AP IMPACT: Honduran criminals missing after arrest

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — At least five times in the last few months, members of a Honduras street gang were killed or went missing just after run-ins with the U.S.-supported national police, The Associated Press has determined, feeding accusations that they were victims of federal death squads.

In a country with the highest homicide rate in the world and where only a fraction of crimes are prosecuted, the victims' families say the police are literally getting away with murder.

In March, two mothers discovered the bodies of their sons after the men had called in a panic to say they were surrounded by armed, masked police. The young men, both members of the 18th Street gang, had been shot in the head, their hands bound so tightly the cords cut to the bone.

That was shortly after three members of 18th Street were detained by armed, masked men and taken to a police station. Two men with no criminal history were released, but their friend disappeared without any record of his detention.

A month after the AP reported that an 18th Street gang leader and his girlfriend vanished from police custody, they are still missing.

The 18th Street gang and another known as Mara Salvatrucha are the country's biggest gangs, formed by Central American immigrants in U.S. prisons who later overran this small Central American country as their members were deported back home. Both engage in dealing drugs and charging extortion fees under threat of death. Now the 18th Street gang says its members are being targeted by police death squads, described by witnesses as heavily armed masked men in civilian dress and bullet-proof vests who kill or "disappear" gang members instead of bringing them to justice.

In the last two years, the United States has given an estimated $30 million in aid to Honduran law enforcement. The U.S. State Department says it faces a dilemma: The police are essential to fighting crime in a country that has become a haven for drug-runners. It estimates that 40 percent of the cocaine headed to the U.S. — and 87 percent of cocaine smuggling flights from South America — pass through Honduras.

"The option is that if we don't work with the police, we have to work with the armed forces, which almost everyone accepts to be worse than the police in terms of ... taking matters in their own hands," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield told the AP via live chat on March 28. "Although the national police may have its defects at the moment, it is the lesser evil."

Alba Mejia, Deputy Director of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, said her group has documented hundreds of death squad cases in the country since 2000. The squads burst into homes with no warrants and take away young men, she said.

"We are convinced that there is a government policy of killing gang members and that there is a team dedicated to this activity," Mejia said. Federal prosecutors say they have received about 150 complaints about similar raids in the capital of Tegucigalpa over the last three years.

The 18th Street gang originated in Los Angeles and spread through Central America after many of its members were deported in the 1980s and early 1990s. In Honduras, the gang controls entire neighborhoods, with entrance impossible for outsiders, while gangsters extort what is called a "war tax" on small business owners and taxi drivers, even schools and corporations.

Drug cartels, which are much larger than the gangs, oversee the movement of cocaine from South America northward to the United States. It is widely believed that the cartels pay the gangs in drugs for protection and assistance in moving the narcotics, and as a result the gangs fight each other over the territory.

Honduran National Police spokesman Julian Hernandez Reyes denied the existence of police units operating outside the law. He asserted that the two gangs are murdering each other while disguised as law enforcement.

"There are no police death squads in Honduras," Hernandez said in an interview. "The only squads in place are made of police officers who give their lives for public safety."

But there is mounting evidence of the existence of squads of police in civilian dress, apparently engaged in illegal executions.

An AP reporter covering the aftermath of an April 7 shootout between police and gang members saw one such squad, whose masked members were directing more than 100 uniformed policemen in an offensive against gang members. The officers had surrounded a house where two gangsters had holed up after a chase with police. Witnesses said that when one walked out with his hands up, masked police shot him dead. "Killers! Killers!" a crowd of women shouted.

Last year, the U.S. Congress withheld direct aid to Honduran police chief Juan Carlos Bonilla after he was appointed to the top law enforcement post despite alleged links to death squads a decade earlier. Bonilla, nicknamed "the Tiger," was accused in a 2002 internal affairs report of involvement in three homicides and linked to 11 other deaths and disappearances. He was tried in one killing and acquitted. The rest of the cases were never fully investigated.

The U.S. State Department has resumed funding to the Honduran police, but said the money only supports units vetted by the U.S. So far this year, the U.S. has provided $16 million to the police force, and argued last month that the money isn't sent directly to Bonilla or any of his top 20 officers.

U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the State Department and foreign operations, has led a group in Congress concerned about the alleged human rights abuses, and has held up $10 million, despite State Department pressure.

"A key question is whether we should provide aid, and if so under what conditions, to a police force that is frequently accused of corruption and involvement in violent crimes," Leahy said. "If there is to be any hope of making real progress against lawlessness in Honduras, we need people there we can trust, who will do what is necessary to make the justice system work. That is the least Congress should expect."

Two weeks before a visit to Central America by President Barack Obama, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey toured Honduras amid questions over how U.S. aid is spent.

"I understand that there are concerns among my colleagues in both the Senate and House about certain U.S. assistance to Honduras," said Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "The U.S. has a moral and legal authority to ensure U.S. assistance is not tainted by human rights concerns."

The latest string of attacks began with gang leader Kevin Carranza Padilla, who disappeared with his girlfriend, Cindy Yadira Garcia, on Jan. 10. Witnesses said he was arrested, and a police photo leaked to the local press showed Carranza with his hands tied and face duct-taped. The couple has not been seen since, and police say they were never arrested.

