Latin American governments congratulate Chavez win in Venezuela

MEXICO CITY -- Governments in Latin America quickly congratulated Hugo Chavez on his reelection Sunday as president of Venezuela, a sign of his convincing win over strong opposition challenger Henrique Capriles.

With Chavez's victory, Venezuela's socialist government is set to remain in power at least through 2019 and maintain its position as a regional leader for leftist governments that are Bolivarian ideological allies or depend on Venezuela's oil and subsidies.

The congratulations were effusive and personally directed at the president who has been in office for more than 13 years, making Chavez, 58, the longest-serving leader in Latin America.

"Your decisive victory assures the continuation of the struggle for the genuine integration of Our America," said Cuban President Raul Castro, in a statement released by the communist country's embassy in Mexico City.

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-- Emily Alpert in Los Angeles

Photo: Trinity Broadcasting Network co-founder Paul Crouch, center, his son, Matt Crouch, right, and Singapore evangelist Joseph Prince tape a prayer broadcast on the terrace of TBN's new Jerusalem studio. Credit: Edmund Sanders / Los Angeles Times

In Venezuela, Chavez foe demands justice in killing of two followers

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Presidential challenger Henrique Capriles on Monday lamented the killing of two of his followers during a weekend rally in the western state of Barinas and said the attack was a symptom of rising violence by followers of President Hugo Chavez against his campaign.

“Yesterday a bottle of paint hit me in the face. If this had happened to the other side, we would now be having an assassination investigation,” Capriles said at a news conference in Caracas, where he discussed Saturday’s attack on his supporters. He called on the government to “let people express themselves peacefully.”

Voters go to the polls Sunday to choose between Capriles and Chavez, who has been in office since February 1999 and is seeking another six-year term. Although most polls have Chavez in the lead, Capriles has narrowed the gap. Capriles insists he will win by 1 million votes.

He demanded an investigation into the shooting deaths of his supporters and urged that the campaign be peaceful. “The election wil be won by votes, not violence or insults,” he said.

One of the victims, Jackson Valero, was the son of Ramon "Chucho" Valero, a former opposition candidate for mayor of Bolivar in Barinas state. The shootings occurred after alleged Chavez followers tried to block a Capriles campaign parade.

Capriles wrapped up the Caracas portion of his campaign with a massive rally Sunday that attracted tens of thousands. As his campaign has gathered strength and opinion polls have shown him narrowing Chavez's lead, attacks by Chavez supporters have increased in the streets as well as over the airwaves.

During a Sunday night program on state-controlled television, the host played what he said was a wiretapped recording of a telephone conversation of Capriles’ father allegedly discussing an illegal campaign contribution.

Capriles on Monday denied any such contribution had been encouraged or accepted, and said, “The incredible thing is that they transmitted an illegal recording over a public channel,” Capriles said.

The incumbent “has distanced himself from the process of change," Capriles said. "He’s become sick with power.”

Capriles also told reporters he will announce his vice presidential running mate Thursday. Rumors point to Lara Gov. Henry Falcon, a former Chavez supporter and now opposition leader. Capriles also said he has selected an unidentified and currently serving armed forces general to be his defense minister if he is victorious.

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-- Mery Mogollon in Caracas and Chris Kraul in Bogota, Colombia

Photo: Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, center, greets supporters during a campaign rally in Puerto Ayacucho, Amazonas state, Monday. Credit: Leo Ramirez / AFP

Accused Mexican drug ring posing as media on trial in Nicaragua

 

MEXICO CITY — The 18 Mexicans said they were journalists from their country’s main television broadcaster, Televisa. They wore the company T-shirt, and the six vans they drove into Nicaragua bore the orange Televisa logo.

The vans contained equipment including computers and cameras. Oh, and also $9.2 million in cash hidden in secret compartments and traces of cocaine.

The mysterious caravan apparently plied the length of Central America, from Mexico to Costa Rica, in the last couple of years, never raising more than passing suspicion until Nicaraguan authorities stopped it in August at Las Manos, a Nicaraguan post on the border with Honduras.

Authorities suspect the group was part of a drug-trafficking network that moved cocaine and money throughout the region. Nicaraguan Judge Julio Cesar Arias this week ordered the group of 18 — 17 men and one woman — to stand trial in December on charges of money-laundering, drug-smuggling and organized crime.

