El Centro

Updated El Centro Line Up

Small Wars Journal and Small Wars Journal-El Centro are pleased to announce an updated line up for the Small Wars Journal-El Centro Fellows for 2015.

Three distinguished scholars join the ranks of SWJ-El Centro Fellows.  The three new fellows expand the existing cadre of fellows and bring a depth of experience in Latin American and Mexican security studies.  These distinguished Fellows are Luis Astorga, a researcher at the institute of Social Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM–Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México); Edgardo Buscaglia, a senior scholar in Law and Economics at Columbia University; and Luis Jorge Garay-Salamanca, academic director at the Vortex Foundation.

Two new Associates, former SWJ-El Centro Interns Irina Chindea, an International Security Program research fellow with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and Byron Ramirez, who recently completed his PhD at Claremont Graduate University have been appointed SWJ-El Centro Associates.  New Interns round out our update. Two doctoral students from the Claremont Graduate University Roger J. Chin and Alma Keshavarz join us as SWJ-El Centro Interns.

Dave Dilegge, Editor-in-Chief, Small Wars Journal

Robert J. Bunker, Senior Fellow, SWJ-El Centro

John P. Sullivan, Senior Fellow, SWJ-El Centro

Confronting the Narcoterrorism Nexus by James Kitfield, Yahoo News

.. Southcom is one of the smaller and most under-resourced of the U.S. military’s geographic commands, in large part because its area of responsibility is Latin America, a vast region of 31 countries and more than 475 million people that is nevertheless often an afterthought for U.S. officials preoccupied with higher-priority crises, like Syria or Ukraine. Nor does it help that Southcom’s primary mission involves some of the most intractable problems the U.S. government has faced, including long and unsuccessful “wars” on drugs and terror and an inability to secure the southern U.S. border.

And yet, in the news of any given week, Southcom officials see a threat matrix that has a direct impact on the lives of millions of Americans. The public recently learned, for instance, that Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the world’s most notorious drug lord, had escaped from a maximum-security prison in Mexico for the second time. Governors and mayors across the country have recently begun warning of an unanticipated heroin epidemic that has seen the number of heroin-related deaths in the U.S. nearly quadruple. Time magazine recently reported that tiny El Salvador is now on track to replace little Honduras as the world’s most murderous country outside a declared war zone. Peace talks between Colombia and the FARC narcoterrorist insurgent group are reportedly on the brink of collapse. Argentines remain transfixed by an ongoing investigation into the mysterious death earlier this year of that country’s best-known prosecutor, who was found with a bullet in his head after building a case that Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah was behind the long-ago bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, and his government knew about it…

Read on.

Mexico Kingpin 'Chapo' Guzman Stages Brazen Jailbreak in Blow to President by Gabriel Stargardter and Dave Graham, Reuters

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman broke out of a high security prison on Saturday night for the second time, escaping in a tunnel built right under his cell, and heaping embarrassment on President Enrique Pena Nieto.

The kingpin snuck out of the prison through a subterranean tunnel more than 1.5 km (1 mile) long that ended in a building site in the local town, National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido told a news conference on Sunday…

Read on.