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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.”

As both the largest country in Central America and the least populated, Nicaragua has the opportunity to enforce environmental protection laws and conserve a relatively large amount of natural resources

In response to a variety of environmental issues, interns, volunteers, and donors work with FSD partner organizations to:

With sustained growth blessing the region, Latin America found itself with an expansive business sector and a demanding public sector, all looking to technology for answers to big social issue

Most Latin American nations could be described as straddling the gap of the digital divide in a sustained balancing act.

“digital divide” has become shorthand for any gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas with regards to both their opportunities and access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs

where President Daniel Ortega, seeking a third consecutive five-year term in November, has just announced that his wife, Rosario Murillo, is his vice-presidential running mate.

Mr. Ortega first ruled Nicaragua for 11 years after the 1979 revolution, until his ouster in the country’s first genuinely democratic election

Having regained the presidency in 2006 through a series of corrupt political maneuvers, Mr. Ortega promptly engaged in more chicanery to ensure he would never have to leave office again

combines the efforts of community-based organizations, volunteers, interns, and donors to

Educate women on basic human rights and how to assert these rights

Support the rights of children against mistreatment, abandonment, molestation, abuse, drug dependence, and child labor through various education programs

Environmental health risks impose a significant burden on Nicaragua’s economy, amounting to 2.6 billion NIO or 2.4% of the country’s GDP.

The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region has a unique mix of qualities and challenges when it comes to the environment. It is exceptionally endowed with natural assets, with globally significant biodiversity and valuable crops, and also harbors the world’s greatest carbon sink in the Amazon.

At the same time, however, the region registers the highest rates of urbanization in the developing world with pollution, overuse of its water and natural resources and detrimental impacts on the health of people, especially the poor, and the environment.

As both the largest country in Central America and the least populated, Nicaragua has the opportunity to enforce environmental protection laws and conserve a relatively large amount of natural resources. However, a variety of forces are driving deforestation and rapidly increasing pollution.

Known as the "Land of Lakes and Volcanoes," and reveling in its status in Central America as the country with the most fresh water, Nicaragua has very little safe drinking water. Those who cannot afford to purchase water are extremely vulnerable to a variety of health issues.

Export agriculture in Central America has long been a booming business for U.S. corporations. Yet pesticides employed at fruit and cotton plantations and other export crops throughout the last 40 years contributed to health problems for entire generations.

Antigua and Barbuda is home to 32 species of stony corals,

In 2006, 32 species of stony corals covered 2–19% of the reef benthos at 2-10m but cover on deep reefs was less than 3%.

Although only 1% of coral colonies showed signs of disease, more that 20% of shallow Montastraea colonies displayed yellow blotch disease. The 2005 bleaching event resulted in average coral cover being reduced from 16% to 7% by 2007

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.

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.

n the international arena, the new president, Dilma Roussef, has pulled back from Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva's many excesses (indifference to human rights abuses, support for Iran and its nuclear program, and rhetorical anti-Americanism) during his last year in office, and may even have a present for Obama.

South America is booming, as India and China swallow up its exports of iron, copper, soybeans, coffee, coal, oil, wheat, poultry, beef, and sugar. Its foreign trade and investment patterns are diversified and dynamic. With a few minor exceptions, migration is internal to the region, and a modus vivendi has been reached with the drug trade, mainly coca leaf and cocaine in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. Moreover, relations with the US, while important, are no longer paramount. South American governments can afford to disagree with the US, and often do. They have just elected a new president of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), whose headquarters are being built in Quito, Ecuador. As its name suggests, Unasur's main raison d'être is to exclude Canada, the US, and Mexico (in contrast to the Organisation of American States).

None of this holds true for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands – mainly the Dominican Republic, but eventually Cuba, too, and, in its own way, Haiti. These are not mineral-rich or bountiful agricultural nations: some coffee and bananas here, a little sugar and beef there, but nothing with which to sustain a boom. While Mexico is America's second-largest supplier of oil, this represents only 9 per cent of its total exports. Instead, these countries export low-value-added manufactured goods (Mexico does more, of course), and live off remittances, tourism, and drug-transshipment profits. All of this is overwhelmingly concentrated on the US: that is where the migrants are, where the towels and pajamas are shipped, where the tourists come from, and where the drugs are bought. For these countries, including Mexico, stable, close, and productive relations with America are essential.

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.