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In early 2007, around the same time that Colombia’s government awarded thousands of dollars worth of agricultural subsidies to a pair of convicted drug lords, farmers in Boyaca province anxiously awaited their own emergency aid. For Feliciano Zapata, a surprise February frost meant he could harvest nothing from his acres of beans, potatoes and peas. Taking no chances, Zapata hired a camera crew to film the brown and withered crops, keeping the video as evidence of his losses when he and more than 2,200 other affected farmers applied for emergency government support. Four months later, Zapata received about $54. “Even the camera crew cost more than that,” he observed. His wife, who’d also applied for assistance as she’d lost about two acres of her own land, received about $1.50, not enough to cover transportation costs back to the farm.

In a region where leaders' efforts to reform their nations' constitutions dominate the headlines, one political regime is flying under the radar in its efforts to radically overhaul its foundational political charter. On November 16, an assembly in the Dominican Republic overwhelmingly approved the final draft of sweeping reforms for what may become the most reactionary constitution in the Americas. The constitutional reforms are expected to be officially signed into law by President Leonel Fernández in a ceremony in early December.

Newly elected Salvadoran president Mauricio Funes inherited a country that is not only facing the worst economic crisis in its history, but also astronomical levels of violent crime. With overall homicide rates for 2009 up 35% over 2008, Funes knows the security question can easily become the FMLN’s Achilles’ heel as he tries to introduce prevention and rehabilitation policies aimed at reducing youth involvement in street gangs. This follows years of repressive mano dura (iron fist) policies implemented by ARENA governments. Instead of focusing on the social origins of gang involvement and pursuing community-based harm reduction, mano dura painted gangs as the country’s greatest threat and criminalized anyone with tattoos—spilling over into a more general suspicion and stigma against youth in a country where 40% of the population is younger than 18, according to the 2007 census.

On the night of October 10, a joint force of military and police personnel, looking like a SWAT team on the verge of a major drug bust, surrounded hundreds of buildings in and around Mexico City. Equipped with shields, helmets, and billy clubs ready to strike, they waited for a coordinated signal, and then hopped the walls and seized the buildings. The buildings in question belonged not to one of Mexico's big-time crime syndicates, but to Luz y Fuerza del Centro (Central Light and Power), the public power company that for decades has provided electricity to millions of people in the most populated part of the center of the country, including over 25 million people in the Mexico City area. Later that night, around midnight, President Felipe Calderón issued a presidential decree liquidating the company, thereby eliminating its feisty, independent union.