Free Republic

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Shootouts involving drug gangs and police Tuesday left at least 20 alleged gang members dead and sent mourners in a cemetery fleeing from gunfire, officials said. The deaths are the latest in an upsurge of killing that has made Rio de Janeiro one of Brazil's most violence-plagued cities with an annual homicide rate of around 50 per 100,000 residents. Most of the killings have occurred in the city's more than 600 shantytowns, controlled primarily by heavily armed drug gangs. At least 14 alleged drug gang members were killed in an hours-long shootout in the Mineira...

On the journey into the United States, a stay in one of Houston's "drop houses" often is the last stop illegal immigrants make before their lives begin in this city. It's a dehumanizing experience. Immigrants — treated as cargo — are known as pollo, or chickens. They're often held at gunpoint and forced to subsist for days or weeks in stifling and filthy conditions before their smuggling debts are paid. These houses are all over Houston, say federal authorities, who find at least one a week. A shootout last week in southwest Houston underscored how problematic these illegal transfer sites...

An e-mail is bouncing around the Internet with photographs of alleged Bolivarian gunmen in an area of Caracas that appears to be 23 de Enero. Many appear to be teenagers, they are wearing Bolivarian t-shirts with Che Guevara's face super-imposed on Venezuela's national colors, and they are armed with Glock 9mm semi-automatic handguns. According to Pensamiento Militar Venezolano 2005, a strategic and tactical military defense document drafted under the direction of President Hugo Chávez, the core mission of these armed youths is to turn Caracas into a kill zone where escualidos will be hunted down systematically if the Chávez regime...