And one Federal official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the 39-year-old victim, Arik Afek, acknowledged to Government investigators that he had provided paramilitary training in Colombia, although he denied that the trainees were the drug traffickers' security forces.
Such collusion offers violent drug traffickers security as well as impunity for their crimes, and erodes the rule of law, feeding the violence that pushes people to flee for the United States border.
Over the last few weeks the TSA has filled the news with stories of agents being arrested for allowing a drug trafficker through security, missing a pair of box cutters, and agents patting down kids after they got off a train.
Honduran lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last month to deploy the country's military against drug traffickers, adopting the security strategy charted by Mexican President Felipe Calderon with mixed results.
Algerian authorities say that, as a result, traffickers are targeting security forces with unusual aggression.In January, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb attacked a gas plant in Algeria with guns and explosives looted from Libya.
Unaccompanied children and women are at the greatest risk – they are easy prey to traffickers, criminals, gangs, security forces and others who abuse, exploit or even kill them.
Egypt had prosecuted one trafficker and no security officials up to December 2013; Sudan had launched 14 prosecutions of traffickers and four of police officers in connection with trafficking and torture.
Mr. Zinser, a politically independent senator before joining Mr. Fox's cabinet, said the government would reserve the power to seek court-authorized wiretaps against organized crime, drug traffickers and genuine national security threats.
There, they are picked up by traffickers or "bought" from security officers at checkpoints, and taken to squalid camps built in recent years — settlements they have started to call "torture camps" because of the violence and abuse that go on there.
"But drug trafficking and drug traffickers are a challenge to the national security of Mexico," Arturo Sarukhan, the Mexican Ambassador to the U.S., told me.
Tracking down a continent-hopping child trafficker, she finds her security contacts are meeting bloody ends, and related murders point to the involvement of both the president and his son.
