Latin America security by the numbers Share This /

WOLA’s Venezuela blog looks at what polls say about the matchup for the country’s April 14 presidential election: “Based on Hinterlaces’ past poll we can see that voter intention for the Maduro-Capriles race had a similar pattern 55-45 [percent]. More recently Datanálisis released numbers that (when adjusted for abstention) show Maduro with a 15 point lead.”

Hours before President Hugo Chávez died on March 5, Venezuela’s government expelled two officers from the U.S. embassy’s military attaché’s office. The U.S. government reciprocated over the weekend by ejecting two officials from the Venezuelan embassy in Washington.

Even after a February devaluation, Venezuela’s currency, the bolívar, is trading on the black market at as much as 74 percent over the official rate.

Defense budget cuts will reduce U.S. air and maritime drug interdiction in the Caribbean and along Central America’s coasts. Two U.S. Navy frigates will not come back to the region after they return to port in April. And, reports the Associated Press, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection has cut 1,900 hours of flight time for its P3 radar planes, a nearly 40 percent cut in flights in the fiscal year ending in September. That leaves the program with only 800 hours for the rest of the year, an amount that could be used up after several dozen flights. The program currently flies several times in an average week.”

Colombia manually eradicated 30,000 hectares of coca bushes in 2012. That is 5,000 hectares less manual eradication than in 2011 (as opposed to fumigation, which has been steady at about 100,000 hectares), and a steep drop from a 2008 total of 96,000 hectares. The Colombian government’s budget for manual eradication has dropped by over half since 2010.

Colombia’s security forces now estimate the current membership of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas at 7,800, the lowest figure since the mid-1990s.

Of the 336 municipalities (counties) in which it operated in 2002, the FARC is no longer present in 85, according to a report by Colombia’s New Rainbow Foundation.

Four or five organizations of “criminal bands,” or new paramilitary groups, totaling 4,170 members, operate in 231 of Colombia’s 1,100 municipalities (counties), according to a study by Colombia’s Ideas for Peace Foundation.

Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, experienced 86 homicides in February, 14 less than in February 2012 and the lowest single-month total measured in 13 years.

Almost 10 percent of the Congress that Colombia elected in 2010 - 22 members in all — have had to leave their posts, mostly for judicial reasons.

After it draws its membership from 8,000 army soldiers and 2,000 navy marines, Mexico’s new Gendarmería Nacional, or mobile constabulary police force, will be the country’s 4th-largest security force after the Army (196,000), Navy (54,000), and Federal Police (37,000), notes security analyst Iñigo Guevara.

There have been 47 cases of violence against Mexican journalists documented by the Inter-American Press Association since June 2012, when Mexico established A Special Prosecutor for Crimes against Journalists. Only seven are under investigation.

Of 1.5 million Haitians displaced by the January 2010 earthquake, 350,000 are still in tent encampments, according to the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Asked in a referendum whether they wished to remain a British colony, 1,514 of 1,517 Falkland Islands voters said “yes.”