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“We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable form of energy.”

In their paper, the officers argue that the United States has to move from “containment” — the foreign policy established after World War II to limit the expansion and influence of the Soviet Union — to what they call “sustainment” or sustainability.

The first priority, they write, should be “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.”

Natural disasters are becoming more frequent, growing more severe and affecting more people than ever before. The reasons vary but include climate change, population growth and shifting habitation patterns.

Another challenge to the effectiveness of disaster management and recovery is sharing information across organizations hampered by a lack of interoperability.

Another fundamental challenge is the need to automate manual records for disaster response and humanitarian assistance organizations, which is just as important as, if somewhat less glamorous than, other critical issues affecting their readiness.

As the sun sinks just below the horizon, Jorge Sandoval strolls across a dusty street. He's a small man in his 50s, who runs volunteer patrols. The neighborhood is poor. The houses are cobbled together out of leftover wood and pieces of metal. Two years ago, Sandoval says, these streets used to be desolate and controlled by gangs. Parallels Nicaragua Follows Its Own Path In Dealing With Drug Traffickers "They would shoot at each other at all hours," Sandoval says. "Suddenly you'd find someone injured, someone innocent, because they just didn't care."

The Dimitrov neighborhood in the capital of Nicaragua used to be one of the most dangerous in the country.

It was so dangerous that its 10 or so square blocks accounted for 20 percent of all the crime of Managua, a city of 1.2 million people.

former USTR and deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick wrote an essay proposing that the United States consolidate our trade diplomacy in the region: This year President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress should launch a new Association of American Free Trade Agreements (AAFTA). The AAFTA could shape the future of the Western Hemisphere, while offering a new foreign and economic policy design that combines trade, open societies, development and democracy.

U.S. global strategy must have a hemispheric foundation. Successful and sustainable international strategies must be constructed across administrations. Ronald Reagan called for free trade throughout the Americas, opened U.S. markets to our Caribbean neighbors, and completed an FTA with Canada. George H.W. Bush completed negotiations for a North American FTA, offered trade preferences to the Andean countries, negotiated peace in Central America, and freed Panama. Bill Clinton secured the passage of Nafta, launched work on a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and backed Plan Colombia. George W. Bush enacted FTAs with Chile, the five states of Central America and the Dominican Republic. He also completed FTAs with Colombia, Peru and Panama. If Congress passes these agreements, the U.S. will finally have an unbroken line of free trade partners stretching from Alaska to the tip of South America. Not counting the U.S., this free trade assembly would comprise two-thirds of both the population and GDP of the Americas. The AAFTA would draw together these 13 partners to build on the gains of free trade. It could also include the island states of the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act. Starting with a small secretariat, perhaps in Miami, the AAFTA should advance hemispheric economic integration; link development and democracy with trade and aid; improve working and environmental conditions; and continue to pursue the goal of free trade throughout the hemisphere. It might even foster cooperation in the WTO's global trade negotiations. The AAFTA might be connected to an academic center, which could combine research and practice through an association among universities in the Americas.... The U.S. cannot afford to lose interest in its own neighborhood.

in many ways, Zoellick is simply proposing a political trade with our FTA partners -- deeper economic integration in return for adding on stringent labor and environmental standards.

Fearful that Central America was becoming overrun by organized crime, perhaps worse than in the worst parts of Mexico, the State Department, the D.E.A. and the Pentagon rushed ahead this year with a muscular antidrug program with several Latin American nations, hoping to protect Honduras and use it as a chokepoint to cut off the flow of drugs heading north.

the antidrug cooperation, often promoted as a model of international teamwork, into a case study of what can go wrong when the tactics of war are used to fight a crime problem that goes well beyond drugs.

“You can’t cure the whole body by just treating the arm,” said Edmundo Orellana, Honduras’s former defense minister and attorney general. “You have to heal the whole thing.”

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR) identifies several key parties that play major roles in the disaster management process, especially in disaster warning (UN/ISDR, 2006).

Communities, particularly those most vulnerable, are vital to people-centred early warning systems. Their input into system design and their ability to respond ultimately determine the extent of risk associated with natural hazards. Communities should be aware of hazards and potential negative impacts to which they are exposed and be able to take specific actions to minimize the threat of loss or damage.

Local governments should have considerable knowledge of the hazards to which their communities are exposed.

A new report ranks Colombia and Mexico as the least peaceful nations in Latin America -- however, this definition of "peace" may not accurately reflect the state of security in the region. 

The GPI's ranking system is somewhat perplexing, given that Central American countries with higher homicide rates -- namely, Honduras and El Salvador -- are considered more "peaceful" than Colombia and Mexico

Last year, both El Salvador and Honduras registered homicide rates higher than 60 per 100,000 people, more than double that of Colombia.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc, after the initials in Spanish) are Colombia's largest rebel group.

They were founded in 1964 as the armed wing of the Communist Party and follow a Marxist-Leninist ideology.

They are controlled by the Secretariat, a group of less than a dozen top commanders who devise the overarching strategy of the Farc.

