Drug related violence in Mexico has killed over 2,700 people this year. Just this week, over 30 people have been found dead: 24 of whom were found in a mass grave, bound and shot execution style, and 7 of whom were killed yesterday when a grenade exploded at an Independence Day celebration in Michoacán. While Mexican press is filled everyday with accounts of violence, kidnappings...
Protests and demonstrations in Bolivia grew increasingly violent this week. Opponents of President Evo Morales in the resource-rich eastern provinces are pressing harder with autonomy demands after a recent recall referendum ratified both Morales and regional governors who oppose him. The latest protests have resulted in numerous casualties and significant property damage.
President Morales’ reaction has included lashing out against the United States, including Tuesday’s expulsion of the U.S. ambassador, who had met with one of the opposition governors several days earlier....
Every year, the President is required by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to submit to Congress an annual report identifying (a) major drug-producing or transit countries and (b) those countries not "cooperating" with U.S. counternarcotics measures and subject to sanctions. Using the "International Narcotics Control Strategy Report" published by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law...
On October 16th of last year, Adam Isacson wrote a piece on the blog Plan Colombia and Beyond about the potential of a third term for Uribe. At the time, the "Party of the 'U'" had promised to collect the 1.3 million signatures necessary for a petition to amend Colombia's constitution to allow Uribe to run for again in 2010. In this post, Adam outlined how Uribe running for a third term could actually make...
Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists' Arms Sales Monitoring Program, we now have data about weapons and equipment that the U.S. government sold to the rest of the world through the Foreign Military Sales program in 2007. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) is one of two programs through which military equipment is sold from the United States to...
Over the past few years, Congress has acceded to several Defense Department requests to use its own budget to provide military assistance, something that it was not legally able to do on its own after 1961, when the Foreign Assistance Act became law.
The result has been a profusion of Pentagon-budget programs that provide military aid very similar to what is already provided through the foreign aid budget. The difference is that these new Defense Department programs have less (or sometimes no) involvement...