The exposure of the 18 has proved one of the most vivid illustrations to date of the well-known but often unseen spread of Mexican drug operations deep into Central America, long a conduit and increasingly a base of storage, production and marketing for Mexican cartels.

It has also proved dicey for Televisa, the world’s largest Spanish-language TV network, which quickly disavowed any knowledge of the group. In a statement, the broadcaster said the people were not its employees and the vans did not belong to the company. Televisa says it will ask for an investigation and hoped to take legal action against the 18 for falsifying its logo.

Televisa got backing from Mexico’s top legal official, Atty. Gen. Marisela Morales, who said in a television interview (with Televisa, of course), that the suspects falsely used Televisa’s name as a cover for their criminal doings, part of a “machination.”

But journalists in Mexico (real ones) turned up paperwork that they say shows that the vans, or at least their license plates, were in fact registered to Televisa.

Already in progress in Managua was a separate trial of Nicaraguan businessman Henry Fariña or Fariñas, who is accused of aiding Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel move cash and coke to and from Colombia through neighboring Costa Rica. His alleged operations came to light when he survived an assassination attempt in Guatemala last year that instead killed a chance companion, renowned Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral.

It is not known if there is a connection between that case and the 18 Mexicans, who have since their arrest been reported to have made numerous trips through Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Meanwhile, at a preliminary hearing on Tuesday, the Mexican suspects sat rather forlornly and heard Judge Arias read the charges and set a date for the trial, Dec. 3.

The lone woman in the group, who has been identified as Raquel Alatorre, 30, of Merida, has been called the leader. She often tries to shield herself from cameras, lowering her head or hanging back in the crowd of suspects.

Nicaraguan prosecutor Rodrigo Zambrana said the suspects gave conflicting and rather improbable accounts of what they were up to when they drove into Nicaragua. At one point they said they were doing a special report on Nicaragua; another time it was a story on a Mexican accused of money-laundering in Managua, according to Zambrana. Neither scenario explains the need for an 18-member TV team, nor why they needed more than $9 million.

They were nabbed when an anonymous caller notified police that he heard the group in Honduras talking suspiciously about their mission in Nicaragua, officials have said.

And speaking of the money, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is apparently already spending it. He says it will go toward buying new patrol cars for police and building and remodeling prisons.

Ortega pretty much publicly condemned the suspects, praising in a speech earlier this month the national police for capturing a crew that, as he put it, took large amounts of drugs north and money south.

Using the Televisa vans, Ortega added, gave the 18 “impunity.” “Because,” he said, “it is not easy to detain supposed journalists to investigate them."

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— Tracy Wilkinson, with a contribution from a special correspondent in Managua, Nicaragua

Photo: Some of the Mexican suspects are escorted to a court hearing in Managua on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012. Credit: Esteban Felix / Associated Press

Colombian president announces fall peace talks with rebels

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Prospects for an end to four decades of civil strife in Colombia inched closer to reality Tuesday as President Juan Manuel Santos announced that his government had agreed to start peace talks in Norway with the country’s largest rebel group in a bid to end the conflict.

The first open negotiations in a decade between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, will start in early October and span "months, not years," Santos said.

Santos was referring to the open-ended, three-year negotiations that collapsed in 2002 after accomplishing little more than disillusioning most Colombians and leaving the FARC militarily stronger.

The new talks will begin in Oslo and then move to Cuba, Santos said. Representatives of the Venezuelan and Chilean governments will act as facilitators.

Conscious that many Colombians, including former President Alvaro Uribe, are deeply skeptical of the talks, Santos said he personally was accepting responsibility for launching the negotiations.

“There comes a moment in history when you have to take risks to arrive at a solution,” Santos said during his 18-minute speech broadcast from the presidential palace in Bogota. “This is one of those moments.”

White House: Peru displaces Colombia as top cocaine producer

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Peru has regained its former distinction as the world’s top cocaine producer, according to an annual White House report, issued Monday, that says Colombia’s output fell sharply last year, putting the former leader in third place behind Bolivia.

