Security & Strategic Review - April 2014 (ISSN 1741-4202)

The ‘balloon effect’ in which a squeeze on one part of the regional drugs trade produces an expansion elsewhere, has not only been recorded recently in the shifts between different trafficking routes and methods, but on a far larger scale in the reorientation of flows and processing patterns that has followed the squeeze on Colombian cocaine output and the re-emergence of Peru as the country with the greatest potential production.... Read More

A report published in early April in the US implicated the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in a covert scheme to foster political dissent in Cuba through a mobile-phone platform which could create social networks beyond government control, envisaging effects similar to those of the Arab ‘Springs’ and the recent wave of protests in Venezuela.... Read More

On 3 April interior minister Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong announced that with the arrest of some of the most important leaders of the Caballeros Templarios (LCT) drug trafficking organisation (DTO), Michoacán had moved on to ‘another moment’.... Read More

MEXICO | Security rationale questioned.... Read More

Media headlines in April, mainly outside Brazil, painted a grim picture of the situation in Rio in the run-up to the Fifa World Cup.... Read More

PARAGUAY | Clash with EPP in Concepción.... Read More

After more than two years of trying, the government of President Ollanta Humala claims to have found enough evidence to charge the leaders of the Movimiento por la Amnistía y Derechos Fundamentales (Movadef) with membership of a terrorist organisation, namely Sendero Luminoso (SL) and financing terrorism with revenues from drug trafficking.... Read More

BOLIVIA | Shootdown law promulgated.... Read More

In the inter-regnum until President-elect Salvador Sánchez Cerén takes office in June, the outgoing government is having to cope with an upsurge in violence for which it is trying to find an explanation, after having to accept that it goes beyond an attempt to influence the recent elections.... Read More

As Honduras took delivery of the first of the radars it had bought from Israel, the US suspended, for the second time in a year and a half, the sharing of information about suspected drug flights from its own surveillance.... Read More