The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal both feature stories this morning on Cuba’s agreeing to restart talks about migration with the United States. In addition, Cuba has said it is willing to cooperate on issues of drug trafficking, terrorism, and even mail service, what the WaPo calls a “warming to President Obama’s call for a new relationship.” The announcement was made on day one of a three day visit to Latin America by Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, and, according to the report, “the announcement of the talks could take the edge off what was shaping up as a battle over Cuba at a regional meeting of foreign ministers that Clinton is scheduled to attend Tuesday in Honduras.” Many OAS member states have been pushing for Cuba’s re-entry to the inter-American body. While the talks are not expected to change significantly the number of Cubans who legally immigrate each year to the United States (about 20,000 are currently allowed), they will be the highest-level contacts between the two governments since 2003 and might lead to dialogue on other topics. “We will continue to press the Cuban government to protect basic rights, release political prisoners, and move toward democratic reform,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added in the AP brief in the WSJ.
From the New York Times and Miami Herald two separate reports look at worrying news about the Venezuelan military. In the NYT piece, the paper says President Hugo Chávez has moved to isolate many domestic critics in recent weeks, including those in the armed forces. Chávez, says the NYT, has done so by arresting and reassigning a number of high profile generals, making many military leaders “resentful at what they see as his micromanagement and politicizing of a proud and relatively independent institution.” In March, Mr. Chávez replaced the chiefs of the army, the air force and the Bolivarian Militia. Mr. Chávez also dismiseed his defense minister, Gen. Gustavo Rangel Briceño during the March shake up, and on Thursday night, intelligence agents detained another former officer, Otto Gebauer, a retired captain who was ordered to hold Mr. Chávez during a brief coup in April 2002. And Admiral Carlos Millán, and Wilfredo Barroso, a onetime general arrested along were arrested with former army chief and one-time Chávez confidant, Raul Baduel on charges of conspiring to oust Mr. Chávez. From the MH, another story opens saying, “Venezuela's recent purchase of the most lethal shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles in the Russian arsenal is sharpening U.S. concerns that parts of President Hugo Chávez's massive weapons buildup could wind up in the hands of terrorists or guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.” “We are concerned about Venezuelan arms purchases that exceed its needs and are therefore potentially destabilizing,” a State Department spokeswoman said recently. Since 2006, Venezuela has purchased more than $4 billion worth of Russian Sukhoi jets, Mi helicopters and 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles for what Chávez says is the professionalization of his 62,000-member armed forces and a defense against U.S. aggression.
And in the LA Times over the weekend, a report on the fallout from a series of drug raids that grabbed a number of local government officials for their relationship with the La Familia drug cartel in Mexico. The paper writes that La Familia “has contaminated city halls across one state [Michoacan],” and “it sometimes decides who runs and who doesn't, who lives and who dies” by purchase, intimidation, or direct order. Besides last week’s drug bust, the paper says that the murder of congressional candidate Gustavo Bucio Rodriguez last month and the murder of Nicolas Leon, a two-time mayor of Lazaro Cardenas, home of Michoacan's huge port both have the mark of La Familia killings. “La Familia goes beyond the production and transport of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine and seeks political and social standing. It has created a cult-like mystique and developed pseudo-evangelical recruitment techniques that experts and law enforcement authorities say are unique in Mexico,” writes the LAT. Moreover, La Familia has established footholds in the United States with operations in 20 to 30 cities and towns across the U.S., including Los Angeles. In Mexico, the drug cartel has expanded into the neighboring states of Guerrero, Queretaro and Mexico, battling remaining pockets of the Gulf cartel and their Zetas hitmen for primacy.
In other news, three other stories on drugs and Mexico in the NYT over the weekend. First, a feature article in the Sunday Times examines the expanding heroin trade fueled by Mexican drug gangs in the U.S. Reporting from Ohio, the paper says “Mexican drug cartels have pushed heroin sales beyond major cities into America’s suburban and rural byways.” The report goes on to say that federal officials now consider the cartels “the greatest organized crime threat to the United States, adding that the groups “are taking over heroin distribution from Colombians and Dominicans and making new inroads across the country, pushing a powerful form of heroin grown and processed in Mexico known as ‘black tar.’” From Mexico, the NYT also reports that a series of raids over the past week have “led Mexicans to grapple anew with the question of familial bonds in the criminal underworld.” The paper says the relatives of some top drug traffickers have come under intense scrutiny by law enforcement agents while drug mafias have complained publicly that their families are being harassed without reason. “Mexican authorities often lean hard on relatives of traffickers, presuming that the criminal in the family is no black sheep,” writes the NYT. But the government has also gone easy on many family members of drug kingpins, “even giving agricultural subsidies to the relatives of some of Mexico’s most wanted drug suspects living in rural areas.” And, third, Mexican officials said this week that notorious drug lord Joaquin ''El Chapo'' Guzman is playing an increasingly less-powerful role in the Sinaloa Cartel with whom he is involved.
Beyond drugs, more stories from Venezuela where President Chávez’s “Alo Presidente” marathon ran over the weekend. The Venezuelan president said during one day of the show that his next gift for President Obama would be a copy of “What is to be Done?,” by communist Vladimir Lenin. However, the 4-day telecast was interrupted by a spat between Chávez and Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. On Friday Chávez backed down from an offer to debate the Peruvian intellectual on the show. Vargas Llosa, along with Mexicans Jorge Castaneda and Enrique Krauze, expressed interest in taking the President up on his offer for a televised debate.
From the MH on Haiti, the paper writes that more relief aid is needed to get the island back on its feet after last year’s devastating hurricanes. And on El Salvador, the AP notes that President-elect Mauricio Funes has appointed his wife and a former Marxist guerrilla to Cabinet posts. First Lady Vanda Pignato will serve as minister of social inclusion and former FMLN guerrilla leader and Vice President-elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren will be education minister.
The LAT reports that that the expansion of the Panama Canal is on schedule, despite the global economic downturn. Officials will award the principal contract for the $5.25-billion expansion of the Panama Canal this month, “a project that will probably alter global shipping patterns and cement this Central American nation's place as a center of global logistics.”
Finally two opinions. The WaPo, in an editorial this weekend, declares that “freedom is on the defensive” in the Americas. Given the Inter-American Charter of the OAS, signed on Sept. 11, 2001, the WaPo says “you'd think a principal item of business would be the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Venezuela” when the OAS meets this week. But it is not, says the paper, with Cuba’s readmission to the body the number one item of concern. The WaPo calls this “a cheap and popular way to please leftist constituencies at home.” “By signaling that it cares more about ‘partnership’ with Latin American governments than defending democracy and human rights, it [the U.S.] has allowed support for those principles to crumble at the very institution founded to defend them,” concludes the WaPo. And, in the WSJ, Mary Anastasia O’Grady also goes on the offensive against Venezuela, saying Hugo Chávez is panicking under financial distress at home. She writes that domestic political repression is a “desperate measure designed to stave off an economic debacle.”
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