In March, Carranza's close friend, Billy "Babyface" Jovel Mejia, 23, and another gang member, Wilder Javier "Sadboy" Alvarado, 20, were on the run, changing houses every couple of days, when they called a friend to say they had been surrounded by police.

A woman named Kelsa, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of reprisals, had helped the two hide out. She told the AP of a call one night from a panicked Jovel, whom she quoted as saying: "The police are coming for us. They are going to enter the house. Tell our families that they are coming to kill us."

"I could hear pounding." she said. "Billy told me he couldn't explain what house they were at. ... I could hear screams. Billy left the phone and then the call dropped."

As often happens in such cases, his mother, Maria Elena Garcia, went from station to station in search of information from police.

"I went to the 4th district, from there they sent me to the 7th, then to the metropolitan police headquarters," Garcia said. "At 5 a.m. they called me to tell me that they had found two bodies."

Garcia and Alvarado's mother identified their sons, whose bodies were found dumped at the edge of the capital. Each had a single 9 millimeter gunshot to the head, and their hands were tightly bound. Jovel was missing his right eye, Alvarado his left.

"The blood was still fresh and the bullets were still there," Garcia said.

Alvarado's mother, Norma, said police had raided her home at least six times in search of her son in a neighborhood called the United States, one of many named for a country.

She described the same routine each time: They would come in civilian clothes with bullet-proof vests and ski masks and identify themselves as police. They were teams of six to eight men in large, expensive SUVs without license plates.

"There were times when I would close the door to give him time to escape," she said. "They even came on New Year's Eve."

In the middle of the night on Feb. 14, six masked men who identified themselves as police took Alvarado's 13-year-old grandson.

She told them he was studying, that he was a good boy.

"I begged them not to take him, not to kill him," Alvarado told the AP, crying. "There was only one car outside our door, but at each end of the street there were more cars. It was a big operation."

The boy, whose name is being withheld because he is a minor, said in an interview that they covered his face with his own shirt and pushed him to the floor of the SUV. Two agents kept him down with their feet while another drove the car around for half an hour, asking about Wilder, the boy's cousin.

"They wanted to know where my brother was. They thought Wilder was my brother. They wanted to know where the weapons were," the boy said. "They kept punching me, and because I wasn't telling them anything, they would punch me more."

The boy was taken to an office.

"They were six men. I could only see them when they took the shirt off of my face to put a black, plastic bag over my head. They always wore the ski masks. I was sitting down and they were asphyxiating me with the bag. When I would faint they would beat me up to wake me up and they would do it again," he recalled.

The boy said he could see photos of 18th Street gang members pinned to the walls.

He doesn't know why, but suddenly they let him go, and the following day his family filed a complaint with the prosecutors' office. They have heard nothing about the investigation.

The 18th Street gang leaders told the AP that the attacks against its members are not the work of rival gangs. Members say police have declared war on them, especially in the southeast Tegucigalpa neighborhood once led by Carranza.

Carranza's partner, Elvin Escoto Sandoval, known as "Splinter," was detained by police on March 13, according to his wife, Doris Ramirez, now seven months pregnant with their first child. Nilson Alejandro "The Squirrel" Padilla, 21, said he was taken into custody along with Splinter and another member identified only as "Chifaro."

"There were seven in civilian clothes, bulletproof vests, ski masks, automatic rifles, and a police badge hanging with a string from their neck. They pushed me against the ground and told me not to lift my head. They were traveling in two cars," Padilla recalled.

"They took us to the National Criminal Investigations offices," he added. "They told me and Chifaro that we didn't have a record and we were released that afternoon. They didn't even question us."

By then, Ramirez was at the station, asking police about the fate of her husband, "Splinter."

Police told her they had only detained two men, not three, she said.

"We then went to all the police stations in the area and finally filed a complaint on his disappearance at the police headquarters," she said.

Ramirez still goes to the morgue every time she hears of an unidentified body. She has also been to the "little mountain," a known dumping ground outside Tegucigalpa for bodies of murdered young men. Her husband has disappeared.

Chifaro is missing now, too.

___

Associated Press writer Luis Alonso Lugo in Washington contributed to this report.

View the original article here

AP IMPACT: Honduran police accused as death squads

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — At least five times in the last few months, members of a Honduras street gang were killed or went missing just after run-ins with the U.S.-supported national police, The Associated Press has determined, feeding accusations that they were victims of federal death squads.

In a country with the highest homicide rate in the world and where only a fraction of crimes are prosecuted, the victims' families say the police are literally getting away with murder.

In March, two mothers discovered the bodies of their sons after the men had called in a panic to say they were surrounded by armed, masked police. The young men, both members of the 18th Street gang, had been shot in the head, their hands bound so tightly the cords cut to the bone.

That was shortly after three members of 18th Street were detained by armed, masked men and taken to a police station. Two men with no criminal history were released, but their friend disappeared without any record of his detention.

A month after the AP reported that an 18th Street gang leader and his girlfriend vanished from police custody, they are still missing.

The 18th Street gang and another known as Mara Salvatrucha are the country's biggest gangs, formed by Central American immigrants in U.S. prisons who later overran this small Central American country as their members were deported back home. Both engage in dealing drugs and charging extortion fees under threat of death. Now the 18th Street gang says its members are being targeted by police death squads, described by witnesses as heavily armed masked men in civilian dress and bullet-proof vests who kill or "disappear" gang members instead of bringing them to justice.

