Security & Strategic Review - July 2024

With crime often perceived by the public as a top concern in Brazil, legislators who back hardline security measures have made significant advances in congress.... Read More

Escalating violence in southwestern Colombia has forced a reshuffle in the military high command, with President Gustavo Petro replacing General Luis Mauricio Ospina as commander of the army.... Read More

Venezuela’s prison system was hit by a wave of hunger strikes for around a week from 9 June, with inmates demanding that the government take action to reduce a judicial backlog that can see inmates spend years in prison awaiting trial.... Read More

Peru’s unicameral congress rapidly approved a number of widely criticised bills in the final stretch of the last legislative period, which ended on 17 June.... Read More

José Antonio Dias Toffoli, a justice on Brazil’s supreme court (STF), ruled on 21 May to annul legal decisions and cases against Marcelo Odebrecht, former CEO of construction firm Odebrecht, relating to the Lava Jato corruption investigation.... Read More

Rodrigo Nicora was officially sworn in as Paraguay’s new justice minister on 28 May, replacing Ángel Barchini, whose resignation the government attributed to personal reasons.... Read More

Speaking at a press conference on 5 June, Uruguay’s President Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou recognised that there is “huge concern” in government about the country’s murder rate.... Read More

Insecurity is likely to be one of the biggest challenges facing Claudia Sheinbaum when she takes over the presidency from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on 1 October.... Read More

Claudia Sheinbaum won Mexico’s presidential elections for the ruling Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena) by a landslide on 2 June.... Read More

In late May Honduras’s leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (Libre) government led by President Xiomara Castro issued a resolution declaring a state of climate emergency, with the aim of defending protected areas and water production zones.... Read More

Days before President Nayib Bukele took office on 1 June for a second five-year term, the national assembly, in which his personalist party Nuevas Ideas (NI) has 54 of the 60 seats, voted to shelve a legislative bill on transitional justice and reparations for victims of the 1980-1992 civil war.... Read More

The recent decision to place retired General Humberto Ortega, the 77-year-old younger brother of Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, under house arrest is just the latest example of the authoritarian leader’s apparent unwillingness to tolerate any dissent.... Read More

At the end of May, Panama’s President Laurentino Cortizo handed the keys to 300 new homes to over 1,300 indigenous Guna people who are being resettled from Gardí Sugdub, an island in the San Blas Archipelago off the country’s northern coast, to the newly built settlement of Nuevo Cartí in the Guna Yala comarca (indigenous administrative region), on the mainland.... Read More

The multinational security support (MSS) mission for Haiti was first authorised by the United Nations (UN) Security Council (UNSC) on 2 October 2023 (resolution 2699) with a view to deployment in February 2024, but the first contingent of 400 Kenyan police officers did not finally arrive in Haiti until 25 June.... Read More

*** EXPANDING AFRICA-CARIBBEAN RELATIONS.... Read More