Tag Archives: security

The FARC’s announcement to halt kidnapping: why?

By Sebastian Chaskel | Published: February 27, 2012
The FARC’s announcement last Sunday that the organization will no longer kidnap civilians was a surprise to most observes and experts of the region. The mainstream media has reported on the event, but has been unsuccessful at explaining why the FARC would do this. In the past 48 hours, online media and blogs have [...]
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Why Guatemala’s Pérez Molina Is Considering Legalizing Drugs

By Natalie Kitroeff | Published: February 15, 2012
Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina has been acting strange lately. Just one month after his inauguration, he is already ruffling U.S. feathers, and making waves in the politics of the region in unexpected ways. Pérez Molina’s military past and hard-line “mano dura” security policy made many worry that he would backtrack on justice reforms led by [...]
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Overstating Cartels’ Relevance to the American Electorate

By Eliot Brockner | Published: November 2, 2011
The lead article in last week’s Proceso talks about the political importance of capturing El Chapo for both the Calderon and Obama administrations. The article is worth a read in its entirety, but the focus of this post is on a quote from the informed and esteemed analyst/lawyer/economist Edgardo Buscaglia: “For Obama, El Chapo is Osama [...]
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In Ciudad Mier, deploying troops is not enough

By Eliot Brockner | Published: September 5, 2011
Back in November 2010, a small town on the US-Mexico border, Ciudad Mier, made headlines when most of the town’s residents left because of intense fighting between the Zetas and Gulf cartels. Both groups wanted the plaza, which is a strategic smuggling corridor for weapons, cash, and money between the United States and Mexico, and [...]
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Latin America’s Security Dilemma Continued

By Eliot Brockner | Published: August 17, 2011
Sam Novacich and I have a piece at ISN in which we take a closer look at one of Rio’s Pacifying Police Units (UPP) in the Cantagalo/Pavão-Pavãozinho communities and document some of the challenges the community members and UPP are facing with the new game in town. In addition to looking into some of the lesser-reported impacts [...]
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The Skeletons in Brazil’s Closet

By Eliza Sweren-Becker | Published: July 10, 2010
In the last year, you’d be hard-pressed to have heard or read anything negative about Brazil (with the exception of President Lula’s pesky affinity for Iran). The South American giant emerged virtually unscathed from the financial crisis and is now the media darling of the Financial Times and the Economist. Democracy has generally been very [...]
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Selective Impunity

By Eliot Brockner | Published: March 29, 2010
El Chiguire Bipolar has a good take on the concept of selective impunity. In the Onion-like fashion for which the blog is known, it tells the story of Maria Angelica Guerrero, a two-time victim of lightning kidnappings and exasperation at the police’s ineffectiveness. Thinking creatively, she attempts to get her kidnapper to speak negatively about Hugo [...]
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Merida 2.0: A New Phase in U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation

By Dora Beszterczey | Published: March 26, 2010
Responding to a growing sense that an exclusive focus on a military-led fight against drug trafficking organizations is failing to curb violence on the other side of our southern border, the United States and Mexico formally announced a shift in their counternarcotics strategy that had been in the works since the fall of 2009. The “new stage” in bilateral cooperation will aim to strengthen civilian law enforcement institutions and rebuild communities crippled by poverty and crime.
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Anti-drug bases in Panama and the Drug War in 2010

By Eliot Brockner | Published: December 30, 2009
One of the biggest stories emerging from the Americas in 2009 was Colombia’s decision to let the United States access military installations throughout Colombia in efforts to combat narcotrafficking. The move exacerbated already tenuous relations between Colombia and Venezuela, with the latter claiming that US presence in Colombia was a direct threat to sovereignty, another [...]
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The International Reach of Organized Crime

By Eliot Brockner | Published: November 27, 2009
Earlier this year, LatAmThought wrote a commentary about the international reach or criminal organizations in the Americas. Last week, we published an article on the International Relations and Security Network about the indirect presence of Mexican Cartels in the Andes. The amount of drug seizures in Bolivia have increased in 2009. Additionally, raids on drug-processing labs [...]
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