This second Small Wars Journal-El Centro anthology signifies the important debate that this new forum, focusing on the crime wars and criminal insurgencies taking place in Mexico and other regions of the Americas, is helping to generate in U.S. defense and homeland security circles. The debate comes at a time when neither of the two major U.S. presidential candidates were willingly to candidly discuss this issue and at the end of the recent Felipe Calderon administration which saw over 80,000 dead, 20,000 missing, and 200,000 internal refugees stemming from gang and cartel violence during...

This work marks the 3rd Small Wars Journal-El Centro anthology. Its analyses, crafted by over thirty contributing authors, forms a compilation of the violence and corruption in Mexico plaguing the first year of Enrique Pena Nieto's presidency. Instances of spillover violence in the United States and the gang and cartel crime wars in other Latin American countries are also chronicled. Spanish language article appendices are additionally incorporated in this important anthology. Dave Dilegge SWJ Editor-in-Chief"