Editor’s Note: See also Arrests Again Point to Paraguay President’s Contraband Cigarettes and Brazilian Documentary on Paraguayan Contraband Cigarettes.
From: MedicalXpress
by Benoît Gomis, The Conversation
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My colleagues in the Global Tobacco Control Research Programme and I just published two papers to address this gap and inform the implementation of the protocol. We examine transnational tobacco companies’ complicity in Paraguay’s illicit tobacco trade and its evolution from the 1960s onwards, which enabled the subsequent rise of local manufacturer Tabacalera del Este, known as Tabesa. We uncovered new evidence of Tabesa’s international expansion, largely through the illicit trade.
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Devastating public health consequences
Journalists at the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color wrote a series of articles on our papers, for which they interviewed Tabesa CEO José Ortiz. Mr Ortiz now claims that many of their products —millions of which have been seized by Brazilian law enforcement —are counterfeited in clandestine factories.
