Regional security in the Americas has been the focus of concern over the past year in Venezuela. We also review the sale of arms by Russia and Spain to the region, the Latin American presence in peacekeeping missions, drugs in Peru and Bolivia, and homicides in Mexico and Brazil.

▲ Igor Sechin, director Rosneft executive, and Nicolás Maduro, in August 2019 [Miraflores Palace].

report SRA 2020 / summary executive[PDF version].

MAY 2020-Throughout 2019, Latin America had several hotspots of tension -violent street protests against economic measures in Quito, Santiago de Chile and Bogota, and against political decisions in La Paz and Santa Cruz, for example-, but as those conflicts subsided (in some cases, only temporarily) the constant problem of Venezuela as the epicenter of insecurity in the region re-emerged.

With Central American migration to the United States reduced to a minimum by the restrictive measures of the Trump Administration, it has been Venezuelan migrants who have continued to fill the shoulders of South American roads, moving from one country to another, and now numbering more than five million refugees. attendance The difficulties that this population increase entails for the host countries led several of them to increase their pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro, approving in the OAS the activation of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR). But that did not push Maduro out of power, nor did the assumption in January 2019 by Juan Guaidó of the position of president-in-charge of Venezuela (recognized by more than fifty countries), the failed coup d'état a few months later or the alleged Operation Gideon invasion of May 2020.

Although Maduro seems to have stabilized, the geopolitical background has been shifting. The year 2019 saw Rosneft gaining a foothold in Venezuela as an arm of the Kremlin, once China had moved away as a credit contributor. The risk of not recovering everything borrowed made Russia act through Rosneft, obtaining the benefit of commercializing up to 80% of the country's oil. However, the US sanctions finally forced the departure of the Russian energy company, so that at the beginning of 2020 Maduro had no other major extra-hemispheric partner to turn to than Iran. The Islamic Republic, in turn subjected to a second sanctioning regime, thus returned to the close relationship it maintained with Venezuela in the first period of international punishment, cultivated by the Chávez-Ahmadineyad tandem.

This Iranian presence is closely followed by the United States (it coincides with a deployment of the Southern Command in the Caribbean), always alert to any impulse that Hezbollah - Iranian proxy - may receive in the region. In fact, 2019 marked an important leap in the disposition of Latin American countries against that organization, as several of them qualified it as terrorist for the first time. Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia and Honduras approved that declaration, following the 25th anniversary in July of the AMIA bombing, attributed to Hezbollah. Brazil and Guatemala undertook to do so shortly. With this declaration, several of these countries have drawn up lists of terrorist organizations, making it possible to pool strategies.

The destabilization of the region by the status in Venezuela has a clear manifestation in the reception and promotion in that country of the Colombian guerrillas. In August the ex issue two of the FARC, Iván Márquez, and some other former leaders announced, presumably from Venezuelan territory, their return to arms. Both this dissident nucleus of the FARC and the ELN had begun to consolidate at the end of the year as Colombian-Venezuelan groups, with operations not only in the Venezuelan border area, but also in the interior of the country. Both groups together have some 1,700 troops in Venezuela, of which almost 600 are Venezuelan recruits, thus constituting another shock force at the service of Maduro.

Russia's exit from Venezuela comes at a time when Moscow is apparently less active in Latin America. This is the case, of course, in the field of arms sales. Russia, which had become an important exporter of military equipment to the region, has seen its sales decrease in recent years. If during the golden decade of the commodity boom various countries spent part of their important revenues on the acquisition of armaments (which also coincided with the spread of the Bolivarian tide, better related to Moscow), the collapse of commodity prices and some governmental changes made Latin America the destination of only 0.8% of total arms exports by Russia in the period 2015-2019. The United States has regained its position as the largest seller to the rest of the continent.

Spain occupies a prominent position in the arms market, as the seventh largest exporter in the world. However, it lags behind in the preferences of Latin American countries, to which it sells less defense material than it would be entitled to by the volume of overall trade it maintains with them. Nevertheless, the level of sales increased in 2019, after a year of particularly low figures. In the last five years, Spain has sold 3.6% of its global arms exports to Latin America; in that period, its main customers were Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru and Colombia.

The better provision of military equipment could suggest a greater participation in UN peacekeeping missions, perhaps as a way to maintain an active army, in a context of lack of regional deployments. However, of the total of 82,480 troops in the fourteen UN peacekeeping missions at the beginning of 2020, 2,473 came from Latin American countries, which is only 3% of the total contingent. Moreover, almost half of staff was contributed by one country, Uruguay (45.5% of the regional troops). Another small country, El Salvador (12%), is next in mission commitment, while large countries are underrepresented, notably Mexico.

In terms of citizen security, 2019 brought the good news of the reduction of homicides in Brazil, which fell by 19.2% compared to the previous year, in contrast to what happened in Mexico, where they rose by 2.5%. If in his first year as president, Jair Bolsonaro scored an important achievement, thanks to the management of the super minister of Security Sérgio Moro (a success tarnished by the increase in accidental deaths in police operations), in his first year Andrés Manuel López Obrador failed to fulfill one of his main electoral promises and was unable to break the upward trend in homicides that has invariably occurred annually throughout the mandates of his two predecessors.

In terms of the fight against drug trafficking, 2019 saw two particularly positive developments. On the one hand, the eradication of coca crops for the first time in the VRAEM, Peru's largest production area. Given its complicated accessibility and the presence of Shining Path strongholds, the area had previously been left out of the operations of this subject. On the other hand, the presidential change in Bolivia meant, according to the United States, a greater commitment by the new authorities to combat illicit coca cultivation and interdict drug shipments coming from Peru. In recent years Bolivia has become the major distributor of cocaine in the southern half of South America, connecting Peruvian and Bolivian production with the markets of Argentina and especially Brazil, and with its export ports to Europe.