RSSNew Orleans Travel Show … Natalee Holloway Aruban Protest … Justice for Natalee Holloway Part III
More reports in from those that went to the New Orleans Travel Show to remind those attending, Natalee Holloway has never been found in Aruba … neither has justice.
We have planned where we will put the banners tomorrow, and they still will be very visible. Tomorrow is the last day of this convention…and gatherings also will be held in and near Jackson Square, on the edge of the French Quarter, so we will try to put a banner on the car in a way that it still can be driven safely, then drive down the street which borders Jackson Square.
In this next picture is a man from Haiti (right side- sitting on the while post) who showed much interest in Natalee’s being found and the family getting answers. He is holding a Natalee brochure. Behind him is the World Trade Center. Some of our signs also are visible.
I am turning left again, toward Harrah’s, where you can see more signs…and some of downtown New Orleans in the background.
We had thunderstorms today…and it was raining so hard this morning we had to set up a bit later than planned. We got drenched… I sure wish northern Alabama could have had this rain instead!
But it overall was another good day…for again, people were coming up, expressing concern about Natalee and her family. We met a number of people from Birmingham. Some have relatives or family members who went to high school where Natalee did.
Some people came up just to ask us if there is any news about Natalee, because they haven’t heard any news for a while.
Posted July 1, 2007 by Scared Monkeys Aruba, Bloggers, boycott, Crime, Missing Persons, Natalee Holloway, New Orleans, Travel | 23 comments |
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23 Responses to “New Orleans Travel Show … Natalee Holloway Aruban Protest … Justice for Natalee Holloway Part III”
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Make those son of a bitchs pay!!!I hate Aruba.
Sorry to hear about the rain, but so happy to hear that people were asking about Natalee and wanting news. You all did a great job and thank-you from those of us that couldn’t attend.
Thanks N.O. crew
for all u do!
Thanks for remembering Natalee,
and for your work helping others
to remember her. (and what Aruba allowed
Joran Van der sloot the teenage
girl tourist murdering rapist to do to her!)
….
BOYCOTT ARUBA
JUSTICE FOR NATALEE
….
-j4n
A heath felt Thank You to all the N.O. protesters for being our voice !!
This may sound silly ..
But do you happen to know if any of the people you have spoken to were travel agents attending the trade show
Hello!
God Bless all of those who traveled to New Orleans in the name of Natalee. We really appreciate ALL of your dedication & hard work!
alabamamom
Thank You N.O. crew for loving Natalee!
perhaps the rain was just Heaven crying for Natalee and her family.
You are very dedicated people. Thank you.
Special thanks to all who went out of their way to support and bring awareness to Natalee’s case.
Bless you!
Scared Monkeys and all you who were there to get Natalee’s story heard again…Thank you. I don’t post much(usually because many of you have said just what i would say) but I come here daily for updates praying for a break in the case. Keep up the good work everyone.
Justice for Natalee and down with the money grubbing whore mongers of Aruba.
Your dedication is truly admirable! God bless Natalee
Boycott Aruba for the hidden truth!
You should all be proud for supporting Natalee Holloway as she never got that support from the country she dissapeared from. She never had a chance as her dissapearance was covered up from day one. A big thankyou to the folks that went out to New Orleans to stand up for Natalee.
It’s time for Aruba to slam dunk Joran. Only the game would be played slightly different.(remember don’t blame the players, blame the game)So keeping that in mind, it wouldn’t be your fault. I would suggest the opposite side of island, rocky, alot of cactus, no one lives there, shark infested. Ask your questions, Joran has alot to tell you, everytime he lies, he goes back in. If you can’t do it for Natalee, do it for your daughters, especially your daughters,your families, your island, your economy, your livelihood. The rapist is only going to bring you more hardship and grief…bottom line is, he’s doesn’t care! So as the situation progresses on your little island, the monsterous problem grows. Everything that is being uncovered on Aruba is because of Joran. You haven’t done anything to demand the arrest of a known rapist, you haven’t done anything about Carlos ‘n
Charlie’s drugging your tourists, you haven’t done anything about the existence of your crack houses. You can’t advertise a safe and happy island. It’s not safe and what goes on there is not happy. Are you that weak that you are going to just sit there an rot?
We’ve always thought the Arubans were really decent people and we came and we spent our money and we supported your economy, but when things went into reverse and we needed your support, hello, there is no one there! I think you should be ashamed of yourself’s, your become an embarrassment to everyone. You can count on the fact, that this will hit the history books.
