The week at a glance...Americas

last updated 8 January 2015

Reynosa, Mexico

Unhappy birthday for kingpin: Mexican police captured a leading member of the Gulf drug cartel last week at his 41st birthday party. Gilberto Barragan Balderas is on the DEA’s list of 10 most wanted fugitives. Also known as El Tocayo or Heriberto, Barragan Balderas was allegedly responsible for enforcing Gulf cartel rules and protecting smuggling routes from the rival Los Zetas cartel. The DEA says he was also responsible for obtaining advance notice of Mexican military and police patrols. Barragan Balderas is suspected of ordering and overseeing executions, kidnappings, and torture, and he is alleged to have signed a note that accompanied a gruesome heap of dismembered corpses.

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Cholera everywhere: An outbreak of cholera that began in Haiti last year has spread to nearly every province in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Officials said there have been 1,143 cases of cholera and 14 deaths since the outbreak began, in November. Heavy rains this week increased the risk that the disease would spread, as waste waters from contaminated creeks and saturated septic tanks flooded villages. Cholera broke out last fall in Haitian refugee camps, where hundreds of thousands of victims of the January 2010 earthquake are still living; more than 250,000 Haitians have contracted the disease, and nearly 5,000 have died.

São Paulo, Brazil

U.S. pilots found guilty: A Brazilian judge has convicted two American pilots in absentia for their role in a 2006 airline crash that killed 154 people in one of Brazil’s worst air disasters. Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino were flying a small private business jet when their wing clipped the wing of a commercial Boeing 737, which caused it to crash, killing everyone on board. All seven people on the business jet survived. The court found that the two were negligent for turning off the device that would have alerted controllers to their location. The judge sentenced Lepore and Paladino to four years of community service, to be served in the U.S. It is unlikely that U.S. authorities will enforce the ruling.