In the last two years, the United States has given an estimated $30 million in aid to Honduran law enforcement. The U.S. State Department says it faces a dilemma: The police are essential to fighting crime in a country that has become a haven for drug-runners. It estimates that 40 percent of the cocaine headed to the U.S. — and 87 percent of cocaine smuggling flights from South America — pass through Honduras.

"The option is that if we don't work with the police, we have to work with the armed forces, which almost everyone accepts to be worse than the police in terms of ... taking matters in their own hands," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield told the AP via live chat on March 28. "Although the national police may have its defects at the moment, it is the lesser evil."

Alba Mejia, Deputy Director of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, said her group has documented hundreds of death squad cases in the country since 2000. The squads burst into homes with no warrants and take away young men, she said.

"We are convinced that there is a government policy of killing gang members and that there is a team dedicated to this activity," Mejia said. Federal prosecutors say they have received about 150 complaints about similar raids in the capital of Tegucigalpa over the last three years.

The 18th Street gang originated in Los Angeles and spread through Central America after many of its members were deported in the 1980s and early 1990s. In Honduras, the gang controls entire neighborhoods, with entrance impossible for outsiders, while gangsters extort what is called a "war tax" on small business owners and taxi drivers, even schools and corporations.

Drug cartels, which are much larger than the gangs, oversee the movement of cocaine from South America northward to the United States. It is widely believed that the cartels pay the gangs in drugs for protection and assistance in moving the narcotics, and as a result the gangs fight each other over the territory.

Honduran National Police spokesman Julian Hernandez Reyes denied the existence of police units operating outside the law. He asserted that the two gangs are murdering each other while disguised as law enforcement.

"There are no police death squads in Honduras," Hernandez said in an interview. "The only squads in place are made of police officers who give their lives for public safety."

But there is mounting evidence of the existence of squads of police in civilian dress, apparently engaged in illegal executions.

An AP reporter covering the aftermath of an April 7 shootout between police and gang members saw one such squad, whose masked members were directing more than 100 uniformed policemen in an offensive against gang members. The officers had surrounded a house where two gangsters had holed up after a chase with police. Witnesses said that when one walked out with his hands up, masked police shot him dead. "Killers! Killers!" a crowd of women shouted.

Last year, the U.S. Congress withheld direct aid to Honduran police chief Juan Carlos Bonilla after he was appointed to the top law enforcement post despite alleged links to death squads a decade earlier. Bonilla, nicknamed "the Tiger," was accused in a 2002 internal affairs report of involvement in three homicides and linked to 11 other deaths and disappearances. He was tried in one killing and acquitted. The rest of the cases were never fully investigated.

The U.S. State Department has resumed funding to the Honduran police, but said the money only supports units vetted by the U.S. So far this year, the U.S. has provided $16 million to the police force, and argued last month that the money isn't sent directly to Bonilla or any of his top 20 officers.

U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the State Department and foreign operations, has led a group in Congress concerned about the alleged human rights abuses, and has held up $10 million, despite State Department pressure.

"A key question is whether we should provide aid, and if so under what conditions, to a police force that is frequently accused of corruption and involvement in violent crimes," Leahy said. "If there is to be any hope of making real progress against lawlessness in Honduras, we need people there we can trust, who will do what is necessary to make the justice system work. That is the least Congress should expect."

Two weeks before a visit to Central America by President Barack Obama, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey toured Honduras amid questions over how U.S. aid is spent.

"I understand that there are concerns among my colleagues in both the Senate and House about certain U.S. assistance to Honduras," said Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "The U.S. has a moral and legal authority to ensure U.S. assistance is not tainted by human rights concerns."

The latest string of attacks began with gang leader Kevin Carranza Padilla, who disappeared with his girlfriend, Cindy Yadira Garcia, on Jan. 10. Witnesses said he was arrested, and a police photo leaked to the local press showed Carranza with his hands tied and face duct-taped. The couple has not been seen since, and police say they were never arrested.

In March, Carranza's close friend, Billy "Babyface" Jovel Mejia, 23, and another gang member, Wilder Javier "Sadboy" Alvarado, 20, were on the run, changing houses every couple of days, when they called a friend to say they had been surrounded by police.

A woman named Kelsa, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of reprisals, had helped the two hide out. She told the AP of a call one night from a panicked Jovel, whom she quoted as saying: "The police are coming for us. They are going to enter the house. Tell our families that they are coming to kill us."

"I could hear pounding." she said. "Billy told me he couldn't explain what house they were at. ... I could hear screams. Billy left the phone and then the call dropped."

As often happens in such cases, his mother, Maria Elena Garcia, went from station to station in search of information from police.

"I went to the 4th district, from there they sent me to the 7th, then to the metropolitan police headquarters," Garcia said. "At 5 a.m. they called me to tell me that they had found two bodies."

Garcia and Alvarado's mother identified their sons, whose bodies were found dumped at the edge of the capital. Each had a single 9 millimeter gunshot to the head, and their hands were tightly bound. Jovel was missing his right eye, Alvarado his left.

"The blood was still fresh and the bullets were still there," Garcia said.

Alvarado's mother, Norma, said police had raided her home at least six times in search of her son in a neighborhood called the United States, one of many named for a country.

