The Strategic Environment in the Americas

1. The Strategic Environment in the Americas Eduardo A. Gamarra Director

2. Defining the Strategic Environment • No nuclear powers (yet) • No WMDs • No presence of large, transnational terrorist threat • No rogue states (yet) • No great powers (only aspiring ones) • Cooperation environment

3. Are they different? What kinds of approaches are being pursued? What are the results? Is a change in direction necessary? The Current Security Challenges

4. Security of democratic governance Poverty, inequality and social exclusion Inability of economic strategies to create jobs in context of huge informal sectors Ethnic/indigenous mobilization in Southern Mexico, Andean republics (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru) Land concentration and re-concentration Vulnerability to natural disasters Environmental degradation Institutional weakness of the state Collapse/overall weakness of political institutions (political parties, judiciaries, legislatures) Inability of governments to use police and/or armed forces in response to social mobilization Extensive social mobilization (direct democracy/governing from the streets). Inability of the state to deliver basic services: health; education; housing; water; electricity; and public security Challenges are different

5. Traditional armed rebel groups in Colombia Terrorism and terrorist networks Trafficking of arms, munitions, explosives Crime and public insecurity Gangs, pandillas, maras Drug production, trafficking and consumption Organized crime Specific security Challenges

6. A major challenge • How should security forces deal with the mass mobilization of social sectors seeking a redress of historical grievances? Evo Morales addresses the Estado Mayor del Pueblo, April 19, 2003, Cochabamba

7. 2. What type of leadership is necessary?

8. Urgent changes required • Specific training for new threats • Riot, gang, and other demonstration control • Address confusion of roles and functions • Public security versus Citizen Security • Police versus Armed Forces • Training in contemporary AOJ issues • Adjustment to new codes for criminal procedure

9. "Mesa has to understand that governments have the right, the legitimate right, to use force," said Eduardo Gamarra, the Bolivian-born director of the Latin America and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami. "You can't just burn down a building or take over a government building because you don't like government policy."

10. Bolivian Blood on Eduardo Gamarra's Hands? • There you have it. Gamarra wants blood: not his own, cowardly, geek-positive plasma, but that which flows through the veins of people who can’t afford an “education” at his gringo university… the blood of the poor, of the farmer, of the indigenous, of those uppity citizens who believe in that radical ideal that a government should be of, by, and for the people. • Gamarra's call to “use force,” in the context of Bolivian history, is an open call – on the pages of the New York Times – for a massacre of epic proportions…