I begin this morning in the Miami Herald and Washington Post both of whom have some interesting reports and opinions on the U.S. and Cuba. First, the MH reports on congressional efforts to use trade as a means of engaging with Cuba. After President Obama eased travel and gift restrictions two weeks ago (but only for Cuban Americans), a group of farm-state senators, led by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), is expected to soon be introducing legislation aimed at boosting agricultural trade with the island and now backers believe momentum is now on their side. “We need to make it easier for America's farmers and ranchers to sell their high-quality products, including Montana's world-class wheat and barley, to one of our closest markets,” says Baucus. Agricultural trade groups want Cuba to be allowed to pay for goods by credit, and they seek an end to a Bush policy that requires Cuba to pay for products in advance. U.S. agricultural sales to Cuba decreased by nearly 15 percent in the two years after the Bush administration required cash up-front for such goods. In the WaPo’s “Outlook,” this weekend, Julia Sweig from the Council on Foreign Relations has an opinion piece in which she argues Guantánamo Bay should be used a means for reaching out to Cuba. The U.S. should be prepared to give Guantánamo back to the Cubans (the U.S. has controlled the territory since the Spanish-American War) as part of a “broader remaking of Washington's relationship with Cuba,” argues Sweig. She mentions an idea I wrote about a few weeks ago in The Nation: converting at least part of the base into a health research center to develop strategies for medical cooperation. And, in an opinion piece in the MH, Columbia professor Mirta Ojito argues that the U.S. can learn much can be learned from Cuba’s medical diplomacy around the world, even with the propaganda that it is often accompanied by. As President Obama alluded to in Trinidad, such health diplomacy could be one way of building a new relationship with Latin America.
The Washington Post and New York Times, meanwhile, write on drug violence in Mexico, from two perspectives. The WaPo reports that “Mexican authorities have arrested more than 60,000 people in connection with drug trafficking over the past two years,” according to newly obtained government statistics—the first public accounting of the government’s crackdown on drug traffickers since President Felipe Calderón’s offensive began. U.S. officials maintain that drug trafficking in Mexico employs an estimated 150,000 people, so any report that 60,000 arrests have been made seems like progress against the cartels, the paper adds. But what is not yet known: how many of the detainees remain in custody or whether they have been charged with crimes related to drug trafficking. The Mexican Attorney General’s office was unwilling to release such numbers to the WaPo. And, as a brief AP report in the NYT writes this morning, some arrested over the past two years may not just be affiliated with drug cartels but also with the Mexican security forces. According to today’s report, Mexican authorities detained 12 federal police investigators from the Federal Agency of Investigations. The men were accused of leaking information to hit men who ambushed and killed eight officers in a failed attempt to free a high-level drug gang member.
And, in other headlines, the Wall Street Journal and LA Times give a daily update on Mexico and swine flu. The WSJ writes that “a picture is now emerging of how U.S. and Mexican officials, with a key assist from a Canadian government lab, first realized they faced a new type of disease and began racing to isolate its earliest origins.” Interestingly, the paper says that until recently, Mexico was widely assumed to be the point of origin for the disease, but now some California doctors are saying two children in California became sick with the virus in late March. See today’s piece in the WSJ for a complete play-by-play of the unfolding health investigation. I have never been to Phoenix, but the LAT reports from Mexico City where it writes that “a week after officials announced the outbreak of the H1N1 flu, Mexico City -- a teeming, polluted, noisy, thrilling behemoth -- feels more like Phoenix than it does the largest city in the Western Hemisphere.”
In other news, the WaPo has an interesting report on a two year Justice Department investigation into alleged irregularities in grant making by the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention during the Bush administration—an office then headed by a Bush administration appointee, J. Robert Flores. The investigation has focused on the hiring of Hector Rene Fonseca, allegedly a former Colombian military official who worked as a contractor to the office between November 2004 and July 2007 when he was collecting $281,000 for his work on anti-gang programs. Another report says Fonseca was actually a former military official in the Honduran military, but the question of what expertise a Latin American military official might bring to eliminating gang violence in US cities goes unanswered.
An AP report in the WaPo on Colombia and Venezuela writes that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said Thursday that his government will not tolerate incursions by Colombian rebels into Venezuelan territory. Chavez was responding to concerns relayed this week by Colombia's government over the killing of eight Colombian soldiers during a rebel ambush in the Sierra de Perija. “It's Colombia's war. It's not our war ... We are not going to get involved in that war,” Chavez maintained. Many have long accused Chávez of giving harbor to the FARC in Venezuelan territory.
The LAT reports that Alejandro Mayorkas is President Obama's pick to be director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The agency within the Department of Homeland Security deals with a broad range of immigration and naturalization issues and oversees international adoptions, asylum, and refugee status. Mayorkas is a federal prosecutor known for his a role in a 2001 decision by President Clinton to commute a drug dealer's prison sentence.
And three opinions. First, the WaPo had an editorial yesterday which I missed berating the Obama administration for ignoring Hugo Chávez’s crackdown on his political opponents in Venezuela. The paper says “Peru's democratic government is to be congratulated for its decision to offer [Chávez opponent] Mr. Rosales asylum. It is shameful that the Obama administration won't say so.” And two pieces in the NYT on swine flu. In one, Julio Frenk, former Mexican health minister and a current dean at Harvard, says Mexico’s “fast action gave other countries the warning they needed to screen for the new virus,” adding that “over the past six years, Mexico bolstered its disease surveillance systems, built up public health laboratories, cooperated in developing international networks for information sharing and devised response plans.” In another, author David Lida says that “despite reports that Mexico City had turned into a ghost town, by Thursday there were still a lot of people in the street. The hardware stores, light-fixture shops and places that sell pots and pans were all doing business. Shoeshine boys and lottery ticket vendors were out and about.” I guess that’s what Phoenix is like.
Image: Bert Garcia
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