She described the same routine each time: They would come in civilian clothes with bullet-proof vests and ski masks and identify themselves as police. They were teams of six to eight men in large, expensive SUVs without license plates.

"There were times when I would close the door to give him time to escape," she said. "They even came on New Year's Eve."

In the middle of the night on Feb. 14, six masked men who identified themselves as police took Alvarado's 13-year-old grandson.

She told them he was studying, that he was a good boy.

"I begged them not to take him, not to kill him," Alvarado told the AP, crying. "There was only one car outside our door, but at each end of the street there were more cars. It was a big operation."

The boy, whose name is being withheld because he is a minor, said in an interview that they covered his face with his own shirt and pushed him to the floor of the SUV. Two agents kept him down with their feet while another drove the car around for half an hour, asking about Wilder, the boy's cousin.

"They wanted to know where my brother was. They thought Wilder was my brother. They wanted to know where the weapons were," the boy said. "They kept punching me, and because I wasn't telling them anything, they would punch me more."

The boy was taken to an office.

"They were six men. I could only see them when they took the shirt off of my face to put a black, plastic bag over my head. They always wore the ski masks. I was sitting down and they were asphyxiating me with the bag. When I would faint they would beat me up to wake me up and they would do it again," he recalled.

The boy said he could see photos of 18th Street gang members pinned to the walls.

He doesn't know why, but suddenly they let him go, and the following day his family filed a complaint with the prosecutors' office. They have heard nothing about the investigation.

The 18th Street gang leaders told the AP that the attacks against its members are not the work of rival gangs. Members say police have declared war on them, especially in the southeast Tegucigalpa neighborhood once led by Carranza.

Carranza's partner, Elvin Escoto Sandoval, known as "Splinter," was detained by police on March 13, according to his wife, Doris Ramirez, now seven months pregnant with their first child. Nilson Alejandro "The Squirrel" Padilla, 21, said he was taken into custody along with Splinter and another member identified only as "Chifaro."

"There were seven in civilian clothes, bulletproof vests, ski masks, automatic rifles, and a police badge hanging with a string from their neck. They pushed me against the ground and told me not to lift my head. They were traveling in two cars," Padilla recalled.

"They took us to the National Criminal Investigations offices," he added. "They told me and Chifaro that we didn't have a record and we were released that afternoon. They didn't even question us."

By then, Ramirez was at the station, asking police about the fate of her husband, "Splinter."

Police told her they had only detained two men, not three, she said.

"We then went to all the police stations in the area and finally filed a complaint on his disappearance at the police headquarters," she said.

Ramirez still goes to the morgue every time she hears of an unidentified body. She has also been to the "little mountain," a known dumping ground outside Tegucigalpa for bodies of murdered young men. Her husband has disappeared.

Chifaro is missing now, too.

___

Associated Press writer Luis Alonso Lugo in Washington contributed to this report.

View the original article here

AP IMPACT: Cars made in Brazil are deadly

SAO PAULO (AP) — The cars roll endlessly off the local assembly lines of the industry's biggest automakers, more than 10,000 a day, into the eager hands of Brazil's new middle class. The shiny new Fords, Fiats, and Chevrolets tell the tale of an economy in full bloom that now boasts the fourth largest auto market in the world.

What happens once those vehicles hit the streets, however, is shaping up as a national tragedy, experts say, with thousands of Brazilians dying every year in auto accidents that in many cases shouldn't have proven fatal.

The culprits are the cars themselves, produced with weaker welds, scant safety features and inferior materials compared to similar models manufactured for U.S. and European consumers, say experts and engineers inside the industry. Four of Brazil's five bestselling cars failed their independent crash tests.

Unsafe cars, coupled with the South American nation's often dangerous driving conditions, have resulted in a Brazilian death rate from passenger car accidents that is nearly four times that of the United States, according to an Associated Press analysis of Brazilian Health Ministry data on deaths compared to the size of each country's car fleet. In fact, the two countries are moving in opposite directions on survival rates — the U.S. recorded 40 percent fewer fatalities from car wrecks in 2010 compared with a decade before. In Brazil, the number killed rose 72 percent, according to the latest available data.

Dr. Dirceu Alves, of Abramet, a Brazilian association of doctors that specializes in treating traffic accident victims, said poorly built cars take an unnecessary toll.

"The gravity of the injuries arriving at the hospitals is just ugly," he said, "injuries that should not be occurring."

Automakers in Brazil point out that their cars meet the nation's safety laws. Some said they build even tougher cars for the country because of its poorly maintained roadways and rejected any notion that cost-cutting in production leads to fatalities.

But the country's few safety activists perceive a deadly double standard, with automakers earning more money from selling cars that offer drivers fewer safeguards — a worrisome gap for new middle-class households, whose surging spending power has outpaced consumer protections taken for granted in more developed countries. The problem extends beyond Brazil, with economic forecasts showing the majority of global growth in auto sales taking place in emerging-market nations as the world's auto fleet doubles to 1.5 billion by 2020.

"Entry-level cars in Brazil are incredibly dangerous, it can't be denied. The death rate from accidents is far too high," said Maria Ines Dolci, coordinator of the Rio de Janeiro-based consumer defense group Proteste. "The manufacturers do this because the cars are a little cheaper to make and the demands of the Brazilian consumers are less; their knowledge of safety issues is lower than in Europe or the U.S."

