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blog

Central America: Tri-National Force To Fight Drug Gangs

Police forces in Corinto, Cortez, Honduras
Police forces in Corinto, Cortez, Honduras

TEGUCIGALPA — The Central American countries of the "Northern Triangle" (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) have long battled gang wars and drug-related crime that have left the region's cities among the world's most dangerous.

Individual attempts in the past to defuse the crisis, including local gang truces and national crackdowns on drugs, have been largely in vain. Now, Honduran daily El Heraldo reports that the three neighbors are uniting to form a tri-national military force to take on the region's myriad drug gangs, which increasingly have links across borders.

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández first proposed the idea last month, declaring it a necessary solution to end the proliferation of violence and drugs in the region. He later visited his Guatemalan counterpart Jimmy Morales and dispatched a government delegation to El Salvador to hold high-level talks on the new force, which would coordinate crackdowns and share information.

The investigative organization InSight Crime says the estimated 70,000 members of drug gangs in the Northern Triangle typically have little trouble crossing borders, which makes it difficult for one country to defeat them alone. Security and defense ministers from the three nations, including prosecutors, have already met to lay down plans, but no clear timetable has yet been announced.

"If the three countries really do implement a joint security strategy, it will definitely bring good results," says Migdonia Ayestas of the National Autonomous University of Honduras' Observatory on Violence. "Transnational crime can only be defeated with transnational strategies."

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Green

The Problem With Always Blaming Climate Change For Natural Disasters

Climate change is real, but a closer look at the science shows there are many factors that contribute to weather-related disasters. It is important to raise awareness about the long-term impact of global warming, but there's a risk in overstating its role in the latest floods or fires.

People on foot, on bikes, motorcycles, scooters and cars navigate through a flooded street during the day time.

Karachi - People wade through flood water after heavy rain in a southern Pakistani city

Xinhua / ZUMA
Axel Bojanowski

-Analysis-

BERLIN — In September, thousands of people lost their lives when dams collapsed during flooding in Libya. Engineers had warned that the dams were structurally unsound.

Two years ago, dozens died in floods in western Germany, a region that had experienced a number of similar floods in earlier centuries, where thousands of houses had been built on the natural floodplain.

Last year saw more than 1,000 people lose their lives during monsoon floods in Pakistan. Studies showed that the impact of flooding in the region was exacerbated by the proximity of human settlements, the outdated river management system, high poverty rates and political instability in Pakistan.

There are many factors that contribute to weather-related disasters, but one dominates the headlines: climate change. That is because of so-called attribution studies, which are published very quickly after these disasters to highlight how human-caused climate change contributes to extreme weather events. After the flooding in Libya, German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described climate change as a “serial offender," while the Tageszeitung wrote that “the climate crisis has exacerbated the extreme rainfall."

The World Weather Attribution initiative (WWA) has once again achieved its aim of using “real-time analysis” to draw attention to the issue: on its website, the institute says its goal is to “analyse and communicate the possible influence of climate change on extreme weather events." Frederike Otto, who works on attribution studies for the WWA, says these reports help to underscore the urgent need for climate action. They transform climate change from an “abstract threat into a concrete one."

In the immediate aftermath of a weather-related disaster, teams of researchers rush to put together attribution studies – “so that they are ready within the same news cycle," as the New York Times reported. However, these attribution studies do not meet normal scientific standards, as they are published without going through the peer-review process that would be undertaken before publication in a specialist scientific journal. And that creates problems.

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