The report by the Office of National Drug Control Policy diverged from a U.N. monitor’s report last week that estimated Colombian cocaine production at a much higher level. No reason was given for the disparity in the reports, which usually track each other closely.

The White House report estimates Peruvian cocaine production last year at 358 U.S. tons, followed by Bolivia with 292 tons and Colombia at 215 tons. It’s the first year since 1997 that Colombia has not led in global cocaine output in the report. The recent figures represent a 25% drop from White House estimates that Colombia produced 286 tons of cocaine in 2010, topping all producers.

Peru was the world's leading producer of the drug through most of the 1980s and 1990s, before Colombian drug traffickers introduced crops here in a bid to form vertically integrated cocaine cartels. Both the White House and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime use satellite imagery, on-the-ground monitoring, seizures and other indicators to come up with their estimates of cocaine production.

U.N.: Colombian coca and cocaine production shows little change

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The United Nation’s annual survey of coca leaf and cocaine production in Colombia on Wednesday showed little change from a year earlier, leading Colombian officials to praise the country's efforts to reduce its output of illicit drugs.  

A determination on whether Peru has taken the lead in coca leaf or cocaine production, as some law enforcement officials expect, will have to wait until late August when that country’s survey is completed, U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime local director Aldo Lale Demoz said at a news conference in Bogota.

Peru led the world in cocaine production in the early 1980s before the main nexus of the illicit industry shifted to Colombia. By 2010, increased law enforcement pressure on criminal gangs and rebel groups processing cocaine had forced the industry back south to Peru and Bolivia. Last year, Peru nearly displaced Colombia as the world’s largest producer of the illegal powder.

The U.N. survey based on satellite and on the ground monitoring showed that as of Dec. 31, there were roughly 160,000 acres of coca crops being grown in Colombia, up from 155,000 acres at the end of 2010. “Potential production” of cocaine was calculated at 345 metric tons for all of 2011, down slightly from 350 metric tons a year previous.

Unlike some past years, the U.N. survey for other Andean coca and cocaine producers was not released on the same day as the Colombian study.

Although the figures for both coca and cocaine production were about flat on a year on year basis -- a 3% increase in coca leaf production and a 1% decline in cocaine production -- Colombian justice minister Ruth Stella Correa hailed them as part of a continuing decadelong trend toward less illegal drug production.

“The 345 tons produced last year are 625 tons less than were estimated a decade ago. That’s an important statistic to highlight and one which the people should know,” said Correa, who attended the U.N. news conference. She noted that the U.N. estimated that Colombia produced 970 tons of cocaine in 2001.

Officials said total acres eradicated manually or through aerial spraying of herbicides in 2011 totaled 342,000 acres, down 6% from the 362,500 acres of crops destroyed in 2010. Manual eradication programs have been scaled back in recent years partly because of the rising casualty rates among eradicators and armed forces members who guard them.

The U.N. report noted that the fastest growing coca farming region in Colombia is southern Putumayo province, particularly the strip within about six miles of the Ecuadorean border, a zone where Colombian authorities  have agreed not to spray herbicides because of alleged health consequences for Ecuadoreans living across the border.

The U.N. also reported that Colombian authorities seized 155.8 metric tons of cocaine last year, down from 164.8 tons in 2010.

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Photo: The representative in Colombia of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Aldo Lale Demoz, center, talks next to Colombia Justice Minister Ruth Stella Correa, left, and the director of Counternarcotics Police of Colombia, Gen. Luis Alberto Perez, during the presentation of the annual report on illicit crops in the country, in Bogota on Wednesday. Credit: Leonardo Munoz / EPA

Venezuela's Globovision pays $2.1 million fine to stay on air

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Globovision TV, a frequent critic of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, bowed to government pressure and said Friday that it will pay a contested $2.1-million fine the day after the penalty was upheld by the Supreme Court and a government official threatened to close down the station.

Calling the fine “unjust and disproportionate,” Globovision Executive Vice President Carlos Zuloaga said the broadcaster’s board of directors decided to pay under protest. The fine was levied last year for what the government described as biased coverage of prison riots that “encouraged illegality.”

Still uncertain was whether the station will have to pay late penalties and interest that could amount to about triple the original fine.

