It looked like a James Bond movie. The assassins They came from the sea on fast jet skis, jumped onto the beach and headed straight for the Paraguayan couple. They didn’t even look at her and he was shot in her face.
Without the sea and without the beach, it would have been a scene from Breaking Bad. But it was reality. Thus ended the life of a young man, who enjoyed his honeymoon in the Colombian Caribbean.
It wasn’t a good idea. Marcelo Pucci He was the prosecutor who in Paraguay investigated drug gangs linked to drug mafias in Brazil, Colombia and other countries in the region, in turn linked to guerrillas, paramilitaries and, possibly, to the Latin American metastases of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah.
The drug power found out about that honeymoon that the Paraguayan and Colombian states were unaware of. Doing intelligence, Pecci’s executioners knew that whoever, due to his functions, had to move surrounded by bodyguards, would go unguarded. To make matters worse, to the country where the first drug trafficking multinationals and where his criminal power remains immense.
what they ignored the governments of Paraguay and Colombia knew it who persecuted the prosecutor for having been the target of his judicial actions or on behalf of the Paraguayan drug traffickers who persecuted him.
Perhaps he thought that informing about his trip and being assigned escorts, as well as being uncomfortable on a honeymoon, could be more dangerous. In short, the Paraguayan state, like the rest of Latin America, are infiltrated by drug traffickers and, if the information reached the wrong ears, some mafia could find out and try to assassinate him.
It is not unreasonable to think that, if no one found out in the governments of Asunción and Bogotá, it would be safer than guarded by both states. The same logic could explain why he has chosen none other than Colombia as his destination. Precisely the fact that it is the least suitable country for him to walk no escort a prosecutor who is on the front line of the fight against drug trafficking in the region could make it a safe place. Well, it wasn’t.
It is not clear why Marcelo Pucci traveled so exposed. What is clear is that Latin America must assume that drug trafficking is its biggest problem. That there are no protocols between countries so that the officials who are in the most exposed trenches can only move with protection measures agreed upon at the supra-state level, shows that the region does not calibrate the dimension of the tumor that eats away at it: drug trafficking.
It is no longer enough to talk aboutnarco-states”. Latin America is a “narco-continent”. In other words, a gigantic wasteland of legal, institutional and police structures to fight against the mafias that have been ruling for decades.
This it’s a war in which one of the sides (the State) goes to battle without a strategy and with soldiers devoid of helmets and adequate weapons.
Marcelo Pucci he was not the first to neglect himself. The first incomprehensible oversight was the responsibility of the man who discovered the power of the narco tumor that was growing in Colombia: Rodrigo Lara Bonilla.
President Belisario Betancur’s Minister of Justice had the courage to confront drug lords that built empires without the State and society providing them. Lara Bonilla denounced Pablo Escobarcausing him to lose the bank he had “bought” in 1982 from an indecent political leader.
No one in Latin America was more clear than that Colombian minister about the size and lethality of the narco tumor that Colombia was incubating. However, he traveled without the security measures in accordance with the role he performed. And one night in 1984, returning home without escorts and in an unarmored car, was ambushed and shot by assassins of the capo of the Medellin Cartel.
After the murder of Lara Bonilla, there were other assassinations in Colombia.
In 1989 he was assassinated Luis Carlos Galan. The charismatic leader and candidate of the Liberal Party was preparing to win the presidential elections with an anti-narco program, when he was shot on stage at a proselytizing act.
In Paraguay, the country where the prosecutor Marcelo Pucci was taking legal action against drug trafficking, there were many signs of the link between local organizations and Colombian narco-guerrillas.
In 2004, Cecilia Cubasdaughter of former president Raúl Cubas Grau, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP), a phantasmagorical rural militia that was linked to Colombian Rodrigo Granda, then known as “the Foreign Minister of the FARC”, the guerrilla that originated as a revolutionary armed movement but artificially prolonged its life in the jungle thanks to the drug trafficking financing.
Just like the ELN, the other guerrilla that grew old degrading in the Colombian jungle, the insurgent movement that he had founded in Jacobo Arenas in the “rRepublic of Marquetalia”, he dedicated himself to the millionaire business of generating liberated territories so that the cartels can produce cocaine, and also dedicating himself directly to the production and trafficking of drugs.
It is possible that the shadow of drug trafficking is behind another assassination in Paraguay: the assassination of Vice President Luís María Argaña.
That March morning in 1999, the Colorado caudillo who tumultuously coexisted with the government he presided over the oviedista Cubas Grau, had a quiet breakfast with his wife Marilyn before heading to the Vice President’s office. Shortly after, he was in the back seat when his Nissan Patrol truck was intercepted by a Fiat Tempra from which the gunmen who shot him jumped.
It was logical to immediately suspect the general who wanted the presidency. He fought for her ever since he had a leading role in the Stroessner’s overthrowbut the Colorados gave the candidacy to Juan Carlos Wasmosy.
In 1989, Lino Oviedo had everything to win the election. He could not, because the prosecutions and convictions for sedition that weighed on him prevented him from running. So he chose Cubas Grau as a candidate, but the second in the formula was his arch-enemy within the Colorado Party: Argaña. So everyone pointed to General Oviedo for the assassination perpetrated the following year.
Oviedismo was behind the crime of the vice president, however it is difficult to think that the drug trafficking. In a “narco-continent”, few fingers pull assassination triggers without being related in some way to the drug traffickers. Just like the assassins who came from the sea on jet skis and shot the prosecutor.
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