America Security News.- President Barack Obama and Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto, right, leave a joint news conference in Mexico City, Mexico, Thursday, May 2, 2013. Credit to AP Photo

Last week, Mr. Obama returned to capitals in Latin America with a vastly different message. Relationships with countries racked by drug violence and organized crime should focus more on economic development and less on the endless battles against drug traffickers and organized crime capos that have left few clear victors. The countries, Mexico in particular, need to set their own course on security, with the United States playing more of a backing role.READ WHOLE ARTICLE HERE

The Americas Security News - Israeli drone Hermes 450

FIFA is getting nervous with the status quo of violence in Rio and Sao Paulo. Brazil also worries, and therefore the government started to put into place a task of security measures. The first one is the use of drones to secure the next Confederations Cup in June, where all the champions of all continents will meet. in that sense the Brazilian Air Forcewill use four Israeli-made drones to help provide security during the Confederations Cup in June.

The Brazilian Air Force says the unmanned planes have been acquired to operate within Brazil’s borders and will be used extensively during the World Cup warmup tournament from June 15-30. If everything goes well this Cup, the drones are also expected to help provide security during the 2014 World Cup.

Brazil has had two of the RQ-450 drones manufactured by Israel in operation since 2011. The other two will be ready this month (March 2013).

The two new units have a few improvements from the other two, including better infrared cameras and enhanced communication systems, that will be used during the nights. The air force says it has invested nearly $25 million in the unnmanned aircrafts, plus the field control station.

The Americas Security News.- Michael J. "Mike" Rogers

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), said Sunday that recent reports about Chinese hacking show the U.S. is losing a global cyber war. “We get [hit] every single day by a whole series … of attacks, everything from criminals trying to get into your bank account or steal your identity, to nation states like China who are investing billions and hiring thousands,” he said. READ MORE HERE

Ranking Member Adam Smith

Of the 30 largest House recipients of defense industry campaign donations since the 1990 election cycle, only 11 are still serving in Congress, according to the analysis of magazine POLITICO and federal data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. It’s the same story in the Senate, where 14 of the top 30 recipients over the same time period still serve.

READ MORE HERE: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/defense-industry-finds-few-old-friends-on-hill-87991.html

The Americas Security News.- Vice President Joe Biden and the gun control panel. Photo Credit AP Photo/Susan Walsh

The Obama administration is considering funding many more police officers in public schools to secure campuses, a leading Democratic senator said, part of a broad gun violence agendathat is likely to include a ban on high-capacity ammunition clips and universal background checks.

The school safety initiative, one of several under consideration, would make federal dollars available to schools that want to hire police officers and install surveillance equipment, although it is not nearly as far-ranging as the National Rifle Association’s proposal for armed guards in every U.S. school. READ MORE HERE

The Americas Security News - Spending cuts in Pentagon

The U.S. Department of Defense DoD will impose a freeze on hiring civilians, cut operating costs on military bases and take more immediate steps to reduce spending in preparation for the possibility that U.S. Congress will fail to reach a deal to avert billions of dollars in additional cuts,  DoD officials said on Friday.   If  the White House and the Congress  do not an agreement, the Pentagon would be subject to $52 billion in cuts this fiscal year — about 10 percent of its non-war-fighting budget.

If no agreement by March 1, the DoD would have seven months to erase the $52 billion from its current budget because the fiscal year ends Sept. 30.  Cuts could affect defense programs, such as ship maintenance, purchase of new weapons and the military training programs.

A memo released Thursday by the Pentagon instructs all DoD forces and agencies to curtail spending on training, travel, office expenses and conferences. It also gives officials the authority to fire temporary workers.

The hiring freeze alone could have a significant impact on the economy in the Washington DC region (including Viriginia and Maryland). The Defense Department employs about 800,000 civilians worldwide, but many are concentrated locally.

This week, the two countries signed Memoranda of Understanding with UNODC that will see the establishment of CCP Joint Port Control Units in Port Georgetown (the John Fernandes Port) and Nieuwe Haven Port respectively.

The Caribbean has become increasingly vulnerable to the illicit flow of drugs from South America to North America and Europe via maritime containers, particularly as Latin American States tighten border control and security. Given their geographic location, the Guyana and Suriname container trade faces significant threats from transnational organized crime.

