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

In the book’s final chapter, Kaplan warns America’s pivot to Asia may overlook its greatest foreign policy opportunity: building an enduring partnership with Mexico to safeguard our most...

When a state is unable to maintain its monopoly on violence, power-vacuums inevitably arise.

Combating the marijuana cartels on America’s public lands.

An important article in yesterday's NY Times by Randal Archibold, Damien Cave, and Ginger Thompson. 

Singer Jesus “Chuy” Quintanilla is the latest in a string of balladeers and musicians to be killed in Mexico’s drug war.  This time the killing occurred in Texas.

Implications for information operations in Guatemala.

SWJ contributor John Bertetto provides tips for bringing down criminal organizations with organizational analysis.

An offering from Viridiana Rios and SWJ El Centro Fellow Stephen Dudley.