This post was written by CIP intern Sarah Kinosian
In Colombia's run-off presidential election this past Sunday, former defense minister Juan Manuel Santos took 69 percent of the vote to beat two-time Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus, who received 28%. The victory margin was the widest in the country's history. Despite ...
Last week, the Board of Visitors for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) held its mid-year session in Washington, DC. WHINSEC, located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, is the Defense Department's principal Spanish-language training facility for Latin American military and law-enforcement personnel. WHINSEC took over the School of the Americas, which was legally closed in 2001. Its Board of Visitors, a "federally chartered oversight committee that...
The Center for International Policy, Latin America Working Group Education Fund, U.S. Office on Colombia, and the Washington Office on Latin America released a new report today. Far Worse than Watergate details how the...
This post was written by CIP intern Sarah Kinosian On Sunday, June 13th the Colombian army rescued three police officers and an army sergeant who had been held hostage by the FARC guerillas for over a decade. ‘Operation Chameleon,’ as the mission was called, was the Colombian military’s hardest blow to the FARC since the 2008 rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and 13 other guerrilla hostages. The mission occurred a week before Sunday’s run-off presidential election between Juan Manuel Santos and Antanas Mockus, in which policy toward Colombia’s illegal armed groups has been a central...
This post was written by CIP's Cuba program intern Meghan Vail On May 27th, two House of Representatives committees held a joint hearing on U.S.-Mexico security cooperation. The Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism of the Committee on Homeland Security and the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the Committee on Foreign Affairs were specifically interested in the next steps for the Mérida Initiative, the $1.4 billion U.S. counternarcotics and security program for...
Three articles in today's news provided interesting statistics about security and narcotrafficking in Latin America: Bolivia's chief of the FELCN (the U.S.-aided Police Special Forces for Counternarcotics), Félix Molina, provided the following statistics about FELCN operations in 2010:
- 6,237 counternarcotics operations have been carried out so far this year;
- 14.8 tons of cocaine and more than 922 tons of marijuana have been seized;
- 2,713 hectares of coca have ...