LIKE most clubs of governments, the Organisation of American States (OAS) is widely seen as little more than a debating society. It makes decisions by consensus, and cannot force its members to do anything against their will. But many of those who complain about the OAS’s lack of effectiveness still concede that its watchdogs, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, have proved their worth. The IACHR consists of seven jurists,...

One of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere is the city of Warnes, Bolivia, which lies a few kilometers outside the country’s industrial capital of Santa Cruz. There, set back in an open field off a bustling highway, is the new regional defense school of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, or ALBA-the eight-member economic and geopolitical bloc founded by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro nearly a decade ago. Since its launch last spring,...

Andrés Spokoiny is a Jewish Argentinean, who lives today in Montreal, Canada, and who is president of the Federation Canadian Jewish Agency (Federation CJA). He has trained many leaders in Jewish communities and some year ago he wrote an excellent essay in which, describing an old miners custom,-and LADDO's main point of view- he explains the scam used by the so-called new left and by the most brutal anti-Semitism, disguised as progressive. This is an essay still relevant today. He...

After a two-year manhunt, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency last week arrested Colombian drug kingpin Javier Antonio Calle Serna, a senior leader of Los Rastrojos, one of the country's most formidable drug-trafficking organizations. After being indicted last summer by the Eastern District of New York, Serna reportedly felt so squeezed by the agency and rival drug dealers that he began negotiating for his surrender. His arrest is by all accounts good news, especially due to Los...

As the United States considers the Islamic jihadi threats confronting it from all sides, it might do well to focus on its southern neighbor, Mexico, which has been targeted by Islamists and jihadists, who, through a number of tactics-from engaging in da'wa, converting Mexicans to Islam, to smuggling and the drug cartel, to simple extortion, kidnappings and enslavement-have been subverting Mexico in order to empower Islam and sabotage the U.S. According to a 2010 report, "Close to home:...

Iran poses one of three major threats to democracy in Latin America, along with drug cartels and the danger of U.S. disengagement from the region, House Speaker John Boehner said. Boehner said today that when he went to Latin America in January, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was also in the region visiting Venezuela and Cuba. The U.S. State Department has designated Iran and Cuba as state sponsors of terrorism, and has criticized Venezuela under leader Hugo Chavez for human rights...

Ahmadinejad visits Venezuela in January 2012, seen here in the company of the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez. Details Background Information . Since Ahmadinejad was elected president in August 2005, Iran has extended and solidified its relations with several Latin American countries, especially Venezuela and Bolivia, and increased its efforts to obtain a political foothold in the others. According to findings brought before the American Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Iran...

Practice journalism in Colombia and Latinamerica is a hazardous activity. The journalists, as well as the campaigners for human rights, the trade unionists, the displaced persons among others, were all groups that the armed conflicts traditionally affect. Therefore, the State has as a duty to give a special protection to them. Despite this constitutional guarantee the situation of the Colombian journalists remains at risk: Colombia is the country in Latin America with the major number of...

The U.S.-Mexico border presents a distinctive set of challenges for combating human trafficking. The involuntary transport of human beings in order to exploit their labour or sexuality is nothing new. Yet conditions in the current era of globalization-growing economic inequalities within and among nations, increasing flows of labour and products across national borders, and the growth of informal economies and organized criminal networks, to name a few-are causing it to proliferate on a...

Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential candidate Enrique Pena Nieto, the front-runner in the lead-up to Mexico's presidential election in July, told Reuters last week that if elected, he would seek to increase the size of the current Mexican federal police force. Pena Nieto also expressed a desire to create a new national gendarmerie, or paramilitary police force, to use in place of the Mexican army and Marine troops currently deployed to combat the heavily armed criminal cartels in...