880 homicides in 2017 - may not be so
easy, even if it was a popular solution.
The year witnessed another round of fighting in different parts of the country,
including a series of battles between the Family of the North and the Red
Command, which effectively ended a 3-year pact between the two groups.
However, it was the First Capital Command (PCC), which continued to pose
the biggest threat, expanding both within Brazil and the region, and putting it
at the top of our list of criminal winners for 2018.
Ironically, it was the leftist government of El Salvador that most resembled the
militaristic Bolsonaro anti-crime strategy in 2018.
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), effectively green-lit a
hardline strategy that reminds many of the same regimes that FMLN guerrillas
once battled against before it turned into a political movement.
In 2018, the party also codified its most draconian measures and largely
protected the intellectual authors of the most egregious human rights
Meanwhile, gangs like the MS13 showed their ability to adapt in 2018, and to
exert their political muscle in ways that continue to surprise, most notably in
the capital city, San Salvador.
Here the former mayor and current leading presidential candidate Nayib
Bukele - himself a political chameleon who swapped from the leftist FMLN to
a rival centrist party -negotiated with the gangs so he could start reshaping the
city’s Historic Center into a more family-friendly - or at least, tourist friendly -
area.
The approach in many respects worked; as violence was down, the center got
some much-needed structural upgrades, and new businesses opened.
A drop in homicides this year suggests that the FMLN and other political
operators may have also noticed the political results and may be seeking to
accommodate the gangs as well in the lead up to the February elections.
Towards the middle of the political spectrum was Costa Rica, which in April
elected Carlos Alvarado Quesada of the center-left Citizens’ Action Party
(PAC) as president. T
here, the election did not seem to turn on citizen security, but the survival of
the new president’s administration may.
Homicide rates are at record levels, in large part because Costa Rica is
playing a greater role in transnational criminal activity, but possibly also
because 2018 showed that the country’s security forces may be more deeply
involved in crime than ever.
Venezuela has effectively become a vehicle for criminal interests.
On a political spectrum all his own was Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, who was
reelected in April in an exercise that seemed to confirm that he has long since
dispensed with any pretense of democracy.
Venezuela has effectively become a vehicle for criminal interests. The reasons
for this center on the emergence of homegrown criminal groups that are both
inside of the government and connected to it; the abdication of the state of its
duties especially as it relates to prisons; and the death of any viable economic
system to support the corruption and ineptitude that prevail in the Maduro
government.
The result was nothing less than chaos, with thousands of refugees who
flowed daily into other countries.
The unprecedented refugee crisis brought with it desperation and, inevitably,
more organized crime. In short, Venezuela became a regional crime hub in
2018, a place where everything from stolen fuel to teenage girls and rotten food was for sale and every space was open for competition.
The government did not seem to mind. It responded by launching a
cryptocurrency tied to its failing oil industry, even while the First Lady was
fighting off accusations of drug trafficking.
Amid the stark zero-sum political squabbles, there is an outlier, a beacon of
hope even.
In 2018, Argentina seemed to be searching for some sort of happy medium in
the battle against crime.
The government made a push to improve data collection and intelligence
gathering, while it punched up its arrest and seizure statistics. It has
implemented a community policing program, even while it has flirted with
using a militarized approach along the borders and elsewhere.
The results are coming in fits and spurts. The dismantling and trial of one of
the co.untry’s most violent criminal groups, for example, was upstaged by its continued ability to operate from prison.
And a new plea deal law opened a window into official corruption, most notably
among politicians connected to the former government of Cristina Fernández
de Kirchner.
As Argentina’s Security Minister Patricia Bullrich puts it, the government’s plan
is almost perfect. “We set into motion what we call the 80/20 model: 80
percent intelligence, 20 percent chance,” she says.
It is a refreshingly candid remark, an admission that not every program is as
advertised.
This article was previously published by InSight Crime. You can read
the original here.
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