The week at a glance...Americas

Veracruz, Mexico

Hackers threaten cartel: The hacker group Anonymous is threatening to expose those who collaborate with Los Zetas drug cartel unless the group releases a kidnapped “hacktivist.” Anonymous said one of its members had been taken hostage in Veracruz, where Los Zetas is based, sometime in October. “You have made a great mistake taking one of us. Free him,” the group warned in a video posted online. It said that if he is not released within a week, it will reveal the names and addresses of police officers who work for Los Zetas. Hackers have already struck a website dedicated to promoting Gustavo Rosario, a former Tabasco state attorney general, replacing the page’s text with the words “Gustavo Rosario is a Zeta.”

Bogotá, Colombia

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Spying at home: Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has dissolved the country’s domestic intelligence agency, the DAS, in response to a decade-long pattern of appalling abuses. During the 2002–10 administration of Álvaro Uribe, Santos’s predecessor and a close U.S. ally, the agency was caught spying on Uribe critics, including judges, reporters, and human-rights activists. Some DAS agents even colluded with far-right militias that killed or displaced thousands. Uribe’s first DAS chief, Jorge Noguera, was convicted of murder in the 2004 death-squad killing of a leftist professor. A later DAS director, María del Pilar Hurtado, fled to Panama to avoid prosecution. Santos said the DAS’s reputation was irreparably harmed. Its employees will be absorbed into the police and the national prosecutor’s office.