CENTRAL AMERICA
A Big Bust
Costa Rica and Panama teamed up to raid dozens of locations and arrest nearly 50 people linked to an international network of human traffickers Tuesday.
The network is believed to be involved in smuggling people from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean through Central America and toward the United States, prosecutors said, according to Reuters.
Costa Rican authorities raided 36 facilities near the country’s borders with Panama and Nicaragua, arresting 37 people, while in Panama federal police arrested another 12 people allegedly connected to the same network.
Costa Rica has documented 249 migrants who were transported by the smuggling ring, but “there have been many more,” said Stephen Madden, deputy director of Costa Rica’s migration police.
The news agency cited a Costa Rican police report as saying that the smugglers transported migrants overland and by sea via the port of Puerto Soley to Honduras, where other organizations based in Guatemala picked them up for transport into Mexico and as far as the southern border of the United States.
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