On 15 July Panamanian officials at Manzanillo port, next to the northern end of the Canal, boarded the Chong Chon Gang, a North Korean ship with a declared cargo of unrefined sugar from Cuba and ostensibly headed for North Korea. The boarding party was officially conducting a search for drugs. Initially resisted by the crew, they did not find any. Instead they found in the first two containers they opened, hidden under bags of sugar, a sizable batch of arms, including parts of anti-aircraft rocket systems and engines of MiG-2 bis interceptor fighters. The captain and 35 crew members were…

The government of President Otto Pérez Molina recently announced the arrest of five members of a ‘community police’ group in Tejutla, San Marcos, on suspicion of involvement in serious crimes. This has been highlighted as proof that the authorities have not lost control of these organisations, which have grown from 168 in 1999 to 717 in 2011 — without counting the unregistered ones. A study conducted by an institute of the Universidad Rafael Landívar and some NGOs have been claiming the exact opposite. Local juntas de seguridad (literally ‘security boards’), as these groups are called, were established during the administration…

The government of President Mauricio Funes has been trying hard to dispel public concern about the increase in violent crime that began in May and reached a new peak in late June and early July, before falling again. The official line is that the surge did not spell the failure of the ‘truce’ between the maras (street gangs) that resulted in a decline in the number of homicides from a daily average of 14 to only 5 between March and December last year. It was, officials said, just a blip. Justice and security minister, Ricardo Perdomo, explained the surge as…