Welcome to Paraguay's 'Wild West,' a bastion for bootleggers, organized crime, and maybe even Islamic extremists. But South Americans know it more as a sort of Wild West β a place where the rule of law matters little and where drugs, arms and counterfeit goods arrive by the ton. Home to about , people, it's also served as a refuge for anyone from drug traffickers to bootleggers and, as GlobalPost recently discovered , an alleged predator priest. The piracy trade's been bustling in Paraguay for decades.
Last year, Paraguay was named one of 13 " notorious markets " worldwide engaged in counterfeiting and copyright piracy in a report by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the agency that advises the president on trade policy. The International Intellectual Property Alliance also highlighted Paraguay as a global scoundrel in the piracy trade.
Professor James Cooper of California Western School of Law in San Diego, who has extensively researched intellectual property violations in Paraguay, estimated the full value of Ciudad del Este's piracy trade as far higher. Pirated goods are everywhere in Ciudad del Este. From the ubiquitous DVD stands to cheap knock-offs of European soccer shirts, phonies with names like "Bolex" stare out from all corners.
The White House's trade representative made a scathing assessment of the South American country's efforts to quell piracy. The International Intellectual Property Alliance report goes into more detail. The Paraguayan government has comprehensively failed to tackle both the production of pirated goods within Paraguay, or woeful customs enforcement at the borders with Brazil and Argentina at Ciudad de Este, the alliance says. Immediate change is "sorely needed," it concludes.
As in much of Latin America, the piracy, counterfeiting and money laundering operations in Ciudad del Este are largely under the control of organized crime groups, the report states.
