The commander of the Bolivian navy has revealed that there is growing evidence that cocaine is being shipped into Brazil and Argentina along routes that cross Lake Titicaca and run along the country’s border rivers that flow into Brazil. The government in La Paz and the antidrugs force, Felcn, have been focusing publicly on the routes, by air and overland, that run through the eastern department of Santa Cruz to Brazil and Paraguay. Recent raids by the navy have strengthened the view that, apart from acting as a conduit for Peruvian cocaine base, Bolivia is increasing its own processing of…

VENEZUELA | ‘Plot to kill Maduro’. On 28 May Jorge Rodríguez, a member of the Alto Mando Político de la Revolución Bolivariana (‘Political High Command of the Bolivarian Revolution’), made public purported emails sent by opposition legislator María Corina Machado urging other opposition figures to make preparations for the assassination of President Nicolás Maduro. One addressed to former opposition presidential aspirant Diego Arria said, ‘The time has come to accumulate efforts, make the necessary calls and raise the funding to annihilate Maduro [...] The rest will fall of its own accord.’ One purportedly sent by Arria to former state oil…

Peru is debating whether to amend or repeal a law just passed by congress that allows the military to become directly involved in antidrug actions — as distinct from fighting ‘narcoterrorists’ — against a backdrop of warnings that not only the fate of the antidrugs effort but even the forthcoming elections are threatened by the pervasive penetration of the country’s institutions by organised crime. The warnings have been escalating since early April, when interior minister Walter Albán called in a television interview which received widespread media coverage for a broad agreement between ‘people of different ideological options’ to face the…