The week at a glance...Americas

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Narco-state? Puerto Rico is moving dangerously close to fulfilling the U.N. criteria of a narco-state, the newspaper El Nuevo Día reported this week. The paper said local economists estimate that the illegal drug trade makes up about 20 percent of the U.S. territory’s gross domestic product. It also said there were certain parts of the island where government authority was all but absent and drug traffickers held sway. Last year, dozens of police officers and former military officials were arrested for being on drug dealers’ payrolls. The government said the accusation was unfair. “To characterize Puerto Rico as a narco-state, drugs would have to have penetrated to the highest government offices, which is not the case,” said Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s representative to the U.S. Congress.

Panama City

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Home again: Manuel Noriega, ex-dictator of Panama, returned to his homeland this week to sit in another prison. Noriega, 77, was arrested by the U.S. during the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, and he served more than 20 years in a Florida prison for drug trafficking. In 2010 he was extradited to France and sentenced to seven years in prison for money laundering, but he asked to be extradited back home to Panama. Now he begins serving three 20-year sentences for ordering the murders of political opponents in the 1980s. Noriega was once an ally of the U.S. in its battle against leftist guerrillas in Central America, but he fell out of favor as he grew ever more repressive and increasingly close to Colombian drug cartels.