Colombia

• “Viaje al Corazon de Tumaco” (Semana (Colombia), May 15, 2017).

Colombia’s second-busiest Pacific port is also the country’s number-one coca (and probably cocaine)-producing municipality. This in-depth multimedia look at Tumaco is worth your time. Great videos.

• Juanita León, Tatiana Duque, “Las Dos Caras del Golpe al Fast Track” (La Silla Vacia (Colombia), May 18, 2017).

Late Wednesday, while President Juan Manuel Santos was in Washington, Colombia’s Constitutional Court issued a decision that might delay, or even cancel, implementation of parts of the FARC peace accord. León and Duque look at the implications, including a possible bright side.

Mexico

• Jose De Cordoba, “Drug War Takes Mexican Journalist’s Life” (The Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2017).

De Cordoba looks into the complicated story murdered Sinaloa journalist Javier Valdez was working on: an intensifying battle between factions of the disintegrating Sinaloa cartel.

• Nathaniel Parish Flannery, “Mexico’s Avocado Army: How One City Stood Up to the Drug Cartels” (The Guardian (Uk), May 18, 2017).

This is what institutional collapse looks like: a Michoacán town’s avocado-growers’ association, some of whose members are probably organized crime-tied, created a paramilitary force that is far more capable than local police. This is illegal, but nobody cares.

Venezuela

• Max Fisher, Amanda Taub, “How Venezuela Stumbled to the Brink of Collapse” (The New York Times, May 15, 2017).

“Established democracies are not supposed to implode like this. Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University political scientist, said Venezuela was one of ‘four or five, ever.’ Among those, none was as wealthy or fell so far.” This was a long, gradual process; Fisher and Taub concisely highlight some of the main steps.