El Centro is SWJ's focus on small wars in Latin America. The elephant in the hemispheric room is clearly the epidemic criminal, cartel and gang threat, fueled by a drug and migration economy, rising to the level of local and national criminal insurgencies and a significant U.S. national security risk. El Centro explores those and other issues across the US Southern Border Zone, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America to develop a better understanding of the national and regional challenges underlying past, present, and future small wars.

El Centro presents relevant Small Wars Journal articles and SWJ Blog posts, and adds a preliminary reading list and research links of external works. We do link to some Spanish language resources but, for the moment, we are only operating in English. We look forward to being able to roll out El Centro, en Español, dentro de poco.

The El Centro Fellows are a group of professionals with expertise in and commitment to the region who support SWJ's approach to advancing our field and have generously agreed to join us in our El Centro endeavor. With their help and with continued development on our site's news and library sections, we look forward to providing more El Centro-relevant SWJ original material and more useful access to other important works and resources in the future.

The most recent SWJ articles & blog posts are listed below, more here.

Recent Items

Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #11: MG 34 Machine Guns Recovered in Nayarit— Hezbollah Arms Transfer Concerns

Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #10: Claymore Anti-Personnel Mine (and Other Military Hardware) Recovered in Zacatecas.

Should U.S. Troops Fight the War on Drugs? New York Times debate on whether the U.S. military should be involved in the war on drugs.

Lessons of Iraq Help U.S. Fight a Drug War in Honduras by Thom Shanker, New York Times.

Drug Trafficking, Violence, and Instability by Dr. Phil Williams and Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.

Must we define drug traffickers in Mexico as terrorists and do more to prevent their disastrous effects?

There are 10,000 saints in the Catholic Church. But there is one that’s not even real that many people are praying to.

H.R. 4303: A bill to direct the Secretary of State to designate as foreign terrorist organizations certain Mexican drug cartels and submit a report on the activities the Department of State is taking...