In late June a number of killings of police officers in São Paulo city, accompanied by unclear police intelligence reports, triggered fears that the state’s largest drug gang, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), was unleashing a large-scale offensive against law-enforcement agencies. A month later, though deaths had continued to mount, the authorities were confused about how the violence got started and the motives of all parties involved. Between 12 and 23 June six members of the state’s military police (PM) were murdered while on leave. This took the number of officers killed since the beginning of the year to…

ARGENTINA | Counting the clandestine flights. The radars installed last year along Argentina’s north-western border under a programme codenamed Escudo Norte (‘Northern Shield’) have been detecting up to 80 unregistered flights a month — according to a report made to a meeting between federal Deputy Security Minister Cristina Caamaño with prosecutors and members of the judiciary of the provinces of Salta and Jujuy. According to the news agency Efe, this was the first time the participants had heard this, because the results of Escudo Norte had been sent directly to federal Security Minister Nilda Garré. The Salta newspaper Nuevo Diario…

The guerrillas of the Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo (EPP) have resurfaced after the appointment of Federico Franco as successor to Fernando Lugo (2008-2012) in the presidency with two minor raids (in one of which a life was claimed) and a series of communiqués in which they call for ‘struggle’ against the new government and promise to avenge the peasants killed last June in Curuguaty. While dismissing the official version of that event as a fabrication, the EPP avoids any mention of its purported direct or indirect involvement in that incident. On 28 June armed men raided the Brazilian-owned Terrado farm…