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One of the world's most hunted drug traffickers, whose criminal organization compared in size to that of late drug lord Pablo Escobar, has been arrested in Brazil as part of a major international bust, officials said.
Brazilian authorities said Wednesday, May 17, that Colombian-born Pablo Rayo-Montano, who had been on the run for a decade, was captured the day before at his home in São Paulo as part of a three-year operation spearheaded by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and police in Brazil, Panama and Colombia. More than three dozen others were arrested during simultaneous raids Tuesday in the United States and Latin America, officials said. Also seized were three islands owned by Rayo-Montano off the coast of Panama and a trove of expensive artwork, yachts, real estate holdings and millions in cash. The cartel allegedly used speedboats, cargo vessels and submarine-like vessels to ship more than 15 tons of cocaine a month from clandestine Colombian ports to the United States and Europe, officials said. "The Rayo-Montano trafficking organization ranked up there with Pablo Escobar and the Cali Cartel in terms of the amount of cocaine it was able to smuggle into the United States," Dave Gaddis, head of the DEA in Bogota, Colombia, told reporters. Escobar, history's most notorious drug trafficker, led the now defunct Medellin cocaine cartel and was shot dead by police in December 1993. Much of the drug trafficking industry was subsequently taken over by Colombia's Cali Cartel. Called Twin Oceans, the latest operation targeted the drug network allegedly run by Jackson Orozco-Gil and the brothers Domingo and Mars Micolta-Hurtado from Colombia's Caribbean coast. All three were arrested Tuesday in Colombia and Panama. But the godfather of the organization, the DEA said, was "Don Pablo," who managed the multinational empire from São Paulo, where he's been living the past three years. "The Rayo-Montano organization had its own private, rogue navy to run a drug business that was nearly as sophisticated as a small nation," DEA administrator Karen P. Tandy said in a press release Wednesday. As a result of the investigation, officials in nine countries, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Mexico and the United States, arrested more than 100 people and seized 47.5 tons of cocaine and nearly US$ 70 million in assets throughout the world, the DEA said. Of the more than 30 arrests on Tuesday, six were made in the United States, including one in Los Angeles in which a federal agent posed as a pizza deliverer, a DEA official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the operation. Four people were arrested in Miami. One arrest was made in Indianapolis. The U.S. Department of Justice considered the Rayo-Montano organization one of its top drug targets, with a comprehensive infrastructure capable of everything from the production of cocaine and heroin in Colombia to smuggling and wholesale distribution in Europe and the United States. Pravda - www.pravda.ru
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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.
Because the brazilian gov't. will negotiate to only allow him to stay home on saturday nights and maybe take a speed boat or two away from him.
Wait until he's sent to the U.S.
Does anyone want to place a bet that a negotiation won't even be on the table??