Nicaragua’s Indigenous Peoples Protect their Forests Even Without Government Support

Nicaragua is the second-poorest economy in Latin America after Haiti, and has already lost much of its forest cover to agricultural development. About 21 percent of the country’s forests disappeared between 1990 and 2005.

Established in 1991, the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve in Nicaragua in north-central Nicaragua, together with the Rio Platano Reserve in Honduras and adjacent protected areas, is one of the largest areas of protected tropical forest in Central America. The core area and buffer zone of Bosawas covers 854,000 hectares, or about 7 percent of Nicaragua.

drugs, when used consistently, constantly, destructively, are all anesthesia from pain. The Mexican drug cartels crave money, but they make that money from the way Yankees across the border crave numbness. They sell unfeeling. We buy it. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing so, and by some estimates about a third to a half of that money goes back to Mexico.

We want not to feel what’s happening to us, and then we do stuff that makes worse things happen–to us and others. We pay for it, too, in a million ways, from outright drug-overdose deaths (which now exceed traffic fatalities, and of which the United States has the highest rate of any nation except tiny Iceland, amounting to more than thirty-seven thousand deaths here in 2009 alone) to the violence of drug-dealing on the street, the violence of people on some of those drugs, and the violence inflicted on children who are neglected, abandoned, and abused because of them–and that’s just for starters.  The stuff people do for money when they’re desperate for drugs generates more violence and more crazy greed

Then there’s our futile “war on drugs” that has created so much pain of its own.

more than 80 percent of the primary flow of the cocaine trafficked to the United States first transited through the Central American corridor in 2012.

Guatemala’s weak public institutions, pervasive corruption, and porous ports and borders to move illicit products, persons, and bulk cash.

Improved law enforcement efforts in Colombia and Mexico, among other factors, led to an increasing volume of precursor chemicals transiting Guatemala.

things have gotten worse for Batista. Hit by mounting debt, a series of project delays and a crisis of confidence, his six publicly listed companies have suffered one of the most spectacular corporate meltdowns in recent history.

He pumped billions into the group's companies even as share prices plunged by as much as 90 percent.

His own fortune - the world's seventh-biggest last year, according to Forbes - has declined by more than $25 billion over the past 18 months.

The news that Brazil has overtaken Britain to become the world's sixth largest economic power is being touted as a sign that that the longtime "country of the future" has finally arrived.

In the past 20 years, Brazil has become well known for turning crisis situations into geopolitical opportunities, becoming a leading voice in international forums devoted to AIDS, poverty, and even the environment. And now, it is doing it again with a challenge that Brazilians understand all too well: a debt crisis.

The IMF contributions stem from Rousseff's intention to maintain a tradition that began under her predecessor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of using foreign assistance as a means to strengthen Brazil's international reputation and influence. Yet another example is Brazil's annual contributions to the World Bank, which have averaged $253 million from 2004 to 2009. Brazil was the first nation to contribute -- $ 55 million -- to the World Bank's Haitian Reconstruction Fund. From 2003-2007, Brazil also gave approximately $340 million to fund the U.N.'s operations. Lula also increased Brazil's contribution to the U.N.'s World Food Program from $ 1 million in 2009 to $ 27 million in 2011.

Some of his proposals never made it out of Congress under predecessors, including putting local police under state authority. Yet he has had success pushing through other broad changes designed to improve the economy, and as much as anything he aimed to restore the public’s flagging faith in his governance.

The case has pushed Mexico’s chronic problems with organized crime, impunity and lawlessness back to the forefront and forced Mr. Peña Nieto, who had tried to prioritize the economy, to act.

“This shows a change from a government that thought that economics will fix security issues, to one that acknowledges that security — and rule of law — is needed to allow economic growth to happen,”

he Executive Secretariat of the Commission for the Control of Drug Abuse (CICAD) of the Organization of American States (OAS) today released the technical report on "Alternatives to Incarceration for Drug -Related Offenses," which was presented to members states in its recent 57th regular session.

The OAS Secretary General, José Miguel Insulza, said that the proposals respond to the findings of the OAS Report on the Drug Problem in the Americas, which was drafted under his supervision in compliance with a mandate from the Heads of State at the Sixth Summit of the Americas in Colombia in April 2012. "The report concluded that there is a problem of prison overcrowding in nearly all the countries of the hemisphere due to drug enforcement taking place mainly through criminal sanctions," he said. In this respect, he said "the application of severe laws for drug offenses has generated negative consequences such as overloaded courts and prisons, and the suffering of thousands of people imprisoned for small drug offenses."

The shift in policy in the region and the beginning of the joint formulation of proposals of alternatives to imprisonment began, relates the report, with the approval of the member states of the OAS - through CICAD - of the 2010 Hemispheric Drug Strategy and its 2011-2015 Plan of Action agreeing to "explore the means of offering treatment, rehabilitation, and recovery support services to drug‐dependent offenders as an alternative to imprisonment, and in some cases, criminal prosecution."