Security & Strategic Review - November 2021

The Mexico-US security relationship is undergoing a major overhaul, with the launch of a new ‘Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities’ which has ambitious and wide-ranging objectives...

President Pedro Castillo’s first 10 weeks in office were almost completely overshadowed by a series of scandals in which key figures in his cabinet were alleged to support, or to have been members of, the Maoist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso (SL)...

Two weeks of mounting tensions between rival factions of the Bolivian coca growers’ union Asociación Departamental de Productores de Coca de los Yungas de La Paz (Adepcoca) came to a head in dramatic fashion on 4 October...

“We will take the battle to the underworld,” Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso declared on 18 October as he decreed a 60-day state of exception to tackle mounting violence related to drug trafficking...

A flare-up in anti-migrant sentiment and xenophobic behaviour in the north of Chile has prompted a slew of criticism from human rights organisations...

Hundreds of indigenous people from across Paraguay congregated in the capital, Asunción, on 12 October to defend their rights and protest a newly sanctioned law which increases the punishments for occupying private land...

“Today we are violating human rights inside prisons,” Uruguay’s interior minister, Luis Alberto Heber, admitted during a congressional hearing on 28 September...

In April this year a parliamentary commission of inquiry (CPI) was set up in the Brazilian senate to investigate the government led by President Jair Bolsonaro’s response to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic...

Before taking office in December 2018, Mexico’s left-wing populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had little time for the armed forces and was deeply critical of its poor record on human rights...

Despite recent falls in the state-level homicide rate, there are fears that the impoverished Pacific-facing state of Guerrero is facing a new wave of violence...

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), along with local civil society groups, have blasted a series of reforms to Honduras’ criminal code, criminal procedural code, and anti-money laundering legislation, recently approved by the 128-member unicameral legislature...

On 17 September President Nayib Bukele promulgated reforms to El Salvador’s judicial-career law and organic law of the attorney general’s office (AG)...

“An aerial expulsion campaign of historic proportions”...

Given the circumstances in which all governments are now operating, it is perhaps not surprising that the hitherto popular prime minister of Jamaica, Andrew Holness of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) is experiencing unaccustomed political pressure due to falling opinion polls...

The United Nations (UN) International Organisation for Migration (IOM) convened a conference in Dominica from 4-6 October at which its report on Migration, Environment, Disasters and Climate Change Data in the Eastern Caribbean was presented and debated...