Sixteen national congressmen in Honduras are drug traffickers, according to a former security advisor for the Honduran government quoted in McClatchy’s dark account of drug trafficking in that country (and the region).The report goes on to detail how, in addition to a fully-equipped cocaine laboratory, authorities found refiners of semi-processed coca paste ready for processing and a vertible military arsenal that included 39 anti-tank weapons in the city of San Pedro Sula. The Norther Triangle — Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — is the most dangerous in the world, outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, a U.S. official said at a briefing that is quoted in the story.
- Mexico’s government (GOM) has hired a New York City law firm to explore suing Federal Firearms Licensees (FFL) in the United States, CBS news reports. The contract was signed in November 2010, the report said. The Mexican government is frustrated at U.S. government efforts to slow the flow of weapons south, which become part of ever-larger and sophisticated cartel stockpiles used to fight each other and the Mexican government. The GOM says it has siezed close to 100,000 weapons since December 2006, the majority of them U.S. origin (manufactured or imported by U.S. FFLs.)
- A mass grave in Durango has turned up 50 bodies, Al Jazeera reports. The bodies were being pulled from at least two different graves outside the capital city of the state, which goes by the same name. It’s not clear what the motives of these killings are or if they bear any relation to the violence that has led authorities to mass graves in the neighboring northeastern state of Tamaulipas. Durango is the site of violence between various factions in the country’s increasingly chaotic underworld.