The LA Times features a report this morning on the failures of U.S. efforts to halt gun smuggling across the border into Mexico. The Government Accountability Office will release a new report on the matter today—the first federal assessment of its kind—which the LAT says “will probably influence the debate over the role of U.S.-made weaponry as violence threatens to spill across the Mexico border.” Among its findings, the GAO says more than 90% of the seized firearms whose origins are traceable are smuggled from the U.S. The report also cites U.S. intelligence indicating that most weapons smuggled across the border are ending up in the hands of drug gangs and are being used not only against the Mexican government but also to expand their drug trafficking operations in the United States. Regarding steps taken by the Obama administration to curb gun smuggling, the GAO adds that the current Obama strategy is only in its early phases and is unlikely to dramatically change the situation in the near future. The $1.4 billion Merida Initiative has also done nothing to prevent cross-border gun movement. Jess Ford, the director of international affairs for the GAO will testify on the matter today in front of Rep. Eliot Engel’s (D-NY) House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee for the Western Hemisphere. Along with corruption in the Mexican government, Ford is expected to emphasize the lack of a “bilateral, multiagency arms-trafficking task force,” and the need for Mexico to fully implement the ATF's electronic firearms tracing system as two measures that must be taken to combat the flow of guns south.
In the Washington Post a feature story on Mexico and how swine flu and drug violence have sharply cut the movement of American citizens to Mexico to, yes, get their teeth cleaned. The reports calls Palomas, Mexico, the “Mexican border town that discount dentistry built” with many people traveling the 360 miles from Phoenix for dentistry work. Cheap prices led many Americans south keeping nearly 50 dentist offices open in the town--that is, until drug violence worries grew over the last year. In fact, says the WaPo, just one year ago, when it really started to get bad in Palomas, the mayor of Columbus, a small U.S. town just across the border in New Mexico, was sitting in a dentist chair getting a root canal when two gunmen burst into the dentist office he was visiting, demanding money. Now, while violence has subsided in part, it seems many dentists in Palomas are waiting for the border town’s image, as a safe haven for root canal’s, to be restored.
The Miami Herald reports on the tense situation between the Venezuelan government and opposition TV station Globovision. The paper writes that anti-Chávez activists in South Florida have contributed funds to the TV station to help it pay a $4 million fine that the Chávez government slapped on the outlet for giving free airtime to anti-government groups during the 2002 oil strike. According to the MH, the fundraising drive was initially organized by students in Venezuela and then spread onto the Internet. The organizers suggest a donation of just $2.50 per pledge, but it is not yet known how much has been collected.
The AP has a short report in the New York Times, writing that Peruvian indigenous leader Alberto Pizango arrived in Nicaragua on Wednesday after being granted political asylum by the Central American country last week. He was greeted in Managua by a Foreign Ministry official and in a statement said he was “astonished, very concerned and very pained” by the deaths occurring during protests by Indian groups opposed to government decrees for oil and gas development on Amazonian lands.
And, the BBC writes that the Peru conflict may be spilling over to Bolivia to some extent. Peru’s foreign minister Jose Antonia Garcia Belaunde accused Bolivia’s Evo Morales of being an enemy of the Peruvian state yesterday, following Peru’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Bolivia on Tuesday. President Morales had called the deaths of indigenous activists in Bagua a “genocide caused by free trade.” The Peruvian foreign minister also criticized Morales for what he called his belief in “a messianic role in liberating Peruvians from the government of President Alan Garcia.” Many analysts say relations between the two countries have never been so poor.
In other news, the NYT also reports on Mexico-U.S. economic relations, writing that while the Mexican economy has been hurt by drug violence, the recession, and swine flu, some border companies on each side of the border with the United States are “prospering because they serve the expanding Mexican-American market in the United States.” For example, the paper writes that “Viz Cattle Corporation, the American division of Mexico’s SuKarne Global, handles exports of Mexican beef to Japan and South Korea, through contracts made in Compton, California.” “Trade,” the paper writes, “is taking on new complexity, with operations in Southern California sometimes serving as Mexico’s link to the global economy.”
In the LAT, a report on the Dole Fruit Co. case which was ruled on in a California court this week. The judge in the case wrote that “several U.S. and Nicaraguan attorneys have developed an ‘industry’ around bringing fraudulent claims against Dole for exposure to a banned pesticide, hiring so-called “captains” to recruit poor Nicaraguan men, coaching them to testify that they had worked on Dole-affiliated banana farms, and then paying medical labs to fabricate evidence that the men had been rendered sterile by chemicals.
Lastly, three opinions, all in the MH. First, Marifeli Perez-Stable writes that Central American countries are all experiencing significant changes right now, be they of varying sorts. She says El Salvador and Costa Rica perhaps offer the brightest “rays of hope,” while Guatemala is in for a long and challenging period as President Alvaro Colom’s presidency has been weakened. Meanwhile, in Honduras and Nicaragua, presidents have staked their future on a link with the ALBA bloc and ties with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Andres Oppenheimer writes that the swine flu crisis is now a model of “reckless journalism” in Mexico, arguing that journalists who once seemed sure that swine flu began in Mexico are now being countered by PAHO officials’ claims which say its origin may have been in the U.S. He says the media must “look at how to handle these kinds of stories more responsibly in the future, and expose reckless charlatans for what they are.” And an MH editorial insists that the “Cuban Five” received a fair trial in Miami, contrary to the claims of the Cuban government and many legal organizations.
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