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Since the 1990s, popular Mexican singers have been increasingly crooning about Kalashnikovs and cocaine alongside their traditional ballads of hard work and lost love. Take "Contraband in the Border" by Valentin Elizalde, one of the thousands of drug ballads or narco corridos that are played in cantinas and parties from the mountains of Mexico to the immigrant ghettos of Los Angeles. "There was a big shoot-out/With 14 bullet-filled bodies/And the American government,/took away the marijuana" go the lyrics, as tubas and accordions drone out the melody to the rhythm of a German polka. In November...
Elizalde's murder is not an isolated incident. Singers have not just been chanting about the bloody drug violence ravaging their country; they have also been among its most prominent victims. At least 13 musicians have been killed - gunned down, burned or suffocated to death - since June 2006. The violence gained international attention earlier this month when three entertainers were killed in a week: a male singer was kidnapped, throttled and dumped on a road; a trumpeter was found with a bag on his head; and a female singer was shot dead in her hospital bed. (She was being treated...
Investigators have yet to solve any of the 13 musician killings. Nor have they revealed any suspects, although they have said that drug gangs could be responsible. The same murkiness clouds most of the 2,500 slayings in Mexico this year that have been tallied by the leading Mexican newspapers in what they call "execution-meters." Those killings involve ambushes or abductions and appear to bear to marks of organized crime...
Brazil's past obsession was potential conflict with its southern neighbor, Argentina. That has passed into history. Venezuela's military spending, however, has forced Brazil to realize that its security needs have shifted. It must now protect its jungle frontiers in the north and west from the depredations of drug smugglers. And it must also police the territorial waters that are home to regular new finds of oil and gas. The forces it needs to do that have suffered from neglect and disrepair. A recent editorial in the newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo said that almost two-thirds...
...There are very real security concerns that are being neglected," says Martin Joyce, the South America defense analyst for Jane's. "One is the Amazon region where drug traffickers are operating with impunity. Secondly, we are also seeing an increased presence of Colombian guerrillas and that requires mobility and that is whey we see helicopters and military airlift high on the priority list. Then there is the new oil reserves and part of the reason for the procurement of a nuclear submarine is because they said they need to protect those resources...