The Joint Port Control Units in the two countries will strengthen the control of containers entering and leaving the ports, improve the coordination, analysis and exchange of information in real time, share human and technical resources to avoid duplicity of activities and facilitate safe foreign commerce. Container inspection in the two ports will be carried out by a team trained and equipped to work together to systematically target high-risk containers with minimal disruption to the free flow of legitimate trade.

A two-week training programme will be conducted for Guyanese and Surinamese officers drawn from relevant government agencies from 1-12 October, and it is expected that the Joint Port Control Units in both countries will commence operations in mid-October. Jamaica and the Dominican Republic are also expected to establish similar units later this year.

READ MORE HERE

The Americas Post - These Colombian troops could be the model for new elite Mexican units

The leading security adviser for Mexico’s incoming president announced Friday that he is recommending the creation of elite units of police and troops who will target not just major drug traffickers but also lower-level cartel hitmen as a way of swiftly reducing violence.

The proposal from newly retired Colombian police director Gen. Oscar Naranjo  offers a glimpse of how President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto might fulfill his promise to slash the number of murders and kidnappings by 50 percent during his six years in office.

Similar to the approach that Naranjo employed against Colombian traffickers, the proposal raises the question of whether the widely respected general can reproduce his success in a very different country.

More than 47,500 people have been killed in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led offensive against Mexico’s cartels nearly six years ago.

Pena Nieto has pledged to reduce violence by refocusing law-enforcement efforts away from the current administration’s heavy reliance on the military to capture drug-cartel leaders and seize their product. He says he wants to better protect ordinary citizens from criminals.

He provided few specifics during his three-month campaign, leading to speculation he would ease pressure on traffickers as long as they throttled down violence.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, who has held a series of meetings with the president-elect and his advisers, said this week that Pena Nieto has discussed a new offensive against the smaller, local gangs that have cropped up in many Mexican states and earn money through kidnapping and extortion in addition to drug dealing.

Naranjo’s proposal of small, elite units dovetails with that idea.

Such units have specific goals and typically work in isolation. The better a unit performs, the more resources it gets. Information is compartmentalized to prevent leaks. The model worked in Colombia and Naranjo said it could also be effective in Mexico.

“It’s good to go after drug dealers in order to capture them. But it’s not good not to have elite groups going after killers in order to impose the law, those squads of hitmen,” he said. “You also have to put a lot of importance on these groups of hitmen to control the violence.”

The idea has been discussed by Mexico’s security experts, and makes sense as a component of a broader strategy to reduce violence, said Eric Olson, associate director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

“If you want to really stop the violence, don’t focus on the kingpins, focus on the killers, it kind of eliminates this middle range of actors,” he said.

Naranjo also proposed setting violence-reduction targets for Mexico.

“In the first 100 days (of Pena Nieto’s government) the goal should be set for reducing violence. It could go badly. It could go well. But it should be put in play,” he said. “I think it’s possible to tell the Mexicans, `Look, in 100 days we want to cut the violence we have in half.’”

It’s feasible, he said, because Mexico’s violence “is really concentrated. If you look at the map of violence there it’s in six places. It’s impossible that in six cities you can’t have some control.”

The 55-year-old Colombian said he does not believe it wise to use Mexico’s military against drug traffickers, criticizing Calderon’s sending of 10,000 troops into Ciudad Juarez at the end of last year.

It neither reduced deaths nor intimidated criminals, he said.

Naranjo, aided by his U.S. allies, had been advising Calderon’s government since 2007. Colombian police have in the interim trained more than 7,000 Mexicans in investigative techniques.

A top foreign policy adviser to Pena Nieto said the president-elect is focused on fighting crime by swiftly spurring economic growth and job-creation with reforms that include bringing private investment into Mexico’s state-owned Pemex oil company, developing massive shale gas deposits on the Texas border and building alternative supplies including wind energy projects in southern states like Oaxaca and Baja California.

Emilio Lozoya said Pena Nieto’s transition team wants to forge consensus among the lawmakers when Mexico’s next congress convenes in September, three months before Pena Nieto takes office.

