Expodefensa more than a showcase, it is a commitment to the region’s stability, peace and prosperity

Expodefensa held its first edition in 2009, at CORFERIAS exhibition centre in Colombia’s capital city, Bogotá, the site of many historic regional and national developments for stability, peace, and prosperity. Nowadays, Expodefensa is arguably the leading event for presenting defence and security solutions from Latin America and for Latin America.

In 2017, MONS was witness to few truly exceptional events in the region: SITDEF (Peru), LAAD (Brazil), FAMEX and Expo Seguridad (Mexico), and Expodefensa tops out the year, beginning this week for another successful edition.

The organisers (COGES, who are affiliated with the highly-successful Eurosatory) profess: “Expodefensa 2017 is an international exhibition and the point of reference for Latin America in respect of technology development and innovation for defence and security…”

Having walked the exposition floor during set up, it is safe to presume: 1) this expo is growing substantially with each edition; 2) Latin America is no longer considering just its former Cold War partners for improving regional stability; and, 3) all those companies who aspire to be active in the Latin American and the Caribbean defence and security scene are here.

Overheard on the exhibition floor: Expodefensa is more than a showcase, it is a commitment to the region’s stability, peace and prosperity. To this, my former supervisor at the Organizacion de los Estados Americanos (OEA) Department of Public Information, Protocol and Press – who hailed from Medellín, incidentally – would say: “Well,…it is about damn time.”

Curtis Hand