Security & Strategic Review - June 2021

Mexico’s 6 June midterm elections are billed as the country’s largest with over 20,000 elected posts up for grabs and over 120,000 candidates taking part.... Read More

“Zero impunity for mafias” and an “iron fist for murderers, rapists and criminals”.... Read More

When Venezuela’s national guard seized the offices of the national daily El Nacional on 14 May, it was merely the most dramatic moment in a month of diminishing press freedoms across the Andean region.... Read More

Five cocaine ‘mega-laboratories’ were discovered in Bolivia in May, together capable of producing over 940kg of cocaine per day.... Read More

A recent series of violent confrontations on Yanomami indigenous territory in Brazil’s northern state of Roraima shines a spotlight on the growing attacks against indigenous rights under President Jair Bolsonaro’s government, and the resultant hardships faced, in this case, by the Yanomami indigenous people.... Read More

Fahd Jamil Georges, a Brazilian criminal who was known as the ‘king of the border’ with Paraguay for his illicit business in the region, turned himself in to the authorities on 19 April.... Read More

Paraguay has taken on a new, more active, role within the international drug trade.... Read More

Every year on 20 May, Uruguay holds the ‘Marcha del Silencio’ – now in its 26th year – during which the victims of the 1973-1985 military dictatorship are remembered.... Read More

Mexico has been suffering from a major drought for a number of weeks now.... Read More

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has set off democracy-related alarm bells over the past year for various reasons - from the deployment of security forces to congress [SSR-20-04] to his repeated disregard for judicial rulings on his government’s response to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic [SSR-20-06].... Read More

Honduras’s national assembly has approved a new electoral law (LEH) ahead of the November general election.... Read More

At the end of April, the Panama Canal authority (ACP) announced that the Panama Canal had begun the transition to become carbon neutral by 2030.... Read More

In May Centre d’Analyse et de Recherche Réseau International en Droits de l’Homme (CARDH), a local NGO, released a report warning that kidnappings in Haiti had increased by over 300% in April compared with the previous month.... Read More

On 8 May, China’s Xinhua news agency carried a report on the deepening of relations between China and Suriname.... Read More

*** BELIZE-GUATEMALA BORDER TENSIONS REPORTED.... Read More