“Our aim is to have an energy bill that is clear and gives absolute clarity to local and foreign capital to co-invest along the state in developing these energy sources,” Lozoya said. The importance of economic growth to security, he said, is that “you won’t get one without focusing on the other.”

“The best weapons against organized crime and insecurity are jobs,” he said. He said a focus on developing infrastructure projects and agriculture would also be important for the new administration.

Lozoya also said Pena Nieto’s administration would want more intelligence-sharing from the U.S., particularly to combat money-laundering, and that Mexico would seek a bigger role in building stability in Central America, which he called a major source of the problems afflicting Mexico, drug-trafficking among them.

Despite major security gains under Naranjo, rural Colombia remains turbulent. Thousands of hired guns in the service of rival drug gangs continue to plague it as well as leftist rebels who are deeply engaged in cocaine trafficking.

The Americas Post - Can Colombian General Oscar Naranjo demilitarize the Mexican drug war?

Inheriting a drug war that has cost more than 47,000 lives since 2006, newly elected Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto is gambling that the Colombian general who helped take down kingpin Pablo Escobar can save Mexico as well.

After winning the vote on July 1, Pena Nieto said Mexicans want immediate results after frustration over the six-year death toll undermined support for President Felipe Calderon. He selected General Oscar Naranjo, the former head of Colombia’s national police, as his security adviser last month and aides say the new president will seek greater intelligence sharing with the U.S. to help break the cartels.

The 45-year-old Pena Nieto must balance public demands for a less-bloody conflict with suspicions that his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was more tolerant of drug cartels during a 71-year reign that ended in 2000. Pena Nieto, who pledged during the campaign to scale back the military’s role in fighting organized crime in favor of the police, said yesterday that there would be no truce with the cartels.

“Already the government is taking flak for letting less violent and ostentatious criminal groups off the hook,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, who studies drug war conflicts for the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It will be an even more sensitive issue for Pena Nieto because he has all the PRI baggage of negotiated deals.”

Drug-related violence shaves almost 1.2 percentage points annually off Mexico’s gross domestic product and the country could double its foreign investment, which reached $19.4 billion in 2011, if the cartels were brought under control, said Manuel Suarez-Mier, an economist at American University who helped Mexico negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“It’s a disaster,” said Suarez-Mier, who represented Mexico’s attorney general when the Merida Initiative, a three- year, $1.6 billion anti-narcotics program funded by the U.S., was signed in 2008. “When you decapitate a cartel, they tend to fracture and now we have more cartels that are more violent.”

A week rarely goes by without reports of dismembered corpses appearing in public as Mexico’s drug gangs battle for territory and routes into the U.S., their biggest market. Three police officers died in a firefight at Mexico City’s international airport on June 25 after they tried to detain suspected traffickers. The mutilated bodies of 14 people were found in bags in an abandoned truck in northern Veracruz state last month, newspaper Milenio reported.

Pena Nieto has vowed to double the number of police to fight the drug war and is counting on Naranjo’s experience to improve security.

“General Naranjo will give a seal of approval, in Mexico and abroad, to our security policies,” Pena Nieto’s campaign said in a statement accompanying his appointment last month.

Naranjo, 55, helped engineer the U.S.-backed crackdown that led to the demise of the Medellin cocaine cartel and its billionaire leader Escobar in 1993, and Pena Nieto credited him for reducing the homicide rate in Colombia.

The Colombian city of Medellin, which was for years the murder capital of Latin America, has seen homicide rates drop to 1,649 in 2011 from 6,349 in 1991, according to government data. The South American country has received more than $7 billion in U.S. anti-narcotics and counter-insurgency aid since 2000, much of it administered by Naranjo when he was national police chief from 2007 to 2012.

Jorge Montano, the PRI’s senior foreign policy coordinator, said in April that the new administration wants to “reset the relationship with the U.S. on the war on drugs,” adding that he would like to see closer cooperation and more information- sharing.

The revival of Pena Nieto’s PRI party has left some in Washington on guard. Representative James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, said last month at a hearing that he’s concerned Pena Nieto may bring a return to the days when the PRI “minimized violence by turning a blind eye” to drug traffickers.

U.S. federal prosecutors in May filed civil charges against Tomas Yarrington, a former PRI governor in the border state of Tamaulipas who allegedly used millions of dollars in bribes from cartels to invest in Texas real estate. The PRI suspended him and Pena Nieto has said justice must take its course in the case.

