Drug war news this week centered on the politics of the war strategy. The new president of Guatemala, former general Otto Perez Molina--following Mexico's model--ordered the army into the countryside to fight the cartels. However, a few days later, he also called for an international discussion of decriminalization of drugs.
Later in the week, President...
In March 2011, Mexican poet and journalist Javier Sicilia’s son was brutally murdered by drug traffickers. Sicilia’s high profile in Mexico brought national attention to his son’s unfortunate killing. In the midst of the media attention, Sicilia recognized the deafening silence that accompanied the stories of so many thousands of other victims of drug violence. In the five-year period since President Felipe Calderón initiated the militarization of the...
I'm just back from several days of border-security research with WOLA colleagues in Tucson and Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Here are some photos from the trip. My entire Flickr photo set is here...
Drug war news brought the announcement by the Mexican Attorney General's Office that 47,515 people had been killed in the drug war between December 2006 and September 2011. This came after much foot dragging and pressure from citizens groups and the national Transparency Commission and immediately ...
Drug war news this week includes a Mexican newspaper, Reforma, putting the drug war death count for 2011 at 12,000. From Australia comes a thorough, well-written, and appalling look at the horrors of the drug war in Acapulco. A U.S. NGO looks at the...
Over the course of 2011, I read or saved a large pile of articles that were:
- Somehow related to security in Latin America and the Caribbean;
- Available at no cost on the Internet;
- At least 2,500 words in length; and
- Not written by the three organizations participating in the “Just the Facts” project. See the end of this post for a list of our own 2011 long-form writings about security in Latin America and the Caribbean.
After a lot of reading over the holiday break, here are links to my favorite 2011...