NICARAGUA-COLOMBIA | More ructions over Caribbean jurisdictions. On 10 September the Colombian government promulgated a decree that establishes an ‘integral continuous zone’ which embraces all Colombian islands and cays in the Caribbean — from Albuquerque and Este-Sudeste in the south , through the San Andrés and Providencia archipelago to Serranilla in the north — under a single administration. It will be recalled that in November 2012 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague has awarded to Nicaragua some of the waters separating the archipelago from the northern cays. The Nicaraguan military high command promptly announced that there would…

Two recent embarrassing episodes have raised questions about the Honduran authorities’ ability to curb clandestine drug-trafficking flights even when these are detected and intercepted in the air, and about the extent to which there is official collusion with those engaged in this traffic. The first episode took place on 18 August, when Honduran military aircraft detected a light aircraft flying low over La Mosquitia. It was pursued and eventually forced to land at El Remolino, in the Ramal del Tigre area of Cortés. Ground forces had been alerted, but by the time they arrived on the scene the plane had…

The resurgence of violence in Guatemala, doubts about the gang truce and the working of the judiciary in El Salvador and about the state’s capabilities in Honduras are the background against which the prospect is again being raised of Central America’s Northern Triangle becoming — or having already become — a collection of ‘narco-states’. Guatemala provides a useful test case for the plausibility of this outlook. In late August the online monitoring service InSight Crime drew attention to a paper by Douglas Farah, president of IBI Consultants, entitled Central America’s Northern Triangle: A Time of Turmoil and Transition. He argues…