The top story from the Americas in the New York Times this morning is a report on China’s increasing influence in Latin America as cash-strapped economies look for new credit and investments. Among China’s new partnerships with Latin American nations are negotiations with Venezuela to double a development fund to $12 billion, a loan to Ecuador of at least $1 billion for a hydroelectric plant, providing Argentina with $10 billion in Chinese currency, and lending Brazil’s state oil company $10 billion, says the NYT report. China is now the region’s second largest trading partner behind the United States. Analysts believe China is looking for a way to secure natural resources and find an alternative to investing in U.S. Treasury notes. Interestingly, the piece says China has also pushed Latin American countries where the U.S. now has limited influence, such as in Venezuela. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has said Chinese aid differs from other multilateral institutions because it comes with no strings attached, including no review of internal finances, writes the paper.
Meanwhile, the Miami Herald, LA Times, and Wall Street Journal all feature a variety of reports and opinions on President Obama’s trip to Latin America. He begins in Mexico today before traveling to Trinidad and Tobago tomorrow for the Fifth Summit of the Americas. In an opinion piece published in the MH, President Obama writes: “As we approach the Summit of the Americas, our hemisphere faces a clear choice: We can overcome our shared challenges with a sense of common purpose, or we can stay mired in the old debates of the past. For the sake of all our people, we must choose the future (…). My administration is committed to renewing and sustaining a broader partnership between the United States and the hemisphere on behalf of our common prosperity and our common security.” In the piece, the president addresses the issue of Cuba, the global economic crisis, energy and the environment, common security, and a commitment to democracy, in that order. The LAT writes that while the president is extremely popular within Latin America, he will be pressed on some U.S. policies which he seems reluctant to change. Among such issues, the paper notes policy toward Cuba and an apparent unwillingness to seek an assault weapon ban. On the first leg of his trip, in Mexico, the LAT says Mexican President Felipe Calderon is likely called to press Obama to stop the flow of weapons and drug money from the U.S. and to curb the demand for the tons of cocaine and marijuana that Mexican traffickers send north while also taking up the issues of immigration and trade. The paper calls Obama’s stopover in Mexico City “largely symbolic” and a form of “reassurance to Mexico and the region of U.S. engagement.” And the WSJ argues that the whole trip will be largely symbolic, arguing that the big question for Obama in the region is “whether the president can deliver much beyond goodwill.” The paper says Mr. Obama will likely “stress the need to protect the region's poorest citizens from the global economic crisis, but may have little to offer beyond multilateral assistance already agreed upon at the recent Group of 20 nations meeting in London.”
And, in the Washington Post this morning the paper reports on Mexico, writing that President Obama imposed financial sanctions against three of the most violent Mexican drug cartels and threatened to prosecute Americans who do business with them, a day before meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon. Obama added three cartels—Sinaloa, los Zetas, and la Familia Michoacana to a list of banned foreign drug kingpins, which now allows the federal government to seize assets and criminally prosecute those who provide weapons, launder money, or transport cash and drugs for the groups. The WaPo says that the announcement accelerated what is normally a year-long effort to add names to the banned list, adding that “since 2000, 78 drug kingpin groups and individuals have been blacklisted by the U.S. government, along with nearly 500 others who have supported them.” The Foreign Drug Kingpin Designation Act, as the law is called, has been used most against Colombian drug traffickers, particularly the Cali cartel.
In other news, the WaPo, LAT, and WSJ all report that Colombia’s most wanted drug lord, Daniel Rendón Herrera, alias Don Mario, was arrested Wednesday. As the AP story in the WaPo writes, he was cowering under a palm tree when he was captured in a jungle raid involving hundreds of Colombian police officers. The private militia that Herrera commanded is responsible for 3,000 killings in the past 18 months alone, said Gen. Oscar Naranjo, director of the national police. Rendón Herrera has allegedly offered assassins $1,000 for each police officer they killed, in an attempt to evade arrest. According to the LAT, U.S. counternarcotics officials said the Rendón Herrera arrest is “more evidence that the Colombian National Police are aggressively investigating and apprehending major drug traffickers.” The WSJ adds that Don Mario has been indicted by the U.S. court for the Southern District of New York on cocaine-trafficking charges, and U.S. officials say they will seek his extradition.
Also on Colombia, the AP writes at the NYT that a Senate committee approved a bill late Wednesday aimed to clear a path for a 2010 re-election of sitting President Alvaro Uribe. The measure now goes to a vote by the full Senate, where the president has an large majority. If passed there, and then by a bicameral committee, the bill will be reviewed by the Constitutional Court, where most judges are expected to vote in favor of the measure. In the LAT, the Inter-American Dialogue’s Michael Shifter writes that the pursuit of a third term by Uribe threatens to tarnish Colombia’s democratic tradition. Shifter writes that strong public support for Uribe is due to the fact that there has been a dramatic turnaround in Colombia’s security situation and high economic growth under Uribe's “take-charge leadership.” But, Shifter argues that “the precedent set by Uribe's third term would reinforce (an) erosion (of democratic governance) and provide a ready justification to others with troubling authoritarian proclivities.”
Also, in an exclusive interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the MH writes that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the Obama administration is still “reviewing a U.S. policy of deporting undocumented Haitians and left open the possibility of expanding travel to Havana beyond the families of Cuban exiles in the United States.” Former Mexico City bureau chief for Newsweek, Joseph Contreras writes on Mexico, arguing that: “Our southern neighbor has undergone a profound degree of Americanization in the 15 years since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, and the economic, political, social and cultural ties linking the United States and Mexico have never been stronger.” Contreras now believes that the President must embrace Mexico even more tightly, rather than focusing on problems of violence alone in Mexico. And MH columnist Andres Oppenheimer argues that with so many other pressing issues on President Obama’s agenda, “it may take a few years before the Obama administration is again forced to focus on the hemisphere,” but he adds that he is hopeful that “Obama will give us clear indications -- more than rhetorical outbursts -- that he will remain engaged with the region once he returns to Washington.”
Image: The Economist (4 Aug 2005).
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