The US government must increase diplomatic and financial support to help Colombia prepare for the possibility of a post-conflict scenario, stated a report published Monday by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

In the dark before dawn one night last February, Colonel Googlis Martín Caballero was driving a white Ford Explorer through the Venezuelan countryside not far from the Colombian border. With him were his wife, his daughter and roughly half a ton of cocaine. 

Mexicans don’t trust law enforcement agencies, which creates a toxic environment for combating cartel violence, according to research released on Thursday. Roughly 90 percent of Mexicans have little or no confidence in municipal police. 

Anti-drugs police in the Dominican Republic have revealed how a micro-trafficking network paid local cops over $100,000 in bribes each month, showing how the domestic drug market is spawning ever wealthier and powerful local organized crime groups.

The arrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the head of the Sinaloa cartel, on Saturday was an event of enormous importance in the Mexican government’s fight against organized crime. Mexican public opinion had long ago decided that this government, and the previous one, were not serious about hunting for Guzmán, preferring the relative stability and lower-violence approach of the Sinaloa cartel to the more militaristic style of other cartels, such as the Zetas.

The upcoming issue of Time features Mexico’s president, Enrique Pena Nieto, on its cover. That has made the magazine more than a few new enemies. But it’s the accompanying front-page headline that really clinched the Mexicans’ ire: SAVING MEXICO.

If Britain were fighting a war where 2,000 people died every year, where increasing numbers of our young people were recruited by the enemy and our opponents were always a step ahead, developing new weapons faster than we could combat them, there would be outcry and loud calls for change. Yet this is exactly the situation with the "war on drugs" and for far too long we have resisted a proper debate about the need for a different strategy.

The Internet, and particularly left-leaning U.S. blogs, are abuzz with a story in the Mexican newspaper El Universal alleging that the United States cut secret deals with one of Mexico's largest drug cartels. The nature of those deals change based on which English-language rewrite you're reading, but in the most extreme and widely circulated tellings, the U.S. allowed the Sinaloa cartel to "smuggle billions of dollars of drugs" and granted the organization "immunity and undisturbed drug trafficking" in exchange for information on rival cartels.