Here is our Wednesday Sociedad Media Now newsletter on regional security updates that include Peru’s crime crisis before voters head to polls, a 2,000-foot drug trafficking tunnel with links to the CJNG, and President Donald Trump’s breakthrough endorsement of right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia.
Peru’s Crime Crisis Is Consuming the Country. On June 7, Voters Will Decide How to Fight It
LIMA — With eight presidents in a decade, extortion rates that quintupled in six years, and criminal networks shutting down schools and shaking down bus drivers across Lima, Peru heads into its June 7 presidential runoff in the grip of a security crisis that has outlasted every government and every promise — and on Sunday, voters will choose between Keiko Fujimori’s iron-fist platform of military deployment and aerial coca fumigation, and leftist Roberto Sánchez's argument that the “political mafia” at the root of Peru’s institutions must be dismantled before the streets can be made safe.
CJNG’s Underground Railroad: The Cartel Tunnel Hidden Beneath a Fake San Diego Discount Store
SAN DIEGO — Beneath a fake discount store called Buy 4 Less — steps from one of the busiest border crossings in North America — the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) engineered a 1,933-foot cocaine tunnel equipped with lighting, ventilation, an electric rail system, and reinforced walls dropping 55 feet underground, moving more than a ton of cocaine valued at $45 million into the United States before federal investigators, who had been watching the storefront for six months, dismantled the operation in the first operational tunnel bust in the Southern District of California since 2022.
🎥 ⬇ Click link below for footage of cartel’s underground tunnel 🇲🇽 ➡ 🇺🇸
Read full story & watch video here →
Trump Endorses De la Espriella for Colombia’s June 21 Runoff — Petro Calls It an Attack on Sovereignty
Three weeks before Colombia’s June 21 runoff, President Trump endorses Abelardo de la Espriella on social media — calling him “El Tigre” and urging a vote for law and order — adding Washington’s full political weight to an election already marked by Ecuador’s Noboa reversing tariffs after a ten-minute call with the candidate and the Trump administration’s designation of Brazil's PCC and Comando Vermelho as foreign terrorist organizations, as Petro fired back that foreign interference kills freedom.
