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On Sunday, a Colombian Army jungle raid freed four policemen who had been held hostage by the FARC guerrillas since the 1990s. Colombian Defense Minister Gabriel Silva said that although there was combat, the rescue took place without a single death. It happened less than 20 miles from
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Adam talks with WOLA's Adriana Beltrán about the resignation of Carlos Castresana, head of the UN commission against impunity in Guatemala, and the international community's effort to help Guatemala rid itself of the influence of violent organized crime.
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On Wednesday a Colombian court did something that only a few Latin American justice systems have managed to do: send a high-ranking former military officer to prison for an abuse of human rights. A judge sentenced Colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega to 30 years.
The case goes back to 1985, when Colombia’s now-defunct M-19 guerrilla group staged a takeover of Colombia’s Palace of Justice (supreme court building) in...
Since the U.S. Congress first passed the “Plan Colombia” aid package in Colombia, it has required limits on the number of U.S. personnel who could be in Colombia at any given time. The resulting “troop cap” in U.S. law was seen as a safeguard or “tripwire” to prevent an unnoticed escalation in U.S. military involvement in one of the world’s longest-running internal conflicts.
The size of the “cap” has changed over the years. The original July 2000 “Plan Colombia” appropriation stated that a maximum of 500 U.S. military and 300 U.S. citizen contractor personnel could be in Colombia...
Every June, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime issues a report with the results of its efforts to monitor coca cultivation in the Andean region. The report has not been officially released yet, but some media outlets have gotten their hands on the new cultivation numbers for Colombia. Reports, such as this one in El Tiempo, indicate that coca...
On a March 2008 visit to Washington, Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim announced an intention to create a South American Defense Council (SADC), a body “based on the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and territoriality.” Jobim then toured the region to get support for the SADC initiative.
Despite doubts that countries like Venezuela and Colombia could agree on common defense and security goals, the Council’s creation was approved in December 2008, in an extraordinary summit in Brazil, where the...