Press freedom advocates have criticized the Chavez government for the fine, saying it’s the latest example of attempts to squelch dissent. In 2007, the government denied the renewal of the broadcast license of another opposition channel, RCTV, provoking widespread student protests that later that year contributed to the defeat of a referendum, Chavez's only electoral loss since he took office in early 1999.

Communication and Information Minister Andres Izarra told reporters Thursday at an event tied to next week’s official kickoff of the presidential election campaign that the Globovision case showed the rule of law prevailed in Venezuela.

Leading foe rejects new plan for Peru mine

LIMA, Peru -- A prominent regional leader who has led protests against a $4.8-billion gold and copper mining project in northern Peru said he opposed a new offer made by President Ollanta Humala and Newmont Mining.

Under the new plan, reservoirs would be built to expand by 10 times the water storage capacity of existing lakes near the proposed site of the mine. With Humala’s backing, Newmont Mining said the reservoirs would address the concerns of residents that the Conga project could endanger water supplies.

But in a telephone interview, Gregorio Santos, president of the Cajamarca region, said Humala and Newmont had both lost credibility. Santos said he and other opposition leaders in northern Peru were sticking to their demand that an independent environmental impact study be carried out before the project goes ahead.

The Cajamarca region is where Newmont operates the Yanacocha open-pit gold mine, one of the largest in the world.

“Humala says he wants dialogue, but he has not listened to the people of Cajamarca,” Santos said. “Now we don’t believe him, and he is only repeating the words of economic power groups.”

In an address to the nation Saturday, Humala said the Conga project would go forward  and promised that water supplies would not be compromised.

“Water comes first, that’s the condition,” he said. “My government would never permit the development of any mining project that exposes the population to the loss of water or the lack of quality standards required for human consumption.” '

Mining has been a prime engine of Peru’s stellar economic growth over the last decade, luring billions of investment dollars amid a global commodities boom. Humala has said he needs the taxes and royalties from the Conga project, which was approved by his predecessor, to help pay for ambitious social programs.

Observers say the project is also a gauge of Humala's commitment to foreign investment despite his leftist rhetoric during his successful presidential campaign last year.

Colorado-based Newmont says the mining design is sound and there is no need for the months-long delay that would result from carrying out another environmental study. Company Vice President Carlos Santa Cruz said recently that Newmont was willing to address any mistakes of the past, reach “a new state of understanding” with residents and contribute to a $49-million social works fund.

Peasant protests over mining projects in Cajamarca in December and in Espinar province to the south in May prompted the government to declare states of emergency, suspending the right to assembly and other constitutional protections. Unlike with the standoff in Cajamarca, protesters against the $1.5-billion Espinar project proposed by Swiss-based Xstrata are negotiating with the company.

“We will not accept Conga," said Santos, the regional president. "There are projects in Peru that are just going to sit there because the people feel they would mean abandoning their natural resources. Cajamarca will continue resisting.”

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-- Adriana Leon in Lima and Chris Kraul in Bogota, Colombia 

Photo: Hundreds of people demonstrate against the Conga mining project in Cajamarca, in the mountains of northern Peru, in May. Credit: Francisco Vigo/European Pressphoto Agency

China commits $15 billion in development funds for Latin America

SANTIAGO, Chile -- In a bid to strengthen ties with an important regional trade partner, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told a U.N. economic conference in Chile on Tuesday that his country was ready to invest and lend $15 billion for Latin American infrastructure, manufacturing and sustainable technology projects.

Wen wound up his state visit to Latin America with a stop in Santiago, the Chilean capital, where in talks with President Sebastian Pinera he promised to double bilateral trade, now worth $30 billion a year, by 2015. China is a major customer for Chile’s copper, fruit and wine exports.

Wen said $10 billion of the development funds would come in loans from the Chinese Development Bank for roads, ports and railways, and $5 billion would be placed in a "cooperation fund" that would finance new technologies. He also said his country would increase the scholarships available to Latin American students to study in China.

The aim is to help the region develop more value-added exports than just natural resources, he said.

"China has become the biggest market for several Latin American countries," said Wen, who was making his third state visit to the region. He also praised the region for having so far withstood the ripple effects of the U.S. and European financial crises of recent years, saying it has demonstrated "cohesion, action and influence."