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“Save Monterrey” reads the lead editorial in Wednesday’s edition of the Mexican daily El Universal. Mexico’s wealthiest city, less than 100 miles from the U.S. border, has rapidly plunged from relative tranquility to narco-related violence. In the past week, cartels shut down the city by blockading main roads, exploded a device outside the Televisa TV affiliate, and murdered the mayor of the nearby town of Santiago.

Mexican authorities say they have seized 180,000 weapons in the past 3 ½ years, and that 191 members of the military (not police) were killed by narcotraffickers in the same period. In all, AFP reports, 694 members of Mexico’s armed forces have been killed on anti-drug operations since 1976, when they first took on the counternarcotics role.

According to The Economist, Venezuela’s Interior Ministry reported 12,257 homicides during the first 11 months of 2009. A study carried out by the country’s National Statistics Institute at the request of the Vice President’s Office found 19,133 murders in 2009. This is an extremely high figure for a country of 28 million people; Colombia, with 45 million people, reported 15,817 or 17,717 homicides in 2009, depending on the source.

In Bogotá, meanwhile, the coroner’s office recorded 938 murders during the first seven months of 2010, up from 905 during the same period in 2009. Due to population growth, however, the city’s overall murder rate declined by 0.9 percent.

A few weeks ago, polls for Brazil’s October 3 presidential elections were showing a dead heat between Dilma Rousseff of the ruling Workers’ Party and José Serra of the opposition Social Democracy Party. Now, with a month and a half to go, Rousseff has opened up a 43% to 32% lead.

Brazil was the destination of a visit from Ecuador’s foreign minister this week, seeking to patch things up after Ecuador’s 2008 expulsion of a Brazilian construction company. Brazil, at the beginning of September, will also be the locale of Juan Manuel Santos’s first foreign trip as president of Colombia.

Colombia’s new foreign minister, María Ángela Holguín, hinted that the U.S.-Colombia defense cooperation agreement might be revised to take neighboring countries’ concerns into account. (Colombia’s Constitutional Court struck down the October 2009 agreement on Tuesday, ruling that Colombia’s Congress must first ratify it.) “Not only Venezuela, but UNASUR in general, has asked that some paragraphs be introduced to assure them that absolutely nothing would happen with the Colombia bases,” Holguín said. “We’re certainly going to look at that in our study of the agreement.”

“The United States should now consider the benefits of supporting a peace process to try to end a conflict that has raged for more than four decades,” writes Milburn Line of the University of San Diego’s Joan Kroc Institute, in a strong piece about Colombia published in the International Herald Tribune.

Claudia López, the Colombian researcher who played a key role in breaking the “para-politics” scandal, has released a new book about “how mafiosi and politicians reconfigured the Colombian state. “There is no proof so far linking him [former president Álvaro Uribe] directly with illegal structures. But it is clear that all illegal actors on the right wing inserted themselves into his political program and he did nothing to avoid it. Eight of every ten para-politicians were from his coalition,” López tells “La Silla Vacía” in a wide-ranging interview.

In a piece published Thursday to the OpenDemocracy.net website, I point out that Juan Manuel Santos – if he continues to follow some of the policies that have marked his few days in office – may find himself on a nasty but necessary collision course with the mafiosi and para-politicians in the coalition he inherited from Uribe.

The WOLA/TNI “Drug Law Reform in Latin America” project unearths a 1998 letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan signed by, among others, Juan Manuel Santos. It calls for “a frank and honest evaluation of global drug control efforts” because “we believe that the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself.”

El Tiempo interviews a former FARC guerrilla, a recent deserter, who was present at the site where hostages were being kept when the Colombian military rescued them in July 2008. He says that he and many others were at first accused of being traitors to the guerrilla group: “They chained my hands and feet, they took me someplace over there [where FARC leader alias “Mono Jojoy” was headquartered] and I spent a month and thirteen days detained with security all around.”

Chile’s defense minister traveled to Lima to meet with his Peruvian counterpart, where they agreed to do more to coordinate their defense expenditures. Meanwhile the head of Bolivia’s army traveled to Santiago to meet with his Chilean counterpart.

85 percent of Latin Americans oppose going the Costa Rica/Panama/Haiti route and abolishing their armed forces. However, at least 1 in 5 Guatemalans, Paraguayans and Uruguayans would be in favor of it. This is one of many interesting findings in a new FLACSO region-wide poll about governance and democracy, whose entire contents are viewable here.

The Obama administration appears to be close to restoring Clinton-era “people-to-people” contacts with Cuba, the Washington Post revealed Wednesday. This would mean licensing several currently prohibited types of U.S. citizen travel to the island.

Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernández named a new armed-forces chief and a new police chief this week. Both said that fighting crime and narcotrafficking would be their main priority.