by the El Reportero news services
Alfonzo Peña
SASABE, MEXICO – Mexican drug lords are taking over the business of smuggling migrants into the United States, using them as human decoys to divert authorities from billions of dollars in cocaine shipments across the same border.
U.S. and Mexican law-enforcement officials said that drug traffickers, in response to a U.S. border crackdown, have seized control of the routes they once shared with human smugglers and are transforming themselves into more diversified crime syndicates.
The drug gangs get protection money from the migrants and then use them to clear the trail for the flow of drugs.
Undocumented aliens are used “to maneuver where they want us or don’t want us to be,’’ said Alonzo Peña, chief of investigations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona.
Gustavo Soto, a spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol in Tucson, Ariz., said smugglers are carrying drugs along paths once used primarily by migrants. New fences and National Guard troops have helped seal the usual drug routes, and vehicle barriers are forcing traffickers to send more drugs north on the backs of cartel foot soldiers, he said, reported World News.
International Court opens hearing in case Nicaragua Colombia
The International Court of Justice (CIJ) will open the public hearings in the dispute on marine delimitation that faces Nicaragua and Colombia next June 4. These trataraán concerning the jurisdiction of the court in the case, it indicated a bulletin of the judicial organism in a bulletin this week.
These are preliminary hearings and will deal only on the topic if the Court is competent to hear it, which Colombia has put in doubt. It will not talk about the substance of the question that both countries face.
Nicaragua denounced Colombia before the ICJ for “legal topics relating to the marine and territorial delimitation” between the two countries in their opposite west of their Caribbean sea. The denunciation was done on Dec. 6, 2001.
In dispute are the sovereignty that Nicaragua claims on the islands Providence, San Andrés and Saint Catalina, as well as on the keys Roncador, Mountain, Serranilla and Quitasueño.
Nicaragua lays claim to the San Andrés and Providencia islands, and Roncador, Quitasueños and Cerrana keys, which it lost to Colombia, Nicaragua says, in a 1928 treaty it was forced to sign because it was occupied by the US Marines at the time.
Also, Nicaragua asks that the ICJ determine the continental platform and the economic exclusive zone in the Caribbean that corresponds to each of the countries. In its denunciation, Nicaragua argued that “it reserves itself the right to request compensations for elements of unjust enrichment “, on the part of Colombia, derivative of the possession of this country of these islands and keys.
