An estimated 86 percent of the cocaine trafficked into the United States passes through Central America, according to the United States State Department’s 2014 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. The firehose of cocaine passing through the isthmus has led the State Department to name Costa Rica and its Central American neighbors as major drug producing and drug-transit countries.
In the face of violent protests roiling Venezuela, many of Latin America's leaders have backed the government of President Nicolás Maduro, some have stayed mum and only a few have complained.
Born in the Honduran mountain town of Siguatepeque, Brig. Gen. Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez attended the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas near Ft. Benning, Georgia, in the 1970s and ’80s. Despite his lifelong love for the United States, he cannot set foot on U.S. soil.
The streets of Guatemala City brimmed for a few hours last Thursday morning with as many as 20,000 protesters from the countryside. The demonstration was intended to apply pressure on the nation’s highest court, which is currently considering the constitutionality of a plan to expand energy projects throughout rural regions of Guatemala.
FMLN presidential candidate Salvador Sánchez Cerén was expected to easily win Sunday's runoff vote in El Salvador, but the results turned out to be a much closer race.
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks who has disclosed scores of classified data about U.S. military and diplomatic efforts, said the group would be releasing a new batch of secret information. Assange spoke through a video feed Saturday to a crowd of more than 3,000 people at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas.
From the beginning, the U.S. government's decade-long crackdown on abuse of prescription drugs has run an unsettling risk: that arresting doctors and shuttering "pill mills" would inadvertently fuel a new epidemic of heroin use.
