"Anti-drug policies in Central America have not had their desired effect,” Public Security Minister Celso Gamboa said. "I can say that after 20 years experience fighting drug trafficking, ... the cases where white collar criminals are caught, those who never touch the drugs, these cases are scarce.”
Last week as I was driving through the sweltering Nicaraguan countryside in the southwestern department of Rivas, a convoy of soldiers traveling at midday on the Inter-American Highway caught my eye.
Women arguably have been hit hardest by Alzheimer's disease: Two-thirds of those with the dementia-causing disease are women, and women serve more often than men as their caregivers.
Five current and one former member of the Ferguson police force face pending federal lawsuits claiming they used excessive force. The lawsuits, as well as more than a half-dozen internal investigations, include claims that individual officers separately hog-tied a 12-year-old boy who was checking his family mailbox, pistol-whipped children and used a stun gun on a mentally ill man who died as a result.
"With Belize joining in, Central America becomes the first region in the world free of cluster munitions," Christian Guillermet, a Costa Rican diplomat working with UN bodies in Geneva, told reporters.
Residents and business owners in Nuevo Arenal, a town in north-central Costa Rica near the Arenal Volcano, are demanding a greater police presence after a spike in crime in recent months.
The argument goes like this: A small country like Costa Rica cannot protect itself from highly armed drug lords without the help of the United States. We need to train police at places like the U.S. Army’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas.
