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One of the world's most hunted drug traffickers accused of shipping more than 70 tons of cocaine to the United States has been arrested in Brazil as part of a major international drug bust, Colombian police said Wednesday, May 17.
Colombian-born Pablo Rayo Montano, who had been on the run for a decade, was captured Tuesday, May 16, by Brazilian authorities in São Paulo as part of a three-year operation coordinated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. More than three dozen others were arrested during simultaneous raids in the United States and Latin America, officials said. "It's estimated the amount of cocaine supplied by this organization was enough to poison 37 million consumers," Colombia's anti-narcotics police said in a news release. Called Twin Oceans, the operation targeted a major drug cartel that used go-fast boats and submarines to ship cocaine and other drugs from clandestine ports along Colombia's coastlines. Officials in nine countries including Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Mexico and the United States have arrested more than 100 people during the investigation, and have seized 47.5 tons of cocaine, 22 pounds of heroin and 770 pounds of marijuana. The U.S. Department of Justice considered Montano a key target, accusing him of running one of the world's largest drug smuggling operations from São Paulo, where he had lived for the past three years. Colombian police said he began trafficking drugs in the early 1990s from the Pacific port of Buenaventura and quickly rose to prominence within the now-defunct Cali cartel alongside a top leader, Helmer "Pacho" Herrera, who was killed in a Colombian jail in 1998. Police said that in Brazil, Montano set up a number of companies, including an art gallery in an upscale district, to launder proceeds from the monthly sale of an estimated 22 tons of cocaine to the United States and Europe. O.Ch.
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
The same happened to Biggs the UK train robber who lived with total impounity in Brazil...for decades.
The same again happened to thousands and thousands of Nazis after World War 2 who went to Brazil with all the money stolen during the war !
And guess what ! 5 years after the ex-Nazis invaded Brazil, you suddenly had an economic boom !
Quite well known too that Brazil is a paradise for those wanting to avoid the justice of their country !
You have tens of thousand of foreign people hiding in your country !