Counternarcotics

So much for Tio Sam's war on drugs. Skeptics are less enthusiastic. Soon after the UN announced its survey, critics noted that the report focused on the coca leaf but omitted data on how much of the crop is being converted to cocaine. And without that data, the heralded fall in coca may be an optical illusion.

AEL Sistemas, based in Porto Alegre, became a subsidiary of the Israeli company Elbit in 2001, at which time it began developing a new generation of Brazilian surveillance drones using Israeli technology. But the Hermes 900 was just one example of Brazil’s growing role in the booming global market for unmanned aerial systems.

For more than six weeks, 22 agents from the Guatemalan National Civil Police’s (PNC) "Los Halcones" (Hawks) unit trained with United States Army Green Berets, participating in exercises focusing on fighting criminal organizations, including drug-trafficking groups that use the Central American country as a transshipment point to transport narcotics into North America.

A record 55,000 hectares (just over 210 square miles) of coca were destroyed in 2013-14 — dropping the Peru to No. 2 behind Colombia in land area under coca cultivation. Peru nevertheless remains the world's top cocaine-producing nation. Thousands of Peruvians who have lost their livelihoods to the government's campaign to destroy the plant used to make cocaine.