BOLIVIA | Upheaval in the judiciary. On 28 July Bolivia’s 130-member lower chamber voted to suspend two magistrates from the seven-member plurinational constitutional court (TC), Ligia Velásquez and Zoraida Chanez, so they could face trial for negligence of duties and prevarication. These are the first sitting justices elected to their post in the unprecedented October 2011 national elections to select 56 new judges to be suspended. Their suspension illustrates the continued crisis in Bolivia’s judiciary, a weak point which could well emerge as a campaign issue ahead of 12 October general elections, reigniting long-standing complaints about the politicisation of justice…

The first half of this year in Venezuela was a record breaker as regards violent repression of protest actions, comparable only to those of the 1989 Caracazo — and this despite the fact that only 8% of the protests were violent. This emerges from a detailed analysis produced by the non-governmental Observatorio Venezolano de Conflictividad Social (OVCS). All told, there were 6,369 protest actions in January-June, or 278% more than in the same period of 2013. Of these, 510 were violent. Not all the protests included a rejection of the government led by President Nicolás Maduro; 28% concentrated on demanding…

Claims have been made that the number of flights on Peru’s cocaine airbridge has been increasing, and that traffickers may have been testing the use of bigger aircraft to carry the drug. In the mean time interdiction of the ‘narcoflights’ (on the ground, since Peru does not have a shootdown policy) is hampered by the lack of radar surveillance, and acquiring it is taking time. On 3 July the joint command of Peru’s armed forces announced that joint military-police operations in the last week of June had led to the location and destruction of 12 clandestine airstrips (designated PACs, for…