International roundup

By Agencies
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Police in Mexico said they have arrested a top lieutenant of the violent Metros faction of the Gulf drug cartel implicated in 23 attacks on police and nine against military personnel.

The suspect was identified as Hugo Salinas Cortinas, whose nickname “La Cabra” means The Goat. 

Police and the Mexican Army said he was arrested Friday, but provided no explanation for the delay in making the announcement.

Police said Salinas was caught with two guns and 600 pills, apparently fentanyl. 

He allegedly headed up drug and migrant smuggling along a stretch of the Mexican side of the Rio Grande river, also known as the Rio Bravo.

Salinas allegedly operated in a territory comprising the towns of Camargo and Miguel Aleman, across the border from the Texas towns of Rio Grande City and Roma.

Local media reported that a woman identified in 2021 as his wife had been arrested in Roma, Texas, after police found over $800,000 hidden in shoeboxes and backpacks in her home.

The Gulf cartel has splintered into warring factions following the arrest and extradition of some of its top leaders over the decade.

EL SALVADOR

El Salvador opened a trial against former President Mauricio Funes alleging that he had negotiated a truce with the country’s powerful street gangs when he was president, but the trial will proceed without Funes who lives in Nicaragua.

Funes has denied negotiating with the gangs or giving their leaders any privileges. 

“I never ordered nor authorized any negotiation,” Funes wrote Tuesday on Twitter, adding that the truce was between rival gangs, not with the government. 

Mediators in the talks between the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs were not representing the government, he said.

El Salvador’s congress reformed the law last year to allow people to be tried in absentia.

Prosecutors accuse Funes of illicit association and failure to perform his duties for the gang truce negotiated in 2012. 

David Munguía Payés, who served as Funes’ security minister, is on trial for the same charges, as well as others. 

If convicted, Funes could face a sentence of up to 11 years in prison, but since Nicaragua awarded him citizenship, it remains unlikely he will face justice in El Salvador.

El Salvador has pursued Funes, who governed from 2009 to 2014, for other alleged crimes in at least a half dozen cases.

But current President Nayib Bukele has been accused of engaging in the same kind of negotiations with the gangs.

In December 2021, the U.S. Treasury said that Bukele’s government secretly negotiated a truce with leaders of the country’s powerful street gangs. Imprisoned gang leaders were allegedly given privileges in exchange for slowing down killings and for giving political support to Bukele’s party. Local news site El Faro had previously reported negotiations.

Former Attorney General Raúl Melara had said at the time that he would investigate the allegations, but when Bukele’s party dominated mid-term elections and took control of Congress, the new lawmakers ousted Melara.

The truce apparently broke down when the gangs killed 62 people in a single day in March 2022. Bukele responded by suspending some fundamental rights and waging an all out war against the gangs that carries on today.

BOLIVIA

The top Bolivian prosecutor launched an investigation Monday into a late Spanish priest who allegedly abused several minors in Bolivia dating back to the 1980s.

The case of Jesuit priest Alfonso Pedrajas Moreno, who died in 2009, came to light over the weekend in a report by the Spanish newspaper El País.

Attorney General Wilfredo Chávez said on Twitter that he was seeking information from the Spanish consulate on the case, and that he was asking the Catholic Church to comment.

“This horror would have been covered up by the leadership of the Catholic Church at the time,” Chávez alleged on Twitter.

El País had published excerpts of the personal diary of Pedrajas Moreno, who allegedly admitted to having abused dozens of children while he was a teacher in Bolivia until 2009 when he died.

“We feel embarrassed by the situation,” Bolivia’s Jesuit congregation said in a statement, and vowed to listen to the victims, seek justice and work to put an end “to this scourge.”

The congregation said it already had started a probe into Pedrajas Moreno following an allegation in 2022, and had determined the “veracity” of that allegation.

This is not the first complaint against priests for abusing minors in Bolivia, but few cases have been thoroughly investigated and brought to justice.

In 2015, a rural priest was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the abuse of 12 minors. 

A short time later he committed suicide in jail. 

In 2009 a priest was sentenced to 22 years in prison for similar crimes.

MEXICO

Mexico’s Labor Department said 85% of the country’s 140,000 officially registered labor contracts are in danger of being canceled because they failed to meet Monday’s deadline to have union members vote on them.

Under labor reforms that helped win renewal of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement, starting in 2019 Mexico told unions with registered contracts they had to submit the labor pacts to secret-ballot votes by workers within four years.

The small percentage of contracts meeting Monday’s deadline reflects what Mexican officials acknowledge has been the longstanding practice of labor leaders in negotiating contracts with little or no worker input to ensure wages stay low so they can keep factories in Mexico. Wages in Mexico, at roughly one-eighth or less of U.S. wages, have drawn millions of manufacturing jobs out of the United States.

Only about 20,000 contracts complied and were confirmed by votes as of May 1, 2023, the deadline for doing so. The Labor Department said the remaining 120,000 will be nullified, unless those unions have scheduled votes between now and July 31. That is likely to be tiny percentage of the contracts.