Peruvian Villagers Hold Hostages to Demand Help after Oil Spill

LIMA – Residents of an indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon are holding eight state employees hostage in order to pressure the government into including their village in the state of emergency declared following oil spills in the Loreto region.

An air force helicopter carrying provisions and workers of state oil company Petroperu and the OEFA environmental oversight agency had been barred from leaving since last Sunday in Mayuriaga.

Eight of the workers remained captive in the area Tuesday after the helicopter was allowed to depart on Monday to provide transport for an official committee, the press coordinator of the Interethnic Association for Peruvian Rain Forest Development, or Aidesep, Segundo Chuquipiondo, told EFE.

Petroperu Chairman German Velasquez and emergency services chief Gen. Alfredo Murgueytio are traveling to the area Tuesday to deal with the matter, the spokesman for the state oil company, Juan Jose Beteta, told EFE

The Mayuriaga community is not included in the Feb. 28 decree declaring an emergency in 16 communities in the Morona district of Loreto due to environmental damage caused by the oil spill from the North Peruvian Pipeline in Cashacaño.

Mayuriaga’s leaders demand that the government include its community in that decree, together with three others, and that it consider providing economic resources for the environmental restoration of the area, Chuquipiondo said.

The Aidesep spokesman recalled that Velasquez committed himself early this month to carrying out environmental restoration of the wetlands affected by the spill before resuming work on the oil pipeline.

The oil spills in the regions of Loreto Amazonas, according to a report released last month, have injured about 100 people and affected 4,500 others.

The first rupture of the North Peruvian Pipeline occurred on Jan. 25 in the municipality of Imaza-Chiriaco, where between 2,000 and 3,000 barrels of crude were spilled over the three days it took Petroperu to repair the conduit.

The second spill occurred on Feb. 3 in Datem del Marañon province and resulted in oil reaching the Mayuriaga River and then the Morona River, a Marañon tributary.

A national dialogue commissioner of the prime minister’s office is in simultaneous contact with indigenous community leaders and with officials of OEFA and Petroperu seeking to reach an agreement on the community’s demands, sources at the P.M.’s office told EFE.

Petroperu was fined 12.64 million soles (about $3.59 million) by the Energy and Mining Investment Supervisory Body for failing to properly maintain the pipeline.

The North Peruvian Pipeline transports oil extracted from fields in the Peruvian Amazon to the Pacific port of Bayovar along an 854-kilometer (530-mile) route

Mexican Drug Lord’s Daughter Says The Guardian “Libeled” Her

MEXICO CITY – Rosa Isela Guzman Ortiz, who says Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman is her father and was the subject of a story in The Guardian last week, said on Tuesday that the British newspaper “libeled” her and the article told “many lies.”

“I never gave an interview to anybody, I was chatting with certain people and didn’t say anything, they’re libeling me. That’s what they’re doing,” the 39-year-old Guzman Ortiz told Radio Imagen.

The Guardian, citing an interview with Guzman Ortiz, reported that Chapo Guzman was in the United States on two occasions after breaking out of prison in July 2015.

In the exclusive interview published last Friday, Guzman Ortiz is quoted as saying that Mexican officials facilitated the drug lord’s escape and also helped him remain free under an “agreement” before eventually betraying him.

“I don’t want to say anything, I just want to say that they’re libeling me and telling lots of lies,” Guzman Ortiz said.

The woman said her conversation with reporter Jose Luis Montenegro took place between October and November, and she was not sure whether it was recorded.

Montenegro, for his part, told Radio Imagen that he had recordings of both the interview conducted last July “in a face-to-face session” and of calls made via Skype.

Guzman Ortiz’s reaction may be due to “fear” over the impact of her comments, Montenegro said, adding that she was the one who contacted him after the publication of his book “Narcojuniors.”

Montenegro, who revealed that he has received death threats via e-mail, said Guzman Ortiz told him that she “wanted to help her father.”

The majority of the statements published by the newspaper “are false,” Guzman Ortiz said, adding that she said “many things.”

Guzman Ortiz, who lives in the United States, said the interview took place in the northwestern state of Sinaloa and not in the United States.

The woman reiterated that she was the Sinaloa cartel leader’s daughter, adding that she, her husband and children lived “very separate” from the Guzman family.

Guzman Ortiz also denied that she was married to one of the sons of the other top Sinaloa cartel boss, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.

The woman said she planned to visit her father at the Altiplano prison in central Mexico in the next few weeks.

“He wants to see me,” Guzman Ortiz said.

Guzman Ortiz would be traveling to Mexico at a time when that country’s Attorney General’s Office said it was conducting “different inquiries” to confirm her relationship with the drug lord and was willing to give her an opportunity to present her allegations that politicians were paid off by her father to a judge.

