Security & Strategic Review - May 2025

Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa scored a thumping re-election victory on 13 April that was due in no small part to his hardline stance against criminal gangs.... Read More

The Comuneros del Sur, a breakaway faction of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) guerrilla group operating in southwestern Colombia, handed in 585 explosive devices on 5 April as the first step in a demobilisation plan.... Read More

The brief military uprising that occurred in Bolivia on 26 June 2024 has been described by President Luis Arce’s government as an attempted coup d’état, and by the government’s critics as an extravagant piece of political theatre [SSR-24-08].... Read More

Brazil’s supreme court (STF) has concluded a high-profile case commonly known as the ‘ADPF das Favelas’.... Read More

Tensions have risen between Paraguay and Brazil after the Brazilian media revealed that Brazil’s intelligence agency (Abin) had allegedly spied on Paraguayan authorities from 2022-2023 to obtain information related to negotiations to revise Annex C of the Itaipú Treaty, the section which determines the prices for the sale of surplus electricity generated by the binational Itaipú hydroelectric dam.... Read More

Isabel Allende Bussi, a member of the left-of-centre Partido Socialista (PS) and daughter of Chile’s former president Salvador Allende (1970-1973), has lost her seat in the senate over a controversial initiative by the government of President Gabriel Boric to buy her father’s house in Santiago and convert it into a museum.... Read More

Debates around ‘narcocorridos’, a sub-genre of the traditional Mexican corrido musical genre, have intensified in recent weeks, following two high-profile incidents at concerts in the states of Jalisco and Estado de México (Edomex).... Read More

Water scarcity in Mexico’s northern states has become an increasing issue in recent years due to consistently drier and hotter weather.... Read More

Bullfighting has been the subject of two key votes in separate state congresses in recent weeks.... Read More

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth paid a visit to Panama in early April where he met President José Raúl Mulino, Security Minister Frank Ábrego, and the administrator of the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), Ricaurte Vásquez.... Read More

The US deportations of alleged members of Venezuelan criminal organisation Tren de Aragua (TdA) and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), one of two main street gangs in Central America, to El Salvador’s notorious maximum security prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot), has made international headlines in recent weeks [SSR-25-04].... Read More

In late March Nicaragua’s 92-member unicameral legislature, which like all institutions is controlled by President Daniel Ortega’s Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), approved changes to the country’s military code.... Read More

A little over a year since the nine-member transitional presidential council (TPC) assumed power on 25 April 2024, the TPC’s failure to improve the lives of Haiti’s 11m citizens has been near total, prompting United Nations (UN) Special Representative for Haiti María Isabel Salvador to tell the UN Security Council on 21 April that Haiti had reached a “potential point of no return” and that the country faced “total collapse”.... Read More