El estado de Michoacán, México está convirtiendo en un campo de batalla entre el pueblo y los carteles. En respuesta a la violencia que trae el cartel Caballeros Templarios a esta región, grupos vigilantes forman para protegerse.
After the murder of former Miss Venezuela and soap opera actress Monica Spear, more concerns have contributed to the discussion of safety in the violence-stricken country. After being in a vehicle deemed “too modest” by her attackers, Monica Spear and her husband were murdered by gunshots, leaving their five-year-old daughter an orphan.
Planes land daily in San Pedro Sula, returning over 100 deported Hondurans, mostly young men, donning shackles and telling horrifying tales of US detention centers.
El autogobierno en el sistema penitenciario es un fenómeno muy extendido en Latinoamérica que da cuenta de cómo bandas delictivas altamente organizadas le disputan al estado, muchas veces con éxito, el manejo real de las cárceles. De esta manera, el estado pierde uno de sus atributos constitutivos, el cual es tener el monopolio del poder coercitivo.
El 11 febrero de 2014, en medio de la polémica generada por las llamadas “reformas estructurales” que el presidente Enrique Peña Nieto estaba impulsando, el senado mexicano aprobó la Ley Antiterrorista en una votación apresurada, de esas que suelen denominar fast track.
Statistics from the UNDOC routinely rank Latin America as the most violent region in the world, and more than 150,000 people died from homicide in the Americas in 2012. In Brazil alone, more than 50,000 people were victims of homicide in 2012, more than triple the number in the U.S. (UNDOC, 2013). The crime epidemic that has arisen in the past decade in Latin America has resulted in the militarization of conflict, most exemplified by the Mexican government in its ongoing battle with drug cartels.
Cuenta Piergorgio Sandri, que alguna vez le preguntaron al polémico presidente de Guinea Ecuatorial, Teodoro Obiang, si se consideraba un dictador, a lo que contestó: “Si el dictador es el que dicta las leyes… ¡entonces sí soy un dictador!”.
Since the 1990s, Mexican drug cartels have become billion dollar operations and their capacity has grown dramatically. In 2006, president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa began deploying the military and federal police to perform counter-narcotics operations in various regions of the country. The armed conflict that ensued converted many communities into virtual war zones and left hundreds of thousands dead, missing, or displaced from home and community.
During the past decade, drug consumption surveys and expert analyses have warned about growing drug use in Latin America. According to the 2013 World Drug Report, cocaine use in Latin America increased significantly during the first decade of the 2000s while the U.S. cocaine market, although still the largest in the world, has been declining. Similar upward trends exist in marijuana, synthetic, and prescription drug use. These trends are seen as unprecedented as they affect primary drug producers, such as Colombia and Mexico, and are seen as generating significant violence.
