Attacking drug cartel infrastructure indirectly, creating judicial frameworks on terrorism, and raising terrorism as national security concerns—irrespective of U.S.-Israel-EU pressures—should be top of mind for Latin American governments. Terror, whether ideologically or financially motivated, only undermines democracy.
The unfolding crisis in Bolivia involves the stability and strategic posture of the country literally at the heart of South America. This turning point also has implications on the future access of Washington’s extra-hemispheric rivals, namely China, Russia, and Iran. With distant, mutually reinforcing global crises elsewhere, Washington’s resources and attention are in ever shorter supply, but Bolivia needs to at least be on its radar screen.
Judiciaries across the Americas must start placing cybersecurity among their top administrative priorities, or else risk catastrophe.
Gender-based violence is inextricably linked to the security crisis in Haiti. Addressing it should be as essential as confronting the gangs. A gender-sensitive approach must be woven into the MSS operation’s every action. Without definite, actionable steps to account for women, girls, and victims of gender-based violence, existing considerations risk becoming mere rhetoric, potentially condemning Haiti to yet another failed intervention.
In the wake of the announcement of a Kenyan police-security deployment to Haiti, public attention to the crisis the country is facing shifted from general appeals for multilateral action to concerns that the Kenyan deployment would not resolve the crisis—simultaneously debating the logic of a fourth international intervention in a span of three decades. A common variable throughout is that the crisis in Haiti is deepening, and that even with some conditionalities, most Haitians desperately want outside help.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has opened yet another battlefront in Mexico’s belligerent political context. In violation of the constitution, the national education law, and the most basic sense of decency and morality, but with the usual levels of opacity and cynicism, AMLO’s government has drafted and published new textbooks for public schools nationwide through the Ministry of Education.
A potential electoral defeat of the Petro administration will likely lead to an escalation in disputes between the executive and local governments over the next three years.
Fernando thus had a plausible path to the Ecuadoran presidency, creating a risk of him working from a position of authority to dismantle webs of corruption involving not only Rafael Correa, his cronies, and the Chinese companies he built his presidential administration around but also the broader penetration of the Ecuadoran economy and political system by international criminal organizations.
After the Cold War, Cuba and China developed a strong and comprehensive alliance. Today, their collaboration is two-fold. Firstly, the economically-dependent Cuba helps China advance its myriad of interests in Latin America and the Caribbean. Secondly, the alliance meets China’s strategic needs in two broad areas: military-intelligence and biotechnology/neurosciences.
The U.S. and other like-minded democracies have an obligation to assist Ecuador in combatting criminality while preserving essential civil liberties. Enduring democratic leadership in Ecuador and the world will have to bring both effective law enforcement and civil liberties to douse the fire.