Manufacturers earn a 10 percent profit on Brazilian-made cars, compared with 3 percent in the U.S. and a global average of 5 percent, according to IHS Automotive, an industry consulting firm.

Only next year will laws require frontal air bags and antilock braking systems on all cars, safety features that have been standard in industrial countries for years. The country will also have new impact regulations on paper, at least; Brazilian regulators don't have their own crash-test facility to verify automakers' claims about vehicle performance, nor are there independent labs in the country.

Experts say those requirements alone are not sufficient to meet basic safety standards. Some models sold in Brazil, like the Chinese-made JAC J3, scored only one star in a recent crash test despite having air bags and antilock brakes.

An independent pilot effort known as the Latin New Car Assessment Program has run initial tests of Brazil's most popular car models, and the results are bleak.

The cheapest models of four of the five top-selling cars, made by General Motors, Volkswagen and Fiat, received a one-star rating, out of five stars, while other top sellers also scored poorly. Such a rating means cars provide little protection in serious head-on wrecks, compared to four- or five-star rated cars, which are virtually the minimum that consumers in the U.S. and Europe buy.

"The difference is you're talking about somebody dead in the vehicle or dying very quickly, or somebody being able to get out of the vehicle themselves," said David Ward, director general of the London-based FIA Foundation for auto safety, which supports the Euro and Latin NCAP programs. "It's definitely a difference between life and death."

The squat Ford Ka hatchback sold in Europe scored four stars when it was tested by Euro NCAP in 2008; its Latin American version scored one star.

Ford acknowledged that particular Ka is built on an outdated platform, and said it cannot be compared with the European version of the same name — it's that different. The company said it aims to have all its cars produced in Brazil built on updated, global platforms by 2015.

The Mexico-produced Nissan March compact sold in Latin America received a two-star rating from Latin NCAP, while the version sold for about the same price in Europe, called the Micra, scored four stars. The crash tests found the Latin American model had a weak, unstable body structure that offered occupants little protection in even non-serious wrecks.

In an emailed statement, Nissan said the March sold in Brazil is "practically the same model" offered in Europe. "The difference in the results achieved in Europe and Latin America is due to variations in the NCAP tests applied in different parts of the world."

Not so, said Alejandro Furas, technical director for the Global NCAP crash test programs.

"We perform the frontal crash test exactly in the same way as the Euro NCAP," he said. "The March and Micra were tested in the same lab, with the same type of crash test dummies, under the same conditions with the same people running the laboratory."

The Euro NCAP tests are more complete. They include side-impact and other tests, while the Latin American version only records front-impacts. Each type of impact test is individually scored on a 16-point scale.

The March sold in Brazil obtained a 7.62 rating in its frontal-impact test. The Micra fared much better, 12.7 points.

Italian automaker Fiat said in an emailed statement that "in general, Brazilian projects receive more reinforcements" within the cars' bodies to fortify them against the nation's "harsher roads and terrain."

However, NCAP tests found that Fiat's best-selling car in Brazil, called the Novo Uno, had an unstable body structure and scored it just one star.

Crash-test footage shows the front of the car folding up like an accordion, giving it a 2.0 point rating, the second lowest of the 28 cars NCAP has examined. Consumers purchased nearly 256,000 Novo Uno's last year — the second-most popular car in the country.

Renault's safety standards also vary. The French company builds its Sandero in Brazil, selling 98,400 cars last year. That car scored one star on the Latin NCAP test, but the model sold in Europe, made by Renault's Romanian subsidiary Dacia, scored three stars.

Renault said the safety record of the Sandero and its other cars were on par with autos of the same class in Brazil.

One of those is the VW Gol, Brazil's best-selling car for the last decade.

Volkswagen said it strives to maintain a global standard for body strength, putting the same number of welds on the same models regardless of where they're produced, and using high-strength steel in Brazilian cars. It added that since 1998 it's given Brazilian consumers the option of buying a car with air bags — its Gol Trend model with two frontal air bags scored three stars, while the same model without air bags scored one star.

The company didn't respond to requests for figures on how many consumers requested air bags.

"Structural integrity during a crash is a global standard for Volkswagen," the company said in an emailed statement. "The passenger compartment for the Gol remained stable and thus guarantees survival space for occupants."

Latin NCAP has tested three VW models. The Gol and the Polo had stable bodies. The Bora sedan, however, was rated as unstable, though other factors helped it score three stars.

And then there are the cars the companies do not market outside Latin America, such as the Celta by GM. Celta is Brazil's No. 5 car in terms of sales, with 137,615 sold last year. It received one star after its door unhinged and the passenger cabin roof bent into an inverted V shape during its crash test.

General Motors had no comment other than to say that its cars in Brazil are legal.

An engineer for a major U.S. automaker, speaking only on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said he has watched for years as his company failed to implement more advanced safety features in Brazil, simply because the law did not require them.

""The automakers are pleased to make more profitable cars for countries where the demands, whatever they may be, are less rigorous," he said. "It happens everywhere — India, China and Russia, for example."

___

About 40 million Brazilians moved into the middle class during the past decade with more income than ever to buy their first car. The growth potential is enormous: One out of every seven Brazilians owns a car, while the U.S. vehicle fleet covers nearly every American.

But as auto sales boom in Brazil, so have the number of accidents and deaths.