“I’m going to travel there. I have nothing to fear and nothing to hide, I didn’t do anything and I’m not accusing anyone, and all this stuff is a lie,” Guzman Ortiz told Radio Imagen.

In a letter published by the Mexican press last weekend, Emma Coronel, Chapo Guzman’s wife, said the Sinaloa cartel leader did not know Guzman Ortiz.

Coronel told Mexico City’s Milenio newspaper that Guzman was not aware of the existence of his supposed daughter until he was sent to the Altiplano maximum-security prison in the central state of Mexico, which surrounds the Federal District and forms part of the Mexico City metropolitan area.

“(Guzman) told me that this woman started writing him letters saying that her mother had told her that he was her father, it was the first time he had heard of her,” Coronel said.

The drug lord’s wife said he replied “out of courtesy” and did not challenge Guzman Ortiz’s story.

Guzman “has no recollection of who her mother, named Maria Luisa, was” and his sisters have no knowledge of the woman’s existence, Coronel said.

The drug lord escaped from Altiplano I outside Mexico City on July 11, 2015, through a 1.5-kilometer (nearly one-mile) tunnel dug to his cell.

The drug kingpin, who was one of the world’s most-wanted fugitives, was recaptured on Jan. 8 in Sinaloa.

El Chapo has several family members in the United States, the birthplace of his third wife, Emma, a former beauty queen.

Guzman has asked his legal team to speed up the extradition process from Mexico to the United States due to the harsh conditions at Altiplano I, one of the drug lord’s attorneys said Wednesday.

The Sinaloa cartel boss faces drug, money laundering, criminal conspiracy and other charges in Arizona, Texas, California and New York.

Russia - Nanny beheads 4 yr old girl then holding severed head in front of police station ( shouting 'Allahu Akbar' )

Iran- Crackdown on Kurdish people in Iran

Fuziyeh and Avat Hosseinzadeh, a Kurdish sister and brother, were arrested on February 28 by agents of Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS/VEVAK) plainclothes squad in Saghez, western Iran, and transferred to an unknown location.
The charges raised against these two Iranian Kurds were cooperation with a Kurdish groups opposing the Iranian regime.
Fuziyeh 25 and her brother, Avat, 28 were severely beaten during the arrest and the agents also confiscated their personal properties. 
To this day there are no information as to their whereabouts of this brother and sister.

Iran - Man in prison no charges or due process

Following the arrest of Mehran Amini, resident of a villages near the city of Sanandaj, western Iran, the authorities have been lip tight as to his condition or his exact whereabouts. Efforts in to establishing his charges or condition from Sanandaj security officials has fallen into deaf ears.
While no reasons have been provided for why this Kurdish citizen has been arrested, his relatives have cited “propaganda against the state” being the probable reason. Amini was at his father’s home when arrested by Sanandaj intelligence agents. He was beaten during the arrest.
The presence of these agents in the home of Amini’s father took place without any prior notice or judicial order.

Juarez ,Mexico - Baghdad across the border " 65 cop's killed in the last year".

 By early Sunday, 11 more residents of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, had been slain in a 20-hour period, including the sixth police officer killed this year in growing drug cartel violence. More than 65 police officers have been murdered in the border city of 1.4 million in the past year. Too often, U.S. and Mexican media have been AWOL from coverage.

As if by accident, I learned today that even the Juarez Mayor is living not in Mexico, but across the fence here in the United States and commuting to his office in Chihuahua State.

I hadn't intended in doing a follow up to my Juarez narco crime spree story of three days ago, since the killings, mutilated bodies, taunting death notes, and random street crime is not only ignored on the USA side of the border for the most part, but since my syndicated outrage here and my personal blog garnered a grand total of one reader response.

After reading a litany of new crimes, police helicopter assaults, city hall epithets, and carjackings in the local Spanish-language daily El Diario, and relating the stories - all buried inside the hefty Saturday edition (in contrast to dwindling U.S. dailies) - my wife egged me on. She said, "You have to tell it again. Maybe something written by an outsider to this area for whom these events are still shocking, will shake some sense into some authorities, somewhere." Since she was a darned good police reporter and feature writer in her day, I'll try again.

The overall decline in traditional journalistic coverage of Juarez events makes me wonder if the entire city, or the entire "Borderland" region is locked up by chamber of commerce interests. It's as if when you don't report it, it never happened.

$2.75M pot load seized at Mariposa port

Port officers in Nogales seized $2.75 million worth of marijuana from a tractor-trailer this week, their third bust of more than a million dollars worth of pot so far this year.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a 29-year-old male truck driver from Nogales, Sonora tried to the enter the United States though the Mariposa Port of Entry on Feb. 24 with a shipment identified as assorted electronic items.