Jeff Dunsavage's Blog – July 2010 Archive (9)

The following is from Top10 Costa Rica. I don't normally copy and past a full story, but there was no easy way to link straight to this one, so I hope the good folks at Top10 don't mind.

Using Costa Rica as a rest stop, the two foreigners detained in Nicaragua have been clearly identified as the American couple wanted in Panama in the death of at least one U.S.…

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Scary graphic from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This article on the Committee to Protect Journalists website highlights the fact that Honduras remains a violent and politically unstable country and that the country's leadership may well be behind the violence. And yet this is the country whose government the U.S. State Department wants my family to appeal to in order to obtain the presumptive death finding… Continue

Some things are complicated, some aren’t – and some simple things become unnecessarily complicated by politics and/or bureaucratic inertia. Over the past year, I have become quite the authority on simple things being made complicated.

In May 2009, my brother Joe Dunsavage disappeared while on vacation on Isla de Roatan, Honduras. We don’t really know what happened apart from the fact that he left the beach to tool around the shallows offshore in a 10-foot-long outboard-powered…

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This Wall Street Journal article details the arrest on trumped-up drug charges and abuse of two U.S. citizens in Mexico. Important to read not only for its informative value as to the absence of travelers' rights in Mexico but also as a window into a broken Third World judicial system. This latter point is important to us, as these Third World courts are the only way (according to the U.S. State…

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It's rare that we get media coverage for any of our stories of people missing abroad, and certainly not a year after the actual disappearance. Getting this nice story published in our hometown newspaper, The Star-Ledger, took months of close work with a reporter who took a genuine interest in my family's plight and in the larger story. That's the only way it happens -- getting people who can do something… Continue

Langtang National Park has advised foreigners to avoid trekking alone in the area after US hiker Aubrey Caroline Sacco, 23 went missing for more than two months while on her way to the Langtang valley from Lama Hotel area, according to this article in the Himalayan Times. Aubrey's whereabouts are still unknown.…

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Interesting graphic on Wall Street Journal's site. Nearly 23,000 people have died from drug-related violence in Mexicp since 2006, according to government sources.

A shootout near the U.S.-Mexico border between rival groups with ties to organized crime left 21 people dead Thursday, Mexican police officials said in this CNN.com article. Two groups authorities believe were involved in drug and human trafficking clashed in a deserted area about 12 miles south of the border, Sonora State Police spokesman Jose Larrinaga Talamantes said.