An analysis of Health Ministry data shows that 9,059 car occupants died in vehicle crashes in Brazil in 2010, according to the most recent statistics available. That same year, 12,435 people in the U.S. were killed in car crashes, though the U.S. passenger car fleet is five times larger than Brazil's. The result: Brazilian automobile crash victims died at four times the rate as those in the U.S.

The dangers come down to basics, engineers said: the lack of body reinforcements, lower-quality steel in car bodies, weaker or fewer weld spots to hold the vehicles together and car platforms designed decades before modern safety advances.

"The electricity used in building a car is about 20 percent of the cost of the structure," said Marcilio Alves, an engineering professor at Brazil's premier University of Sao Paulo and one of the few independent researchers in the nation looking at car safety.

"If you save on electricity, you save on cost. One way to save electricity is either reducing the number of spot welds or using less energy for each spot weld made. This affects structural performance in the event of a crash."

In a car with no air bags and an unstable body structure, a driver's biggest danger is the steering wheel.

A weak body structure and fragile steering column make it easier for the wheel to slam into the driver's chest and abdomen in frontal crashes, the deadliest and most common, causing serious damage to vital organs.

Ward talks of steering wheels that break off and "float" during wrecks in poorly made cars — moving around the cabin in the driver's area. That means that even if an air bag is deployed, the steering wheel may go around or under it and directly hit the driver.

Many Brazilian car bodies also don't contain crumple zones, areas that absorb energy during wrecks. The omission endangers occupants' lower limbs, as foot wells rip off and expose feet and legs to car parts slamming into them from the front.

"If a car's body cannot absorb the energy of a crash, it will logically result in more damage, more injuries to passengers," said Alves, the doctor who specializes in traffic accident victims.

One auto engineer described the situation by sketching two car body designs with identical perimeters, but one depicted internal gaps — missing body reinforcements.

He worked three decades for Volkswagen and spent the last 10 years as an independent engineering consultant for big automakers. He asked that his name not be published for fear of losing contracts and benefits.

"The secret of a car's body being able to withstand the crash test are the weld spots," he said.

"Let's say this is a German car," he pointed to the gapless sketch. "It's really sophisticated. Nothing is missing."

Then he pointed at the car made in Brazil, full of incomplete ink strokes.

"The Brazilian version looks the same from the outside, but it's missing pieces," he said. "In one version they include the reinforcement, in the other they don't. What's of interest is the final shape. What's inside, nobody can see."

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In 2008, Carlos Alberto Lopes, then a 23-year-old waiter, was riding in a one-star car traveling about 50 mph on a rainy highway in the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais when the road curved smoothly left. The car hydroplaned, skidded into an embankment and rolled several times down a long incline. Of the four occupants, Lopes was the only one with serious injuries, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

Lopes says the three-point seatbelt he was wearing didn't lock his body in place, allowing him to repeatedly hit the collapsing roof as the car rolled. He suffered a crushed vertebra.

"If the seatbelt had locked when the car rolled I wouldn't have hit my back. None of this would have happened," Lopes said.

A study by a chain of Brazilian rehabilitation centers where Lopes is being treated found that in 2011, 40 percent of the patients it worked with in Sao Paulo with serious spinal injuries were hurt in traffic accidents.

Lopes never considered a lawsuit. In fact, in more than a dozen interviews with accident victims left paralyzed after crashes, not one considered taking legal action against vehicle manufacturers.

That's in part a reflection of the lack of police investigations into car accidents, the majority of which, like Lopes', only result in simple "occurrence bulletins" that include minimal information.

But it's also indicative of the deference Brazil's new middle class consumers show to automakers and most other industries.

"We're 20 years behind the U.S. and Europe in terms of consumer awareness," said Dolci, coordinator of the Proteste consumer defense group. "The new, emerging middle class entering the market has little information on car safety. They think little of automobile security. It's this very class of consumer the automakers are targeting and to whom they're selling a mountain of cars."

Accidents like Lopes' involve more than a poorly built car.

Drivers fail to obey traffic laws, which many of the region's governments notoriously don't enforce. Cars must navigate crumbling roads and poorly designed highway systems that all but make gridlock and accidents unavoidable. And many drivers simply value perks such as alloy wheels and sound systems over unseen crumple zones.

In 1965, there were 47,089 motor vehicle fatalities in the U.S. That same year, consumer activist Ralph Nader's famous indictment of the auto industry was published, Unsafe at Any Speed. The book ignited a national discussion on auto safety and ultimately led to reforms that dramatically refashioned the industry's standards, helping lead to a 32 percent drop in deaths by 2011.

Nader said halting the growing number of auto deaths in Brazil would take "a public uproar, product liability lawsuits, selective boycotts by motorists or by mandatory Brazilian law equalizing safety standards with the safest engineering required in other countries."

"These responses in the past have worked in other countries confronted by auto industry double standards for protecting lives on the highway. Such actions are long overdue but now Brazilians know the truth in more detail," he said.

The Brazilian government says its new laws mandating frontal air bags and anti-lock brakes will dramatically improve safety, as will new impact standards. But because there are no independent crash-test centers in Brazil, companies will not face the same scrutiny as elsewhere. They will run the impact tests themselves and present the results to the government for approval. Because there is no "conformity of production" clause in the Brazilian legislation, cars won't be spot-checked to ensure they meet safety laws.

