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October 30, 2006

Not quite an arms race, but still troubling

Arms transfers are a frequent topic in Latin America's news lately, much more than we've seen during the past ten years or so. The United States - which often gets accused, correctly, of being the world's arms supermarket - is only partially involved. A few examples that appeared in the press last week:

Meanwhile, the United States has been busy too. Whenever an arms sale exceeds $14 million, the Defense Department must notify Congress. The notifications page of the Defense Security Assistance Agency notes big sales to Chile (PDF), Colombia (PDF), and Brazil (PDF) since late September.

Posted by isacson at October 30, 2006 12:16 PM

Comments

In conjunction with these trends, I was also alarmed to read about the three day Latin American Revolutionaries Summit taking place in Santiago, Chile, including the open participation of FARC members.

Posted by: rainercale [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 30, 2006 10:29 PM

rainercale: I also read about that, but some days / weeks ago. Haven't heard anything about what actually happened there.

Based on what I understood, those "revolutionaries" were mostly going to be militant, aggressively Marxist groups (not all of them guerrrillas nor insurgent per se) from around the region.

But they're not really that representative within the region at large, and the Chilean government apparently was trying to downplay their meeting as something that wasn't worthy of taking seriously

Still, I don't know what actually happened though, and only time will tell whether allowing that meeting was a good thing.

Posted by: jcg [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 31, 2006 4:42 PM

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