Monday, November 21, 2011
The Deterioration
of Security Environments in Latin America
By Jerry
Brewer
It is hard for the U.S. not to look to the south
and focus on a region of the world consumed in turmoil and violence. It could be said that it is just unpleasant to
look that way when the media coverage and the numbers graphically paint a portrait of human carnage, suffering and oppression
against citizens.
The truth is that we do pay attention to Latin
America - much like we go to the movies and watch in awe at things that playfully scare us and consume our attention to the
silver screen. We then go home, lock our doors, and pretend we have nothing to fear and all is well.
While foreign policy issues in Latin America have traditionally focused first and foremost
on immigration and trade related matters, drug trafficking proliferated as the cold war entered decades of dormancy. From
the extended organized crime insurgencies that pushed hard and north through Central America, the northern cone countries
of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have felt the greatest impact, as did Mexico.
Although human rights abuses have also festered throughout the Americas, the current brazen and deadly attacks on
the independence of the media clearly indicate the deliberate oppression against the general populace of the affected nations.
These attacks against freedom tear at the basic fabric of humanity and create a climate of fear, intimidation and helplessness.
The homicide rates in Latin America are now among the highest in the
world. Murder increased by 50 percent from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s alone. The violence in 2004 was
"the main cause of death in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Mexico, and Honduras."
A prominent human rights group, PROVEA (Programa Venezolano de Educación-Acción
en Derechos Humanos), recently announced that at least 13,985 people were killed in Venezuela in 2009. Venezuela
currently has one of Latin America's highest murder rates.
Is the
U.S. turning a blind eye to its neighbors to the south in this quagmire of bloody mayhem? U.S. Special Operations Forces are
playing an increasingly active role in Latin America, as well as the Caribbean. Much of their primary deployments remain counternarcotics,
foreign/internal defense, and counterterrorism. Is this attention simply "reactive" in nature, and are we
ignoring long term and strategic planning based on good human intelligence collection (HUMINT)?
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's slippery rise and sustainment of power has been a decade of socialist dictatorial
iron-fisted dominance of the Venezuelan people. Corruption has escalated under Chavez, and the country now ranks as one of
the most corrupt in the world.
Furthermore, his active solicitation
and facilitation in Iran's involvement in the region has become a serious threat to security in the hemisphere.
While there are those that questioned whether Chavez's "bad-influence" throughout
the Americas had any content validity, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated, "I'm concerned about the
level of, frankly, subversive activity the Iranians are carrying on in a number of places in Latin America, particularly South
and Central America." And Chavez's sleight-of-hand in transforming Fidel Castro's revolution into his own has
not been so cleverly concealed.
Can much of Latin America's
current state of chaos be attributed to leftist regimes? It is hardly a secret that Venezuela's leftist President Hugo
Chavez has spent much of his 11 years in office working to recruit and support leftist presidential candidates in this hemisphere.
His influence has been felt from Argentina to Mexico.
In his own country,
Chavez has demolished independence in Venezuela's institutions, seized control of the economy, militarized the government,
and virtually destroyed private enterprise.
The Chavez leftist alliances
include President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who had previously served his country as Minister of Economy and resigned after
an unauthorized visit to Venezuela to meet with Chavez. Correa has threatened to "trash the capitalists,"
destroy the private sector, control dissent, and rewrite Ecuador's Constitution.
Former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya attempted to eliminate term barriers to reelection by sponsoring a referendum
ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. They had him removed from office.
Circumventing
reelection term limits has apparently become the norm for Chavez's closest allies, including Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega.
Ortega will now serve another term, following November 6 elections that were described by the U.S. State Department as follows:
"International and unaccredited domestic observers have publicly stated that the electoral process was marred by significant
irregularities."
As well, over the years suitcases of cash originating
out of Venezuela for leftist candidates were found in Nicaragua and Argentina.
While more than 45,000 people are said to have been killed in Mexico's violence, northern cone nations are following
suit with disturbing increases. Tough interdiction efforts force traffickers to adjust their smuggling methods and to
a revival in interest in moving drugs through the Caribbean.
Acquiring
and enhancing human intelligence collection in the Americas must clearly focus on a much bigger picture - that goes beyond
drug trafficking. After all, drugs are for producing mass revenue, and mass revenue is a tool of revolutionary practitioners.
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Jerry Brewer is C.E.O. of Criminal Justice International Associates, a global threat mitigation
firm headquartered in northern Virginia. His website is located at http://www.cjiausa.org/.
