Free Republic

The most circulated newspaper in Europe killed a major corruption story to please Joe Biden. A new report details how editors at Bild, the outlet in question, canned an extensive investigative piece on Albanian PM Edi Rama because he and the US president are friends and political allies.Per The Washington Examiner, Albania has become a narco-state over the last decade under Rama, and Bild was getting ready to expose him further.So, who is Rama? He’s the far-left leader of Albania’s Socialist Party. Accusations against him range from drug trafficking to money laundering, to extortion and vote buying.A few days ago,...

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Honduras extradited former President Juan Orlando Hernández to the United States on Thursday to face drug trafficking and weapons charges in a dramatic reversal for a leader once touted by U.S. authorities as a key ally in the war on the drugs.Just three months after leaving office, a handcuffed Hernández boarded an airplane with agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration bound for the United States, where he faces charges in the Southern District of New York. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Hernandez "abused his position as President of Honduras from 2014 through 2022 to operate...

In an October 9, 2021 article in the English-language Saudi daily Arab News, Lebanese media figure Baria Alamuddin writes that Hizbullah continues its globe-spanning drug trafficking activities, now using West African countries as major transit states for its drug shipments. She notes that Hizbullah and Syria, both sponsored by Iran, continue to bolster their status as the world's major source of the amphetamine-based drug Captagon. However, since Saudi Arabia banned the import of Lebanese produce earlier this year, Hizbullah has had to divert its Captagon shipments through transit countries to obscure the country of origin. West Africa has become a...

In an interview with Bloomberg, Ajmal Ahmady, governor of Da Afghan Bank, observed the majority of the central bank’s more than $9 billion in assets were frozen by the U.S. following the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces...Last week, the International Monetary Fund said the Taliban has been prevented from accessing reserve assets worth about $500 million. Afghanistan functions primarily as a cash economy, but the Afghani, the nation's currency, is not accepted for cross-border trade, while an informal transfer system known as hawala doesn’t function efficiently in a modern financial environment.Ahamdy predicted the Taliban will “probably try to go...

Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador warned Friday he would not allow the US to conduct cross-border armed operations, after Donald Trump vowed to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups. The US president has been talking tough on the powerful drug cartels since one was allegedly responsible for the massacre of nine women and children from a US-Mexican Mormon community in northern Mexico on November 4. Trump tweeted after the killings that the US was ready to help Mexico "wage war on the drug cartels," and he followed up this week by vowing to add Mexican cartels to the...

A Dutch lawyer in a major gangland case has been shot dead outside his Amsterdam home - a crime described by police as exceptionally brutal. Derk Wiersum, 44, was the lawyer for a state witness in a case against members of a violent drug gang, who are accused of five murders between 2015 and 2017. A hoodie-wearing suspect fled on foot. Police chief Erik Akerboom said "with this brutal murder, a new limit has been crossed: now even people simply doing their work no longer seem safe". Jan Struijs of the NPB police union said "organised crime has got totally...

Thanks to oil, Venezuela was once the wealthiest country in the region — before becoming the continent’s poorest, ravaged by corruption and feckless economic policy. And amid the economic decline, high-ranking government officials became conspicuously wealthy. But how? According to U.S. indictments, former government officials, and regional experts, officials linked to the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah and members of Maduro’s government built a massive drug syndicate — while most of the country increasingly struggled to find food to eat, or medicine to care for the sick. “Venezuela was a narco state several years ago, but it has become darker and...

U.S. counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan are in a “perilous state” despite billions of dollars spent to combat the spread of drug production there, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko told Congress on Wednesday. [snip] Poppy cultivation hit a record level in 2013, with 209,000 hectares, or about 516,000 acres, devoted to growing the picturesque red flowers that provide the base ingredient for opiate drugs, including heroin, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. That’s a 36 percent increase over 2012.

Mexico’s defense secretary has acknowledged that some areas of the country are outside government control, fueling the debate over the specter of state failure in the country. At a military ceremony yesterday, Mexican Defense Minister Guillermo Galvan Galvan addressed the national security situation in the country, pessimistically describing it in stark terms. “Clearly, in some sectors of the country the public security situation is completely overrun,” said Galvan, adding that “it should be recognized that national security is seriously threatened.” He went on to say that organized crime in the country has managed to penetrate not only society, but also...

Mexico City – Violent crime has become a problem of national security in Mexico, where half of the territory is outside of state control and "we're in the hands of the narcos," an intelligence expert and author of a new book on Mexico's public safety woes, said. Jorge Carrillo Olea, founder of Mexico's leading intelligence center, said the "state has lost territorial control, and therefore governability," over roughly 50 percent of the country.The government has been incapable of fully enforcing the law and ensuring justice is upheld, said Carrillo, who spoke to Efe while in Mexico City to promote his...

(RTTNews) - A prominent newspaper in Mexico's border city of Ciudad Juarez has published an editorial requesting guidelines on media publishing from drug cartels operating in the city after one of its employees was shot dead by suspected drug operatives last week. The unprecedented editorial carried by the El Diario de Juarez newspaper on its front page on Sunday was prompted by the killing of Luis Carlos Santiago, 21-year-old photographer working for the paper, last week. Santiago and a co-worker was shot by unidentified gunmen in Ciudad Juarez on 17 September when they were sitting inside a parked car outside a...

Forget 2012. As far as many Mexicans are concerned, the ancient Mayas were being generous: the sky's actually going to fall next year. Why? Because it's 2010, Mexico's bicentennial, and Mexican history has an eerie way of repeating itself. Mexico's 1910 centennial, after all, saw the start of the bloody, decade-long Mexican Revolution, which killed more than a million people. And that cataclysm was precisely a century after the start of Mexico's bloody, decade-long War of Independence in 1810. You get the picture. As a result, there's been no shortage of talk lately about possible unrest, especially in the form...

On March 1, 2006, I met Hamid Karzai for the first time. It was a clear, crisp day in Kabul. The Afghan president joined President and Mrs. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ronald Neumann to dedicate the new United States Embassy. He thanked the American people for all they had done for Afghanistan. I was a senior counternarcotics official recently arrived in a country that supplied 90 percent of the world’s heroin. I took to heart Karzai’s strong statements against the Afghan drug trade. That was my first mistake. Over the next two years I would discover...