Latin American Drugs & links

[SWJ Blog]

US Military Expands its Drug War in Latin America

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[SWJ Blog]

Drug Traffickers Threaten Central America's Democratic Gains

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[SWJ Blog]

Head of Southern Command Says He Lacks Resources to Fight Drug Trafficking

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[SWJ Blog]

Gangs & Drug Trafficking in Central America Conference

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[SWJ Blog]

Review of Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and The New Politics of Latin America

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[davidbfpo]

If headlines solved difficult problems then the Mexican President's UN speech is a good example. The BBC report assembles other opinions too. Here is a fact:

Mexico has had more people disappear than Argentina and Chile together during their whole military regimes...We've had more Mexicans die in the drugs war than the US has had in Afghanistan and Iraq together. It's unreal. There's no way you can justify that kind of human cost.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-36109104

Open Democracy chimes into the debate:http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=...c&e=c883a819dc

A change in direction as the US Presidential Election looms is hardly encouraging or those who advocate change.

[AdamG]

Latin America is a hotbed of Islamic terrorism where groups like ISIS and Hezbollah operate freely and raise large sums of money to finance terrorist activities in other countries, mainly the United States, according to a new report released by Spain’s Defense Ministry. “Latin America represents an important region for Islamic radicalism because conditions enable the free, almost undetectable, movement of their members throughout the region,” the defense document states.
Governments in the region consider Islamic terrorism to be a foreign problem, the report says, and intelligence agencies are ill equipped to handle the threat they represent. “The ignorance involving the threat of jihadist terrorism in Latin America has been such that some governments have refused to cooperate with U.S. authorities and other intelligence services,” the disturbing assessment reveals. The report was released this month by the division of Spain’s Defense agency known as Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos (IEEE), Spanish Institute of Strategic Studies. The document, authored by a counterterrorism expert, is titled “El radicalismo islámico en América Latina. De Hezbolá al Daesh (Estado Islámico),” Islamic Radicalism in Latin America, from Hezbollah to ISIS.
The Lebanese group Hezbollah is identified as having the largest fundraising operations in the region, though others, such as ISIS, are also prominent. The terrorist organizations have teamed up with established drug trafficking conglomerates to raise and launder large quantities of cash. The report identifies a group called El clan Barakat in Paraguay and Joumaa in Colombia as two examples of drug trafficking enterprises that have long worked with Islamic jihadists to launder money. Spain’s military experts refer to the relationships as a “marriage of convenience” between Latin American organized crime and Muslim terrorists with different objectives and interests. “Each takes advantage of the benefits that the relationship provides,” the report states.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/20...ca-attack-u-s/

[davidbfpo]

AdamG,

There have been similar allegations before, IIRC not from official sources and SWJ articles. There is an area on the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay that often is the focal point. See:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=1073

[Bill Moore]

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/20...ca-attack-u-s/

There is in fact concern, and has been for sometime about extremists operating in Latin America and the Caribbean, but judicial watch is a terrible source to cite. They have been proven to be unreliable in the past.