Beginning on Wednesday, September 9, 2020, massive protests erupted in Colombia after the death of law student  Javier Ordóñez at the hands of Bogotá police. The night before, the 46-year-old father of two, who worked as a taxi driver while he was finishing a law degree, was detained by police who used a Taser to

On September 3, 2020, the online news site El Faro published a deep dive article based on extensive research and reporting about a secret truce negotiated between the administration of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and Salvadoran “maras” or gangs. Bukele offered benefits in exchange for a decrease in the number of homicides and

On August 31, 2020, the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro announced that it had “pardoned” more than one hundred individuals, including dozens of political opponents that the Maduro regime had imprisoned, as well as others who had taken refuge in foreign embassies in Caracas, or had fled the country. The surprise move came three

In mid-August 2020, Colombia was rocked by a series of massacres in the departments of Nariño and Valle del Cauca. They point to ongoing problems in the years since the Colombian government signed a peace agreement with the FARC, and the heavy burden created by over seventy years of guerrilla warfare. The situation is complicated

On August 13, 2020, after three postponements and months of recurring violent protests, with cities blockaded by labor unions, the Bolivian political class and security forces finally prevailed on acting President Jeanine Áñez to agree on a firm date for the new presidential election, October 18, 2020. Supporters of exiled former President Evo Morales had

In early August 2020, the Mexican government’s struggles with and infiltration by drug cartels and violent criminal organizations were highlighted by a series of dramatic events. On August 2, 2020, José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, aka “El Marro” (“the Sledgehammer”) was captured in Guanajuato. Also, new evidence emerged about narco influence during the administration of former

On August 4, 2020, Colombia’s Corte Suprema de Justicia (CJS) ordered house arrest for current Senator and former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez. The former two-term head of state was arrested for alleged procedural fraud and bribery of witnesses. He is the first former president of Colombia to ever be arrested. The Court’s statement justifying the

In early July 2020, almost six years after 43 normal school students from Ayotzinapa (known as normalistas) disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, the federal government of Mexico announced that the remains of one of them had been identified. This finding points to the collapse of the original, official account offered by the administration of former President

The Secretario de Seguridad Ciudadana of Mexico City, Omar García Harfuch, was wounded on June 26, 2020, when a group of heavily armed men attacked him and his bodyguards as he left his elite neighborhood in his armored Suburban. García Harfuch quickly blamed one of Mexico’s most powerful drug gangs, the Jalisco Nueva Generación. Commentators

A federal judge, Uriel Villegas Ortiz, and his wife, Verónica Barajas, were murdered in their Colima city home on Tuesday, June 16, 2020, in front of their two daughters, aged 3 and 7, and a domestic employee. The judge handled drug trafficking and other organized crime cases, and before moving to Colima from Jalisco in