Do something about something !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh, and by the way, I want my money back..I didn’t know, when I was there the taxpayers money was being used to finance corruption and evil.
This is the third protest of its kind; first Boston, then Miami, and now New Orleans.
WHEN is Aruba going to understand that WE ARE NOT GOING AWAY? And then its posters come here asking that we think about “the poor Aruban people”?
I’ve read that in the heyday of the Roman Empire, any Roman citizen could be anywhere in what was then seen as the civilized world, and if he said “Civis Romanum sum” (“I am a Roman citizen”) he was assured of decent treatment.
Why? Because it was clear that Rome, then the mightiest power in the world, would take action to protect its people.
I don’t know if that legend is true. But in our day and age, we have an American citizen vanish in a foreign country, that government carrying out an obvious cover-up, and … our government says nothing.
Was it in 1977 that, on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American citizen, was shot dead, deliberately, and his body thrown into the sea by people of the Palestine Liberation Organization?
And now we are providing that group subsidies, in the belief that we can promote the “good” ones and thereby help defeat the “bad” ones ….
Anyway, kudos to the New Orleans people. Great job.
Just wait until you see the pictures of the horse-drawn carts in the touristy parts of New Orleans with the Natalee posters mounted behind them!!
I don’t want to divert this thread from its main purpose, which is the New Orleans protest. However, it is the latest Natalee thread. This article came out today, and I suspect these activities might not be irrelevant:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070701/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/the_venezuelan_connection_1
Venezuela becomes cocaine conduit
Associated Press
Jul 1, 1:45 PM ET
CARACAS, Venezuela – A twin-engine plane swoops low across the open waters south of the Dominican Republic, and three men in a fishing boat haul in the airtight bales that have just splashed into the waves.
Suddenly the men spot a U.S. plane and British helicopters overhead. Video shot by their pursuers and seen by The Associated Press shows the men hurling the parcels overboard and trying to flee, but their motor dies. The men are picked up by a Dominican cutter while a British navy helicopter recovers a half-ton of cocaine.
Tracked by U.S. surveillance, the May 12 flight originated in Venezuela, which U.S., European and Colombian counter-narcotics officials say has become the path of least resistance for smugglers of Colombian cocaine.
The drug shipments are flowing nearly unhindered from Colombia into Venezuela, then leaving by the ton on ships and planes making deliveries for the multibillion-dollar U.S. and European markets, the officials say. They say high-level corruption has also helped make Venezuela a major haven for drug smugglers running from the law.
The cocaine passing through Venezuela on President Hugo Chavez’s watch has risen by as much as 30 tons a year since 2002, reaching an estimated 300 tons in 2006, according to U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield. That’s roughly a third of the world’s supply.
“Caracas is replacing Bogota (Colombia’s capital) as a center of everything related to drug operations,” said Mildred Camero, who was Venezuela’s top anti-drug official until she reported high-level corruption and was dismissed in 2005.
Venezuelan airports have become such sieves that airborne smuggling – almost all of it from Venezuela – now accounts for about 30 percent of cocaine and heroin traffic out of the Andes, compared with 10 percent two years ago, said U.S. Adm. Jeffrey Hathaway, outgoing director of the multinational command that coordinates drug interdiction in the region.
Of 46 suspected drug flights detected in the Caribbean by U.S. surveillance in the first four months of 2007, all but six originated in Venezuela.
“It’s worrisome. It’s historic,” said Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, who was Mexico’s top organized-crime prosecutor last year when 5.5 tons of cocaine was seized on a DC-9 jet from Venezuela. Not since the 1990s had cocaine come to Mexico in such big planes. In February, another ton was seized in Mexico on a flight from Caracas.
Chavez says the steady barrage of U.S. condemnation on the issue twists the facts “to demonize our government” and ignores the fact that trafficking and drug-related corruption in Venezuela preceded his administration.
“We’ve landed the strongest blows against drug trafficking in all of Venezuelan history,” he told the AP in a June 9 interview, citing increased seizures – including 142 tons of cocaine seized in the past three years – and claiming determined efforts are being made to weed out corruption.
Most U.S.-bound cocaine still moves north by sea – often in synchronized combinations of speedboats, trawlers and freighters – via the Caribbean or eastern Pacific to Mexico and Central America, then crosses the U.S. border by land.
