Security & Strategic Review - March 2022

Mexico’s performance in the 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), released by Berlin-based NGO Transparency International (TI) on 25 January, was notable not because of a significant improvement or decline, but precisely due to a lack of meaningful change.  Despite President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s strong anti-corruption rhetoric, which underpinned his 2018 electoral campaign, efforts to tackle corruption remain limited, with high levels of impunity and an increasing number of corruption scandals that implicate those close to the president. ... Read More

Colombia’s eastern department of Arauca saw in the new year with its “most violent day in ten years,” in the words of departmental human rights ombudsman Juan Carlos Villate.... Read More

With the world’s attention fixed on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the bolstering of Moscow’s military cooperation with Venezuela in February has heaped further strain on that country’s already hostile relationship with Colombia.... Read More

Doubling Ecuador’s oil production over his four-year term has been a core policy of President Guillermo Lasso, who views his 1m barrel per day (bpd) production target as key to the country’s economic recovery from the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.... Read More

In January, the government of Rio de Janeiro state launched a new programme designed to bring public security and public services into the favelas of the state’s eponymous capital.... Read More

The United Nations (UN) has repeatedly warned that extreme weather events, which are already increasing in frequency and intensity, will only continue to do so under the impact of climate change.... Read More

An international operation against Brazilian drug traffickers, carried out across a number of countries on 15 February and coordinated by Europol, resulted in the dismantling of a large criminal organisation involved in money laundering and trafficking cocaine from South America to Europe.... Read More

Since 7 February, Mexican fishing vessels have been banned from operating in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as from entering US ports or accessing port services.... Read More

Letra S, a Mexico City-based (CDMX) civil society organisation dedicated to defending LGBTI+ rights, announced on 14 February that there had been an escalation in LGBTI+ hate crime in Mexico over the previous two months.... Read More

Less than three weeks after the now former president Juan Orlando Hernández (2014-2022) and his Partido Nacional (PN) government left office, replaced by President Xiomara Castro and her leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (Libre), Hernández was arrested in line with a US request for his extradition on drug-trafficking and weapons charges.... Read More

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), its Special Rapporteurship for Freedom of Expression, and the Regional Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) for Central America, the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean have recently sounded the alarm regarding new evidence of the use of spyware Pegasus for illegal surveillance of journalists and civil society organisations that investigate and report on matters of public interest in El Salvador.... Read More

In January President Alejandro Giammattei marked the mid-way point of his four-year mandate.... Read More

There is no doubt that Guyana is the current success story of the Caribbean.... Read More

*** ANTIGUA’S PREMIER EYES EARLY POLL.... Read More