Word: venezuela
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...addition, insurance brokers and some officials say governments themselves sometimes pay ransoms - especially on land in kidnap-heavy countries like Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela - despite insisting that they do not. In 2001, for example, the Dutch government paid $1 million to free a doctor working for the aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) who had been kidnapped by Chechen rebels; the government later tried to recoup the money from MSF. "Ransoms are certainly being paid," Antonia Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, said in an e-mail on Friday. "Of course...
Here is how the system works, according to kidnap-and-ransom experts who agreed to talk to TIME: Within minutes of a vessel being seized by Somali pirates (or foreign oil workers being nabbed in Venezuela or Nigeria) the crew alerts its company headquarters. There, officials call the company's insurer, which then contracts a "response company" - private firms, like Control Risks in London or ASI Global in Houston, which are generally staffed by former military personnel experienced in hostage situations, and whose day rates can run to thousands of dollars, according to insurance brokers. Those companies begin negotiations with...
...irony lost on corpses, analysts say, the arrest of drug leaders often only leads to more violence. When narcotrafficker Wilber Verela, alias "Jabon," was murdered in Venezuela in 2008, seven allegedly related deaths followed the next week in Bogota, intelligence sources said. And after the April 1 arrest of Fabio Edison Gomez, alias "Rinon," the leader of Medellin's main crime organization, 33 people were killed in a week, according to the city's police. The renewed upsurge in violence led to the government dispatching some 500 soldiers and 6,800 police to poor neighborhoods in the city. But major...
Those same Chavistas add that the U.S. has scant right to criticize Venezuela's policy on its national capital when residents of Washington, D.C., still aren't allowed representation in Congress. But it's the sort of two-wrongs-make-a-right rebuttal that won't fly as well in the post-Bush era, says Larry Birns, head of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a think tank in in Washington that has often been sympathetic to Chávez. Birns feels Chávez needs to more now than ever guard against his "self-destructive tendencies and not risk...
...stepped off a plane in Venezuela later in the day, where he was meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez before traveling on to the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad on Friday, Morales said unequivocally, "They were going to kill me." He added, "These are international mercenaries" aligned with Bolivia's right-wing opposition. Whether or not the men are linked to the conservative opposition - whose members adamantly denied any ties - officials say a flag of the Nacion Camba - a Santa Cruz-based fascist group - was reportedly found among the weapons. According to security officials, one of the three...