Empresa Tomza Guatemala S.A. reported that in Nicaragua the government of President Daniel Ortega illegally expropriated and confiscated the company's assets, which together amount to $4 million in investments.
The expropriation process took several years. Tomza executives explained that in 2015 they were granted the permits for the construction of a property located in the municipality of Tipitapa, department of Managua.
Because of factors such as business closures and lack of opportunities, it is estimated that criminal activity costs Honduras and El Salvador 16% of GDP, and in the case of Guatemala, its losses could amount to 7% of its production.
In Central America, the human costs of crime remain one of the highest in the world. El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—referred to as the Northern Triangle— account for about four-and-a-half percent of homicides worldwide despite only having about one-half-percent of the world's population.
A raíz del robo de un contenedor que transportaba productos lácteos, la cámara del sector hizo un llamado a todos los gremios vinculados al comercio internacional y local, para que refuercen sus medidas de precaución.
In a statement, the Nicaraguan Chamber of the Dairy Sector (CANISLAC) reported that on Friday, December 13, 2019, the first container of Quesillo was stolen in the history of Nicaragua.
Because the area of stolen land in Guatemala has grown from about 10,000 hectares in the 1990s to 164,000 in 2018, losses in agricultural production caused by this phenomenon reached nearly $650 million last year.
The Chamber of Agriculture (Camagro) estimates that only in 2018, invasions of private property, mainly agricultural production farms, generated a negative impact equivalent to 0.6% of Gross Domestic Product.
After motorized paramilitaries attacked a group of businessmen with firearms on September 7, the productive sector asks the government to clarify the facts "in an objective and truthful manner.”
The violent aggression was directed at the Cosep delegation and the Civic Alliance, made up of José Adán Aguerri, Michael Healy and Álvaro Vargas, who accompanied journalists Jaime Arellano and Aníbal Toruño on a visit to the city of León, reported the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (Cosep).
The political crisis that has been going on for more than a year has led wholesale travel agencies to remove the country from their portfolio of tourist destinations because of insecurity.
Claudia Aguirre, president of the Nicaraguan Association of Receptive Tourism (Antur), explained to Elnuevodiario.com.ni that "... 2019 is proving to be a difficult year, as the crisis that began in April last year is impacting current activities and the outlook is bleak for the coming months."
Lack of legal certainty, electricity theft and social conflicts are forcing businessmen in Guatemala's energy sector to choose to relocate their investments to El Salvador.
Last year, the companies Applied Energy Services (AES) and Corporación Multi Inversiones (CMI), both US and Guatemalan capital, decided to invest $47 million in solar energy projects, encouraged by the facilities offered to the energy sector in El Salvador.
In Nicaragua, a company dedicated to the production of passion fruit which planned to invest $20 million in the coming years, reported that last weekend armed groups invaded their land.
The Swiss origin company, Chimaco S.A., reported that the demo facility located at kilometer 124.5 of the highway between Chinandega and León was taken over by armed groups who prevented investors from entering.
The twenty-five productive properties that have been invaded since the crisis began in Nicaragua together make up more than 28 million square meters of land, of which 43% correspond to areas used for agricultural crops and another 44% to livestock production.
According to data from the Union of Agricultural Producers of Nicaragua (Upanic), 33% of the affected properties have an area greater than 100 manzanas, 23% are land measuring between 50 to 99 manzanas and 46% have an area of less than 50 manzanas.
A report by InSight Crime highlights the homicide rate registered in Costa Rica in 2017, which was 12.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest number in its history.
The report indicates that Costa Rica is a country that has traditionally been considered "peaceful," and in respect to the escalation of the homicide rate, an increase that local authorities attribute to organized crime, the report indicates that "... lack of retrospective and a vague methodology is weakening the authorities' attempts to attribute blame to organized crime."
In its new warning system for tourists, the US government included Panama and Costa Rica at the lowest risk level, Nicaragua at level 2 and Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, in the category "Reconsider Travel".
The US Department of State has announced modifications to its system of travel alerts and recommendations to citizens considering traveling to other countries.The new advisory system divides nations into four levels, according to the risks present in each country.
In addition to the usual problems of crime facing cargo carriers in the Northern Triangle, the union has denounced an increase in robberies on Costa Rican roads.
Inequality and lack of coordination in security measures that are implemented in each of the Central American countries is preventing better results from being achieved in combating robbery of freight trucks.
Alcoholic beverages, technological equipment and chemical products are some of the products most affected by the disappearance of containers which has been denounced by the union of importers in Costa Rica.
The Costa Rican Chamber of Importers has expressed its concern at the "extreme" security measures which have to be taken to ensure that containers with imported goods reach their destination without being stolen in transit.Its director, Katherine Chaves, told Diarioextra.com that in some cases the containers disappear from thestorage zones.
The unprecedented increase in violence in Costa Rica, once an oasis of peace in the region, is another sign of the failure of the traditional methods of fighting drugs.
EDITORIAL
More powerful than the Central American states, drug trafficking is on the rise not only in terms of an increased supply of drugs in the countries in the region, but through its permeation of institutions using the power of money and generating a growing culture of violence that is making Central America´s lack of a death penalty seem risible. Yes it does exist, but the worst part about it is that it is not institutionalized justice systems that implement it, but the mob bosses, pointing out -to ever younger executioners- the people who should be executed.
Carriers are warning that an epidemic of theft of containers that primarily affects El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, may be starting to affect Nicaragua.
The president of the Central Transport Federation (Fecatran), Marvin Altamirano, told Elnuevodiario.com.ni that "... at least four cases of container theft have occurred in Nicaragua. "With the authorities we managed to stop about four containers that had been stolen, and which were loaded onto trucks with Guatemalan plates, that showed that the vehicles were already in contact with international criminal gangs.'"