“The stakes are high for Mexico,” Victoria Nuland, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, told reporters in Washington yesterday. “The stakes are high for us. And we think we will be able to have good cooperation.”

Fresh off his election win, Pena Neito rejected concerns the PRI will loosen the reins on the nation’s drug war.

“The Mexican people have given our party a second opportunity. We will honor it with results,” Pena Nieto said after claiming victory. “In facing organized crime, there will be no pact or truce.”

While Pena Nieto has vowed to eventually return troops to their barracks, Mexico may still need them to battle criminals such as Los Zetas, a group of former military officers who have expanded into kidnapping and other illicit businesses, said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

“The initial approach will be a kind of detente with organized crime groups,” Shirk said in a phone interview. “But you can’t get rid of guys like Los Zetas without some serious commitment of force.”

Chavez and Ahmadinejad. Photo Credit Elmer Martinez AFP Getty Images

During the last six months, Iran is developing an offensive in Latin America.  Tehran views the latinamerican region as one of the main points to overcome its increasing international isolation due to its nuclear program.

The Iranian strategy is comprehensive. For example, a few weeks ago, the inhabitants of Quito were surprised by the appearance of  street billboards calling to commemorate a new anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Khomeini.

the posters read “a lifetime dedicated to the people and the revolution”.

During the event, held on 31 May in the Auditorium of the National Council of Pichincha with the presence of Iranian diplomats, Khomeini was compared to the latinamerican independence hero Simón Bolivar.

The event was broadcasted by Hispan TV, a satellite TV channel that the Iranian regime inaugurated last December, which broadcasts news in Spanish on a 24 hours a day  basis and whose main target is the Latin American audience.

Another way of showing the Iranian involvment in the subcontinent are the Iranian diplomacy,  who have increased their activity and presence in the region. In  the case of Bolivia,  Iran has 145 diplomats accredited, more than the rest of the diplomatic corps in La Paz.

Spain, with all its historical relationship with Iran  has  between 8 and 10 Iranian diplomats.

The estimated number of Iranian diplomats accredited in Venezuela is even greater than in Bolivia.

Another important step taked by Iran is the several visits of  Iranian officials to Latin America that are constant and often are accompanied by economic benefits for the countries visited.

Recently over a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended  a Summit on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro and then started with a mini tour in South America,  announced a few days in advance.

It is the second visit of the Iranian President in six months and the fourth in the same period of a senior Iranian top government official.

Last January, Ahmadinejad visited Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Nicaragua. In May it was the turn of the vice president, Ali Saeidlo, who made the same tour also including Bolivia.

In Managua, Iranian officials announced the cancellation of debt of Nicaragua with Iran.

Days before the Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi visited Bolivia , who opened the Defense College of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), the regional integration organization that emerged on the personal initiative of Hugo Chavez. About Vahidi weighs an international warrant for his involvement in the bombings in 1992 and 1994 in Buenos Aires against the Embassy of Israel and Argentina Jewish Mutual, which caused a total of 115 dead.

In their travels, Vahidi was accompanied by Iranian representative Kanbiz Jalali, head of the Directorate General for Latin America created by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Jalali is a  diplomat with extensive experience in the region.

Tehran is focusing on military and defense issues. In less than 24 hours has signed a military assistance pact with Bolivia. Also the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez admitted the announcement  that Venezuela is building drones under the supervision of Iranian engineers.

Ramin Keshavarz, a leading member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, is responsible for overseeing the project.

One the other hand, Brazil is not so enthusiastic about Iran . President Rousseff refused to meet privately with Ahmadinejad, despite Iran’s insistence.

Brazil is not the only obstacle. Colombia is also resisting Iran´s “charme” offensive, while in Argentina the Iranian official representation only adheres to senior diplomats, due to the arrest warrant that Justice has issued Argentina against senior Iranian officials , including Vahidi and Ali Rafsanjani, due to the bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires (AMIA).

However, this diplomatic chill has not stopped the trade between the both countries, that has gone from zero to $ 400 million in just four years, or since 2010 Iran is the second world soybean buyer Argentina.