Oliver Dodd is an Economic and Social Research Council postdoctoral fellow in politics and international relations at Aberystwyth University.
Tanja Nijmeijer’s memoir tells of how Colombia’s FARC was forced into a long and painful retreat. Her account of its political setbacks suggests that power doesn’t always flow from the barrel of a gun.
For years, US leaders struggled with botched efforts to bring the opposition to power in Venezuela. Talk of the War on Drugs provided a justification for a more direct US assault, imposing regime change without the trappings of democratic transition.
Almost every assassin involved in the murder of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was Colombian. That’s no coincidence: if you want mercenaries for hire on the cheap, often trained by the US military, you can find them in spades in Colombia.