Alexandre Cordeiro, the top government minister overseeing auto safety laws, acknowledged that the government doesn't have its own crash-test center — but said Brazil will monitor crash tests conducted outside the country.

"Regarding front- and rear-end crash tests, our cars are as secure as European or American cars," Cordeiro said.

However, when asked about the stark differences in performance that the NCAP tests document between Brazilian and European cars, Cordeiro acknowledged improvements need to be made, saying "we need to evolve and we're working on it."

Over the years Ward said he has watched the same battles play out over auto safety — the only thing that changes is the location.

"The sad thing is, this has been the experience in the 1960s in the U.S., in the 1990s in Europe and now in Latin America," Ward said. "The industry does the least it can get away with until they're forced to do something different. It's maddening."

http://www.latinncap.com/en/

http://www.euroncap.com/home.aspx

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Follow Bradley Brooks at http://twitter.com/bradleybrooks

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AP IMPACT: Cartels dispatch agents deep inside US

CHICAGO (AP) — Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world's most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits.

If left unchecked, authorities say, the cartels' move into the American interior could render the syndicates harder than ever to dislodge and pave the way for them to expand into other criminal enterprises such as prostitution, kidnapping-and-extortion rackets and money laundering.

Cartel activity in the U.S. is certainly not new. Starting in the 1990s, the ruthless syndicates became the nation's No. 1 supplier of illegal drugs, using unaffiliated middlemen to smuggle cocaine, marijuana and heroin beyond the border or even to grow pot here.

But a wide-ranging Associated Press review of federal court cases and government drug-enforcement data, plus interviews with many top law enforcement officials, indicate the groups have begun deploying agents from their inner circles to the U.S. Cartel operatives are suspected of running drug-distribution networks in at least nine non-border states, often in middle-class suburbs in the Midwest, South and Northeast.

"It's probably the most serious threat the United States has faced from organized crime," said Jack Riley, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago office.

The cartel threat looms so large that one of Mexico's most notorious drug kingpins — a man who has never set foot in Chicago — was recently named the city's Public Enemy No. 1, the same notorious label once assigned to Al Capone.

The Chicago Crime Commission, a non-government agency that tracks crime trends in the region, said it considers Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman even more menacing than Capone because Guzman leads the deadly Sinaloa cartel, which supplies most of the narcotics sold in Chicago and in many cities across the U.S.

Years ago, Mexico faced the same problem — of then-nascent cartels expanding their power — "and didn't nip the problem in the bud," said Jack Killorin, head of an anti-trafficking program in Atlanta for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "And see where they are now."

Riley sounds a similar alarm: "People think, 'The border's 1,700 miles away. This isn't our problem.' Well, it is. These days, we operate as if Chicago is on the border."

Border states from Texas to California have long grappled with a cartel presence. But cases involving cartel members have now emerged in the suburbs of Chicago and Atlanta, as well as Columbus, Ohio, Louisville, Ky., and rural North Carolina. Suspects have also surfaced in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

Mexican drug cartels "are taking over our neighborhoods," Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane warned a legislative committee in February. State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan disputed her claim, saying cartels are primarily drug suppliers, not the ones trafficking drugs on the ground.

For years, cartels were more inclined to make deals in Mexico with American traffickers, who would then handle transportation to and distribution within major cities, said Art Bilek, a former organized crime investigator who is now executive vice president of the crime commission.

As their organizations grew more sophisticated, the cartels began scheming to keep more profits for themselves. So leaders sought to cut out middlemen and assume more direct control, pushing aside American traffickers, he said.

Beginning two or three years ago, authorities noticed that cartels were putting "deputies on the ground here," Bilek said. "Chicago became such a massive market ... it was critical that they had firm control."

To help fight the syndicates, Chicago recently opened a first-of-its-kind facility at a secret location where 70 federal agents work side-by-side with police and prosecutors. Their primary focus is the point of contact between suburban-based cartel operatives and city street gangs who act as retail salesmen. That is when both sides are most vulnerable to detection, when they are most likely to meet in the open or use cellphones that can be wiretapped.

Others are skeptical about claims cartels are expanding their presence, saying law-enforcement agencies are prone to exaggerating threats to justify bigger budgets.

David Shirk, of the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute, said there is a dearth of reliable intelligence that cartels are dispatching operatives from Mexico on a large scale.

"We know astonishingly little about the structure and dynamics of cartels north of the border," Shirk said. "We need to be very cautious about the assumptions we make."

Statistics from the DEA suggest a heightened cartel presence in more U.S. cities. In 2008, around 230 American communities reported some level of cartel presence. That number climbed to more than 1,200 in 2011, the most recent year for which information is available, though the increase is partly due to better reporting.

Dozens of federal agents and local police interviewed by the AP said they have identified cartel members or operatives using wiretapped conversations, informants or confessions. Hundreds of court documents reviewed by the AP appear to support those statements.

"This is the first time we've been seeing it — cartels who have their operatives actually sent here," said Richard Pearson, a lieutenant with the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department, which arrested four alleged operatives of the Zetas cartel in November in the suburb of Okolona.

People who live on the tree-lined street where authorities seized more than 2,400 pounds of marijuana and more than $1 million in cash were shocked to learn their low-key neighbors were accused of working for one of Mexico's most violent drug syndicates, Pearson said.

