With Mexican midterm elections fast approaching, a campaign urging voters to nullify their votes seems to be growing, according to a New York Times report over the weekend. I’ve mentioned the “Voto Nulo” campaign before, and, according to Marc Lacey’s reporting, similar campaigns have existed in past Mexican elections. However, Mexican polling firm MUND Group says, only this year is the idea “catching fire.” That is largely because a significant number of Mexican voters have lost confidence in those in charge of the Mexican democratic system, believing that “voting for nothing is better backing the politicians currently running the country.” The three factors that appear to be most influential in creating this uptick in anti-government sentiment are a struggling economy, drug-related violence and insecurity, and rampant corruption. It’s not yet known how many will nullify their ballots, although some say it could be around 5% of those who turn out to vote. This, however, does not take into account the fact that simple abstention is expected to be very high as well on July 5, with some polls showing that as many as 60% of the eligible voting population will not go to the polls at all.
The interrelated issues of drugs and guns in Mexico are featured in two pieces in the LA Times as well over the weekend. The Mexican legislature has taken quiet steps to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, meth, and other drugs, and President Felipe Calderon is now expected to sign the decriminalization measures into law. While these moves have been criticized by some, President Calderon has argued that “it makes sense to distinguish between small-time users and big-time dealers, while re-targeting major crime-fighting resources away from the consumers and toward the dealers and their drug lord bosses.” Interestingly, in 2006, former President Vicente Fox also supported a similar measure but was forced to back down under pressure from the Bush administration which saw decriminalization as a slippery slope toward increased overall use. No high-ranking U.S. official has yet commented on this year’s push for decriminalization, perhaps a noteworthy shift in U.S. drug policy vis a vis Latin America. Or a sign that U.S. lawmakers are more concerned with other issues, including a recent GAO report that says the U.S. lacks a coordinated strategy to stop the southbound flow of smuggled weapons to drug syndicates. Some Republican legislators criticized the report in a hearing Friday, arguing the GAO did not account for the origin of those guns not coming from the U.S. “Where did the other 22,000 guns that were seized come from? Venezuela? Europe? Ecuador? Nicaragua?”, Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL) badgered the GAO on Friday.
Shifting to Venezuela, the Washington Post has a story about land reform in that country, arguing that many of the hopes of President Hugo Chávez’s agrarian plan have yet to materialize for small farmers. The paper says that among the problems is the fact that technical help promised by the government never arrived to many who received plots of expropriated land, creating a situation in which Venezuela is far from achieving its call of “food sovereignty.” Allegedly, food imports rose to $7.5 billion last year, part of a six-fold increase since Chávez assumed the presidency 10 years ago. Carlos Machado, formerly an agricultural expert with the OAS and now of the Caracas-based Institute of Higher Administrative Studies does not parse words in describing the land reform plan of President Chávez. “The government policy to increase the crop production in the country is a complete failure,” he says. But there are some signs that while the production of food stuffs like beef, rice, sugar cane, and milk have decreased, the cultivation of so-called non-traditional crops, particularly fruits like bananas, melon, and pineapple, has increased. In any case, resentment toward the Chávez government appears to have grown among former large land owners whose lands were expropriated, adding to the intense polarization more often associated with urban Venezuela.
Also, various papers and news agencies, including the AP in the Wall Street Journal, continue their reporting on the tense situation in Peru. There was a bit of hopeful news late last week, when indigenous leaders called off protests after Congress revoked two controversial land decrees related to natural resource development. Well-organized indigenous groups seem to have come out of this round of the on-going conflict most powerful. As one activist said after the land decrees were revoked, “This is a historic day for indigenous people because it shows that our demands and our battles were just.” Also, approval ratings for President Alan Garcia fell to their lowest level in over 18 months over the weekend. Just 21 percent of Peruvians now approve of the president, according to a new Ipsos survey. That represents a nine percent drop from just one month ago.
And an interesting opinion piece by Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald on Brazil and its foreign policy. As the country asserts a growing role in the international community, Oppenheimer argues this weekend that the South American power should be criticized for its foreign policy which has embraced dictators and largely ignored human rights issues. Interestingly, in an interview with Der Spiegel, Lula spoke of Venezuela saying, “[Hugo] Chávez is without a doubt Venezuela's best president in the last 100 years.” And, perhaps more significantly, Brazil has abstained from a series of UN votes calling for human rights monitoring in places like North Korea, Sri Lanka, and the Congo—in contrast to its Southern Cone neighbors in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. According to Jose Miguel Vivcano of HRW, “Brazil regards human rights as an obstacle for its strategic goals. It believes its support for Third World, anti-colonialist policies should take precedence over human rights considerations,” adding that when talking about a human rights-based foreign policy Mexico, followed by Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay are the Latin American models that should be mentioned.
In other stories of interest over the weekend, serious questions surround the second round of voting for open Senate seats in Haiti. A man was killed at a rally for the very popular deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide /funeral for Rev. Gerard Jean-Just. And Haitian TV showed U.N. soldiers on the island as perhaps being responsible for the death. Also, there are reports that very few Haitians turned out for the run-off Senate vote on Sunday, likely hurting the legitimacy of those elections in what is an increasingly unstable political situation. President Rene Preval proposed a compromise earlier in the week on a controversial minimum-wage hike, saying that he “would support an increase to $5.14 for some employees, but limit the minimum wage to $3.25 for factory workers who make clothing for export.” Parliament is expected to take up the issue this week.
A new UN report says that coca cultivation in Colombia fell last year [although it remains the top world producer of the plant] while cultivation of the crop rose in Peru and Bolivia for the third straight year. The UN said that crackdown on cultivation in Colombia has directly related to those increases in Peru and Bolivia, with the case of Peru now becoming increasingly worrisome due to the presence of international cartels. Conservative columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady brings Ecuador into the mix in discussing Colombia in the WSJ, arguing the U.S. should reaffirm its relationship with the country when Alvaro Uribe visits Washington this week instead of reaching out to Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, whom she calls “Fidel Castro with a Ph.D. in economics.”
Gunmen threw a grenade at an ambulance and then opened its doors to kill a patient inside, just after the victim had narrowly survived an earlier shooting in the drug cartel-plagued state of Morelia, Mexico on Friday. That according to the AP which also reports on an issue I have mentioned a few times in past weeks: the growing number of Mexican drug users—and the growing problem of drug cartels directing violence against such users.
Finally, two other pieces this weekend worth reading. The NYT has a long piece on the issue of Salvadoran gang rivalries in suburban New York. The author of the piece, Sarah Garland, has a new book coming out shortly entitled “Gangs in Garden City,” based on five years following Central American gang members on Long Island. And, this morning, the WaPo writes on the largely unknown significance of the U.S.-Mexican border corridor, which unbeknownst to me, happens to also be one of the most important geographic areas for migratory animals. This fact has made the construction of a border fence along the border very unpopular with environmentalists who have joined civil rights groups and Indian tribes in opposing the barrier’s completion.
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