But as Mexico cracks down on land shipments, and authorities get better at high-seas interdiction – the helicopters in the May 12 bust came off a British ship in the area – Venezuela is increasingly providing an alternative, counter-drug officials say.
Most Europe-bound cocaine is believed to pass through Venezuela, sent aboard ships and jets – 727s, DC-8s and Gulfstreams – to west African nations where enforcement is often weak and easily bribed, Hathaway said at the command’s headquarters in Key West, Fla.
“The reason it is very hard for us to stop these flights is that the aircraft look like, smell like and act like legitimate commercial flights,” said Hathaway, a Coast Guard rear admiral who retired in May as head of the Joint Interagency Task Force-South. “There is either no capability or no desire for Venezuela to halt these aircraft.”
The multinational command gets its human intelligence from drug and customs agents on three continents. Its ships, planes, spy satellites and over-the-horizon radar scour 42 million square miles of high seas from the mid-Atlantic to the eastern Pacific. Partners currently include France, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain and Britain.
Also participating are all the drug-producing Andean nations except Venezuela, which hasn’t sent a replacement since its liaison, an air force colonel, retired early this year.
Like the plane that made the May drop, drug flights from Venezuela are almost exclusively detected through aerial surveillance, Hathaway said, and almost always race back after dropping off their cargo.
In the 12 months leading up to Sept. 14, 2004, U.S. surveillance tracked 38 suspected drug flights from Venezuela to the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America. The following year, that number grew to 64, and the next to 115. In the 6 1/2 months to March 31, 2007, there were already 99 more.
Venezuela’s Anti-Drug Office chief, Col. Nestor Reverol, says well over 200 National Guard soldiers have been dismissed in an anti-corruption purge, some officials have been jailed and Venezuela actively cooperates with a range of countries beginning with Colombia, where most of the world’s cocaine is produced.
In September, for example, Dominican agents acting on a tip from Venezuelan authorities seized 2.4 tons of cocaine in a Belgium-bound shipping container. Last month, Venezuela seized 2.5 tons of cocaine as smugglers prepared to load it onto an Africa-bound private plane on Margarita Island. Among those arrested were six police officials.
“We’re taking actions. We aren’t standing by with our arms crossed,” Reverol said.
But senior Colombian police and military officials report scant cooperation from the Venezuelans on drug interdiction.
And Antonio Mazzitelli of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, who is responsible for western Africa, said he knew of no busts or seizures in his region that stemmed from information provided by Venezuela.
“The majority of the big seizures have been because a plane broke down” or because of Spanish or French high-seas interdictions, he said by phone from Dakar, Senegal.
A Dutch naval intelligence officer on the Caribbean island of Curacao, Lt. Cmdr. Frank Hermans, lamented the scarcity of shared intelligence from Venezuela, which is about 40 miles away: “We only encounter targets of interest coming from Venezuela due to surveillance.”
Drug traffickers have always developed new routes and smuggling methods as law enforcement catches up to the old ones.
In the early 2000s, they began using supercharged speedboats to whisk loads of up to 5 tons of cocaine out of Colombia and Ecuador, to waiting ships. But smugglers increasingly looked to Venezuela as U.S.-Colombian naval coordination improved and tools such as infrared sensors boosted high-seas seizures.
Small planes now commonly dash into Colombia from Venezuela or Brazil, pick up drugs and vault back into Venezuela, where they often can land at commercial airports and avoid clandestine airstrips, said a senior Colombian police official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities.
Sometimes they don’t make it. Two people were killed and a half-ton of cocaine recovered when a Venezuelan-registered Cessna crashed near the eastern town of El Tigre on May 21, authorities said. And on May 5, a Colombian police dog sniffed out 1.5 tons behind false panels on a Venezuela-bound truck.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration still has about 10 agents in Venezuela, but their operations have been restricted since Chavez suspended formal cooperation in August 2005, accusing the DEA of being a front for espionage.
The break with the DEA came shortly after the dismissal of Camero, the Venezuelan anti-drug official, who had worked closely with the agency.
She told the AP she had submitted five reports on high-level drug corruption to the president and vice president, fingering police, military and National Guard officers, customs agents and even two state governors. She would not name names publicly, saying she fears revenge.
Camero said she was told Chavez never saw her reports.
Two senior Colombian police officials told the AP that the drug bosses who call Venezuela home include Wilber Varela, for whom the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing political sensitivities.