One of the best documented cases is Jose Gonzalez-Zavala, who was dispatched to the U.S. by the La Familia cartel, according to court filings.

In 2008, the former taxi driver and father of five moved into a spacious home at 1416 Brookfield Drive in a middle-class neighborhood of Joliet, southwest of Chicago. From there, court papers indicate, he oversaw wholesale shipments of cocaine in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana.

Wiretap transcripts reveal he called an unidentified cartel boss in Mexico almost every day, displaying the deference any midlevel executive might show to someone higher up the corporate ladder. Once he stammered as he explained that one customer would not pay a debt until after a trip.

"No," snaps the boss. "What we need is for him to pay."

The same cartel assigned Jorge Guadalupe Ayala-German to guard a Chicago-area stash house for $300 a week, plus a promised $35,000 lump-sum payment once he returned to Mexico after a year or two, according to court documents.

Ayala-German brought his wife and child to help give the house the appearance of an ordinary family residence. But he was arrested before he could return home and pleaded guilty to multiple trafficking charges. He will be sentenced later this year.

Socorro Hernandez-Rodriguez was convicted in 2011 of heading a massive drug operation in suburban Atlanta's Gwinnett County. The chief prosecutor said he and his associates were high-ranking figures in the La Familia cartel — an allegation defense lawyers denied.

And at the end of February outside Columbus, Ohio, authorities arrested 34-year-old Isaac Eli Perez Neri, who allegedly told investigators he was a debt collector for the Sinaloa cartel.

An Atlanta attorney who has represented reputed cartel members says authorities sometimes overstate the threat such men pose.

"Often, you have a kid whose first time leaving Mexico is sleeping on a mattress at a stash house playing Game Boy, eating Burger King, just checking drugs or money in and out," said Bruce Harvey. "Then he's arrested and gets a gargantuan sentence. It's sad."

Because cartels accumulate houses full of cash, they run the constant risk associates will skim off the top. That points to the main reason cartels prefer their own people: Trust is hard to come by in their cutthroat world. There's also a fear factor. Cartels can exert more control on their operatives than on middlemen, often by threatening to torture or kill loved ones back home.

Danny Porter, chief prosecutor in Gwinnett County, Ga., said he has tried to entice dozens of suspected cartel members to cooperate with American authorities. Nearly all declined. Some laughed in his face.

"They say, 'We are more scared of them (the cartels) than we are of you. We talk and they'll boil our family in acid,'" Porter said. "Their families are essentially hostages."

Citing the safety of his own family, Gonzalez-Zavala declined to cooperate with authorities in exchange for years being shaved off his 40-year sentence.

In other cases, cartel brass send their own family members to the U.S.

"They're sometimes married or related to people in the cartels," Porter said. "They don't hire casual labor." So meticulous have cartels become that some even have operatives fill out job applications before being dispatched to the U.S., Riley added.

In Mexico, the cartels are known for a staggering number of killings — more than 50,000, according to one tally. Beheadings are sometimes a signature.

So far, cartels don't appear to be directly responsible for large numbers of slayings in the United States, though the Texas Department of Public Safety reported 22 killings and five kidnappings in Texas at the hands of Mexican cartels from 2010 through mid- 2011.

Still, police worry that increased cartel activity could fuel heightened violence.

In Chicago, the police commander who oversees narcotics investigations, James O'Grady, said street-gang disputes over turf account for most of the city's uptick in murders last year, when slayings topped 500 for the first time since 2008. Although the cartels aren't dictating the territorial wars, they are the source of drugs.

Riley's assessment is stark: He argues that the cartels should be seen as an underlying cause of Chicago's disturbingly high murder rate.

"They are the puppeteers," he said. "Maybe the shooter didn't know and maybe the victim didn't know that. But if you follow it down the line, the cartels are ultimately responsible."

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Follow Michael Tarm at www.twitter.com/mtarm .

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Canada's Suncor says "negligible" impact from waste water spill

(Reuters) - The spillage of industrial waste water at Suncor Energy Inc's main oil sands project had a limited impact on the local river, Canada's No. 1 oil producer said.

Waste water from Suncor's oil sands operation north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, escaped on Monday morning when a pipe broke after freezing.

The Athabasca River is the main source of drinking water for aboriginal and other communities downstream and has been the subject of several controversial reports on its water quality.

"Based on modeling, preliminary volume calculations and the current flow rate of the river, the process affected water may have had a short term, negligible impact on the river," company spokeswoman Sneh Seetal said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.

An estimated 350 cubic meters of contaminated water was released into the river over a 10-hour period, the company said, adding that it did not contain tar-like bitumen.

Oil sands firms store contaminated water, a byproduct of stripping bitumen from the sands, in holding ponds.

Those ponds became the focus of environmental protests in 2008, when 1,600 ducks died after landing on a tailings pond operated by Syncrude Canada Ltd.

While new regulations introduced after the mass duck deaths aim to eliminate the toxic ponds, they remain controversial because of the risk of spills into the Athabasca River.

"This process affected water was mixed with treated water, prior to entering the river," Suncor said. "The ratio was approximately six parts treated water to one part process-affected water."

(Reporting by Ratul Ray Chaudhuri in Bangalore; Editing by Joseph Radford)

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