Crime Archive

The city of Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state in northern Mexico, looked like a war zone last week as heavily armed members of the notorious Sinaloa cartel attacked Mexican security forces trying to arrest Ovidio Guzman Lopez, a son of former Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Residents dodged bullets and burning buses as gunmen besieged the city. Guzman Lopez has helped lead the Sinaloa cartel since his father’s arrest in 2016. The brazen attack in broad daylight left at least eight people dead, including a member of Mexico’s National Guard, and injured dozens more. Outmanned and outgunned, […]

Russian border guards have escalated a crackdown on North Korean squid poachers in recent weeks, detaining dozens of fishing vessels and hundreds of crew members for illegally fishing inside Russia’s exclusive economic zone in the Sea of Japan. Moscow had previously ignored North Korean incursions into its waters, but the increasing scale of the problem and a mounting domestic outcry finally prompted authorities to take action. In an email interview with WPR, Artyom Lukin, a scholar specializing in Russia’s ties with East Asia at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia, explains the timing behind Russia’s clampdown and how […]

Three years ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin barely registered a blip on Google trends in English or Russian. Today, the Kremlin-connected businessman better known as “Putin’s chef” is persona non grata in many places around the world, including the United States, where the Treasury Department leveled another round of sanctions against Prigozhin this week for his role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Although Prigozhin’s close ties to President Vladimir Putin have long been known to Russian observers, stretching back to their younger days in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, the Kremlin insider was virtually unknown in the United […]

There is no shortage of high-stakes, bitter political battles across the globe today. Few, though, can compete with the drama unfolding now in Peru, where a standoff between the president and the opposition-controlled Congress has suddenly erupted into an unprecedented constitutional crisis. On Monday, President Martin Vizcarra dissolved Congress, and Congress responded by suspending Vizcarra on the grounds of his “permanent moral incapacity,” swearing in Vice President Mercedes Araoz as his replacement. No one is quite sure which move was legal. If the president’s dissolution of Congress is valid, then the Congress was not entitled to remove Vizcarra. If the […]

For more than a week, Indonesia has been rocked by massive student-led demonstrations against a new law that weakens the authority of the country’s Corruption Eradication Commission and a new draft criminal code being considered in parliament. Violent clashes with the police have resulted in the deaths of two protesters and more than 200 injuries so far. The unrest threatens to overshadow President Joko Widodo’s second inauguration ceremony later this month. Jokowi, as he is widely known in Indonesia, comfortably won reelection in April. In an email interview with WPR, Yohanes Sulaiman, a lecturer in the school of government at […]