The below preamble is taken from SWJ's new El Centro page. This is a new addition to SWJ to highlight security studies of our southern neighbors. While we have focused on small wars far afield over the last decade, significant security challenges are plaguing the states in our own backyard. This site feature will develop over the coming weeks and months to add new features, including Spanish-language resources. This initiative has been created and will be handled by a group of El Centro Fellows, with more details linked below.
El Centro is SWJ's focus on small wars in Latin America. The elephant in the hemispheric room is clearly the epidemic criminal, cartel and gang threat, fueled by a drug and migration economy, rising to the level of local and national criminal insurgencies and a significant U.S. national security risk. El Centro explores those and other issues across the US Southern Border Zone, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America to develop a better understanding of the national and regional challenges underlying past, present, and future small wars.
El Centro presents relevant Small Wars Journal articles and SWJ Blog posts, and adds a preliminary reading list and research links of external works. We do link to some Spanish language resources but, for the moment, we are only operating in English. We look forward to being able to roll out El Centro, en Español, dentro de poco.
The El Centro Fellows are a group of professionals with expertise in and commitment to the region who support SWJ's approach to advancing our field and have generously agreed to join us in our El Centro endeavor. With their help and with continued development on our site's news and library sections, we look forward to providing more El Centro-relevant SWJ original material and more useful access to other important works and resources in the future.