Four years after several of its members were arrested, the Perrones, El Salvador's formidable illicit transport organization, has quietly regrouped, reestablishing its dominance in the eastern part of the country and recuperating its control of public institutions to facilitate its illicit activities, according to Salvadoran police, police intelligence documents, and media sources.
Recent reports that dangerous Guatemalan street gangs from the MS-13 are teaming with even more dangerous Mexican criminal organization the Zetas are still as unfounded as when this was first reported several years ago.
Drug policy will not officially be discussed during this week's Summit of the Americas, making it the proverbial "gorilla in the room." In the first in a series of articles examining this beast of an issue, InSight Crime maps where each country stands on drug legalization.
In a surprise move, Nicaragua's authorities detained nightclub owner Henry Fariñas -- the mysterious figure at the heart of the multi-country investigation of the assassination of Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral last July -- when he arrived this week from Guatemala.
The announcement that Colombia's FARC, the region's oldest and largest insurgency, would halt kidnappings was greeted with mixed emotions. But while the skeptics seem to outnumber the optimists, the new strategic and economic reality of the rebels leaves room for hope.
A special US investigative team working with Honduran authorities ruled that a Valentine's Day fire in a Honduras prison in the city of Comayagua that killed over 350 inmates was an accident, the US embassy said in a statement.
Guatemalan authorities captured a top lieutenant of the country's most powerful organized criminal gang, continuing an impressive offensive against the group and its Mexican Zetas allies, launched after the brutal 2011 massacre of 27 farmhands.
A legal safeguard built into Guatemala's justice system is being used to stall the extraditions to the United States of some of the country's most notorious suspected drug traffickers.
A bomb in the Colombian port city of Tumaco left at least seven police and civilians dead, and up to 70 injured, in what authorities said was a guerrilla attack on a police station in a strategic drug shipment departure point.
The United States Treasury Department's announcement that it was placing a Panama-based money laundering operation on its list of Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers (SDNTs) appears to be another step in unraveling a Middle East - Mexico connection that has both political and legal implications.
