In December 2012, newly installed President Enrique Pena Nieto promised to switch the focus of Mexico's drug wars from tackling the gang leaders to reducing the crime and violence that affect the lives of Mexicans. What is the scale of the violence? Official figures have been issued only sporadically. Most estimates put the number of people killed in drug-related violence since late 2006 at more than 60,000. Although there is no official breakdown of the numbers, the victims include...

MEXICO. - According to a report by the National Monitoring Council in Mexico, in the first four months of 2013, there has been an increase of 16.9% in kidnapping cases. The Mexican states that recorded the highest number of kidnappings are Hidalgo (11.21%), Michoacan (10.49%) and Tamaulipas (10.49%). In its periodic report of crimes with high impact, this NGO said that in the first quarter of 2013 there were 553 complaints of kidnapping, which would come out to about five cases of missing...

(Mexico City) - Mexico ’s security forces have participated in widespread enforced disappearances, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Virtually none of the victims have been found or those responsible brought to justice, exacerbating the suffering of families of the disappeared, Human Rights Watch found. The 176-page report, “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored,” documents nearly 250 “disappearances” during the...

Luis David Ortíz Salinas, President of Congress of Nuevo León Juan Carlos Ruiz García, Coordinator of the PAN Edgar Romo García, Coordinator of the PRI Francisco Reynaldo Cienfuegos Martínez, President of the Justice and Public Security Commission José Juan Guajardo Martínez, President of the Social Development and Human Rights Commission Celina del Carmen Hernández Garza, Vice President of the Social Development and Human Rights...

Testimony by Colombian statistical expert Daniel Guzmán provided key evidence in the conviction of two former police officers found guilty in the 1984 forced disappearance of Guatemalan student and union leader Edgar Fernando García. In a historical ruling, two former officers of the Guatemalan National Police - disbanded in 1996 as part of the peace accords ending the internal armed conflict - were each sentenced to the maximum term of 40 years in prison for their role in...

Luis Adolfo Cardona worked as a forklift operator at an American-owned bottling company that packages 50,000 cases of Coca-Cola’s famous fizzy beverages a month. On an unassuming morning, Cardona narrowly escaped death when right-wing paramilitary troops attempted to kill him. Unfortunately, not all labor union activists are so lucky. Isídro Segundo Gil, the gatekeeper and the union’s chief negotiator at another Coca-Cola bottling plant in the small, rural town of Carepa,...

In the 1960s, leftist philosophy professor Abimael Guzman started a Maoist guerilla group at the University of San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, Peru. Guzman named this organization in honor of the most celebrated phrase ever turned by an early Peruvian Communist and journalist, Jose Carlos Mariategui, who wrote that "Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to the revolution." Little did Peruvians realize then that the path would turn into a river of blood. Dried up for a...

Ronald Reagan helped to usher in a hopeful wave of democratization in Latin America. In one country after another, multi-party elections ended decades of single-party rule and military dictatorship. But today, that legacy is under threat - and so is our own homeland. The southern front in the War on Terror, which runs through Latin America’s institutions of state, is cracking under a combined assault of political revolution, Islamist terrorism, and the world’s most heavily armed...

Summary In the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C., U.S. attention to terrorism in Latin America intensified, with an increase in bilateral and regional cooperation. Latin American nations strongly condemned the attacks, and took action through the Organization of American States (OAS) to strengthen hemispheric cooperation. In June 2002, OAS members signed an Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism. President Bush submitted the convention to...

Marcelo Garcia / AFP/Getty Images: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, left, greets his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, last year. BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- Western anti-terrorism officials are increasingly concerned that Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite Muslim militia that Washington has labeled a terrorist group, is using Venezuela as a base for operations. Linked to deadly attacks on Jewish targets in Argentina in the early 1990s, Hezbollah...