Week in Review - New reports edition
06/10/11
Latin America and the Caribbean
- The Department of State released its portion of the Section 655 Annual Military Assistance Report for Fiscal Year 2010. This report, as required by Section 655 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended, covers defense articles and defense services licensed for permanent export under the Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) program. The State Department's DCS program, which regulates private U.S. companies' overseas sales of weapons and other defense articles, defense services and military training, is not to be confused with the Defense Department's Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, which manages government-to-government sales. While we were happy to see the report released relatively close to its February due date, we were surprised to see that the level of detail of reporting has decreased significantly. Previous reports aggregated the data by U.S. Munitions List (USML) sub-category, but the FY2010 report only provides the quantity and value for the USML category and does not provide additional detail about the types of firearms, submersible vessels, vessels of war, tanks, and more licensed for export. You can see the previous level of detail provided on the Just the Facts database (the linked example is for Colombia, but you can see the details for other countries by clicking on a country name or dollar amount on this table). We'll be uploading the new FY2010 numbers to the Direct Commercial Sales database soon, but so far, it appears that the total value of exports licenses issued to the entire region in 2010 decreased by a little over $500 million, from $1.697 billion in 2009 to $1.029 billion in 2010.
- The Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs' Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight released a report (PDF) that examines State Department and Defense Department spending on contracts to supply counternarcotics assistance to governments in Latin America from 2005 to 2009. CIP Intern Claire O'Neill McCleskey summarized the report’s findings on the Just the Facts blog. The report critiques the lack of transparency, inadequate oversight, and monopolization by large contractors.
- The Global Commission on Drug Policy, a high-level commission that includes former heads of state and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, released a report last week in which they declared the war on drugs a failure. The study urges "experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs," adding: "This recommendation applies especially to cannabis, but we also encourage other experiments in decriminalization and legal regulation."
- The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its 2011 Yearbook, which includes a chapter on military expenditures. According to the new report, military spending worldwide grew most rapidly in South America, by 5.8%, compared to the global rise in military expenditure of 1.3%. As Adam Isacson notes in his blog highlighting interesting aspects of the report, “the US$63.3 billion spent by South America is slightly above that spent by France alone, and represents only 4% of the total global expenditure.” Click here to download the most recent Just the Facts podcast, in which Adam Isacson and Lucila Santos talk to Carina Solmirano, co-author of the Yearbook’s chapter on global military spending.
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The Washington Office on Latin America released a new report yesterday. "Tackling Urban Violence in Latin America: Reversing Exclusion through Smart Policing and Social Investment" examines the relative effectiveness of reducing urban violence in four different Latin American cities: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Medillín, Colombia; Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; and Santa Tecla, El Salvador. The report, which can be downloaded as a PDF here, finds that:
- The mano dura (iron first) anti-crime approaches that have been employed by many governments in the region don’t work.
- Policymakers must take into account that social, political, and economic exclusion are the context in which crime and violence take root.
- Citizens whose daily lives are most affected by violence must be involved in designing and implementing solutions for their communities.
- The Center for International Policy’s TransBorder Project released a new report last week. “Policy on the Edge: Failures of Border Security and New Directions for Border Control” examines the failures, waste and misdirection of the border security operations of the Department of Homeland Security. The report recommends “that charts the way forward through regulatory solutions--for immigration, drugs, gun sales, border management--that are more pragmatic, effective and cost-efficient than current policies.” Download the report as a PDF.