The following is a round-up of some of the top news highlights from around the region this week. Colombia
- On Wednesday, the FARC killed seven soldiers and injured five others in the worst violence against security forces since the peace talks began. The group also agreed to hand over two police officers being held to delegates from the Red Cross and the NGO Colombians for Peace on Thursday. The release was ...
-
“In the most expensive initiative in Latin America since the Cold War, the U.S. has militarized the battle against the traffickers, spending more than $20 billion in the past decade,” reports the Associated Press. “At any given moment, 4,000 U.S. troops are deployed in Latin America and as many as four U.S. Navy ships are plying the Caribbean and Pacific coastlines of Central America. U.S. pilots clocked more than
...
U.S. military personnel carry out a very regular schedule of exercises and training deployments throughout Latin America. Here, based on official releases and press reports, is a glimpse of these activities in December and January, in alphabetical order by country.
Belize
The Southern Command’s Honduras-based “Joint Task Force-Bravo” component and the Belize Ministry of Health...
The news coming out of Honduras continues to reveal a flailing economy, political instability, and endemic corruption of the security forces and judicial system. A previous post gave an overview of the country's institutional, financial and security troubles at the outset of 2013. Here's a new update.
Institutional problems
As explained in the prior post, Congress removed four Supreme Court...
 |
|
Chinese Army participants in a marksmanship course pose with their Colombian instructors last August (source).
|
In its...
Recently there have been several reports and articles about the increasing militarization of the drug war, particularly in Central America. U.S. government investment and involvement in security throughout Latin America and the Caribbean has also been given much attention in the media. Below is a compilation of articles describing recent U.S. security-related activity in the region.
U.S. security spending and investment in the region