Crime Archive

A new high-profile trial started last week in Buenos Aires, opening another act in the cloak-and-dagger drama surrounding a decades-old terrorist attack in the Argentine capital. Once again, charges and countercharges about Middle Eastern powers, shady characters and secret payments to local players are bound to come to light. Once again, the principal perpetrators will escape punishment in a case that has continued to claim victims as recently as this year, when the case’s special prosecutor, still leading an ongoing parallel investigation, was found dead in his apartment. When this court proceeding ends, the one thing that is certain is […]

Thirty-six years after the 1979 revolution that overthrew the entrenched Somoza dynasty, Nicaraguans still fill Plaza La Fe in Managua to celebrate Liberation Day festivities every July 19. While to some it may look like an exercise in grand nostalgia, supporters of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and President Daniel Ortega view the revolution as an ongoing process. Yet some question how far the current administration has drifted from the guiding principles of the revolution and claim he is building a dynasty of his own. Ortega’s Return and the Consolidation of Power After being voted out of power following […]

Since early July, when The Wall Street Journal and the Sarawak Report, an investigative website, reported that companies linked to the embattled, indebted Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB had allegedly transferred up to $700 million into the personal accounts of Prime Minister Najib Razak, Malaysia’s normally placid politics have exploded. The allegations came amid an ongoing battle within the ruling coalition between Najib and supporters of longtime former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. On Monday, Mahathir declared in a statement that democracy in Malaysia was dead, “because an elected leader chooses to subvert the institutions of government and make them his […]

On July 30, Societe Generale, one of France’s biggest banks, was declared an “assisting witness”—somewhere between a suspect and a witness—in a money-laundering case against Teodorin Obiang, the son of Teodoro Obiang, Equatorial Guinea’s president who has been in power since 1979. Days later, Maixent Accrombessi, a close aide to Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, was held for questioning in a corruption probe in Paris hours before he was set to return to Libreville. His detention was part of an ongoing investigation into the French military-uniform company Marck—which signed a $7.6 million contract with Gabon in 2005—on suspicions of corruption […]

Colombia’s conflict has always looked different from the vantage point of the jungles, mountains and plains of the country’s most forgotten corners. This is “the other Colombia”: a country of extreme poverty, underdevelopment and state neglect, where Marxist guerrillas have fought the military to a stalemate in over half a century of conflict—and where the peace agreement those rebels are currently negotiating will face its toughest tests. “The country still has these ‘black holes,’ where the state has no monopoly on arms, where there is no institutional presence, no authorities, not even a military presence,” said Orlando de Jesus Avila […]