Reverol responded that he’s in daily contact with the head of Colombia’s DAS domestic security agency, and “if they tell me today where Wilber Varela is and I catch him, rest assured he’ll be deported to Colombia within 24 to 48 hours.”
The State Department says Venezuela has failed to pursue major traffickers and has arrested only low-level figures. In September, when Chavez extradited a man he called a top Colombian smuggler, Colombian officials said he was a lower-level player.
That man, Farid Feris Dominguez, told Colombian investigators that several high-ranking Venezuelan officials helped him. His lawyer told the AP that Feris even obtained a Venezuelan diplomatic passport.
Venezuela’s justice minister, Pedro Carreno, says authorities are investigating Feris’ claims but are wary he may be lying to please U.S. prosecutors seeking his extradition.
Despite the tensions, Venezuela continues to work with the DEA and in March turned over to U.S. authorities an American wanted in South Dakota for alleged methamphetamine trafficking.
But Camero, a former judge and now a consultant whose clients include the U.S. Embassy, said drug trafficking worsened after the 2005 dismantling of a DEA-trained and -equipped counter-narcotics task force.
She said two 2004 seaport busts are emblematic of Venezuelan drug corruption: In one, National Guard troops were protecting a shipping container that yielded 1,300 pounds of cocaine in duffel bags. In the other, they tried to keep police from boarding a boat bearing 1,750 pounds of cocaine.
Chavez says Venezuela has broken up links between some military units and traffickers, taking a hard line in discharging and prosecuting corrupt officers.
“No one is protected here, whatever the civil or military rank,” he said, adding he is well aware how drug mafias can corrode any nation’s institutions.
When Chavez appointed Reverol in February, he laid out his orders in a handwritten note:
“War to the death against corruption, against narco-trafficking.”
Congrats to all who went and spoke out for Natalee. I was at a family party over the weekend and one family member[3 years old] couldnt be found. as we were all running around to find her, my grand daughter could be heard saying” I hope she doesnt go missing like Natalee. Then said thank goodness we are not in aruba. Luckily my neice was found…but the impact of a 7 year old saying this…just goes to show how this will effect this EVIL Island for many years to come.
Aruban’s…have you so forgotten, “God helps those that help themselves”, I suggest you better get busy.
And, I hope I don’t see anymore, whinning and crying about the decent people of Aruba. Arubian’s have had many opportunities to do something about something. You act like what you raise on your island, ostrich’s and donkey’s…you stick your head in the sand and show your ass.
GREAT JOB, MONKEYS!!!
GREAT JOB, NEW ORLEANS TEAM: HOPE AND JUSTICE FOR NATALEE!
Thanks to ALL of you who were able to go to N.O. and represent the Voice of Natalee!!! Keep it Alive until the truth if known and the devils get what they deserve!!!
Justice for Natalee really means to solve this unsolved crime.
Could only Joran be involved and is the beachstory [his web of lies] totally bullshit ?
The ‘Bike’ scenario of the LKPD is bringing new hope.
This scenario is based on the fact that Joran could have used a [mountain]bike to go towards the beach to call Deepak at 2.26-2.34am on monday may 30 to frame the Kalpoebrothers, who knew that brought Joran and Natalee directly to the VDShome.
[arrival at 1.40am]
In April this year they did a forensic search at the VDSresidence. It’s a matter of time that they will search the playgrounds of [the younger] Joran, which he is calling in his book ‘his Cunucu’.
The timeline shows that he really could have done it alone if he used a bike. In his book he wrote that he never cycled. Only Valentijn, his younger brother, uses a bike he said.
His socalled Cunucu [ 3 openspaces near the VDShome] is in this ‘bike’scenario also the spot where the body of Natalee
has been buried. His shoes made a clear track in the sand while carrying Natalees body. So he made up the ‘lost shoes linked to the beach’ story.
I am really hopefull, that her body dumped within 800 meters from the VDShome will be found when the LKPD starts a thorough [forensic] search in Joran’s own Cunucu.
If not, Joran will be no longer the main suspect.
Then there will be only a Mr. X left and the case will be closed. Then it becomes a coldcase.
To Scaredmonkeys..
Did you read the amigoe newspaper today? Please do and translate the article to all here on the blog…
__________________
SM: Posted in the forum. The english version of Dompigs article is online now. Seems to me Renfro and Dompig are affraid of something, maybe KLPD. Trying to cover their asses now with a bunch of BS (klaasend)
http://www.amigoe.com/english/
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