There are new calls for Mexican President Felipe Calderon to change direction in his country’s fight against violent drug cartels, the Washington Post reports this morning. Many, even within the president’s own party, are coming out against him, says today’s piece, arguing that an overreliance on the “blunt force of the military” has promoted “violence and lawlessness” around the country. Interestingly, some U.S. and Mexican officials are increasingly drawing comparisons with the conflict in Colombia where the U.S. spent $6 billion between 2000 and 2006 to try to halt the influence of powerful trafficking groups. “The question is whether the country can withstand another three years of this, with violence that undermines the credibility of the government,” says Carlos Flores of Mexico’s Center for Investigations and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology. Supporters of President Calderon’s military strategy, however, have complained that critics have yet to put forward a reasonable alternative. In particular, Calderon’s interior minister, Fernando Gomez Mont, insisted that the president’s plan was succeeding in protecting innocent victims of a drug war that has taken some 12,000 lives over just 2 ½ years. But across the country, the fight is more and more seen as simply Calderon’s initiative and some close to him say he now feels more alone on the matter than ever. Indeed, as the Post reports, the cover of the news magazine Proceso this week featured a photo of 12 federal agents recently murdered by cartel gangs, their dead bodies piled up, beneath the headline: “Calderón's War.” Meanwhile, there was also an opinion piece in the Post that I missed yesterday on Mexico, elections, and the drug war. Ruben Navarrette writes that the PRI won legislative elections earlier this month, promising “security,” which he calls code for “stopping the fight against drug cartels.” He argues that as Mexican support for Calderon’s offensive dwindles, it will become ever more important that the U.S. stand by Mexico with continued counter-narcotics/military aid through the Mérida Initiative.
From Honduras, there are new signs that the de facto regime in Tegucigalpa may simply be stalling until scheduled elections take place this fall. In an interview with the AP, Roberto Micheletti’s foreign minister, Carlos Lopez, told the news agency that Zelaya would likely lose relevance as a political figure in the country as soon as campaigning begins. The foreign minister also was optimistic that the international community would see elections held under the current circumstances as legitimate, although there are few public statements from international leaders supporting this belief. Meanwhile, Zelaya remained camped out near the Nicaraguan border as hundreds of supporters crossed from Honduras to join him. The AP says this group largely included poor farmers, teachers, and street activists while the New York Times says the group of Zelaya supporters surround their leader in camps where they are “eating chicken dinners provided by Nicaraguan aid groups” and “listening to revolutionary songs.” The Honduran military eventually closed down the border yesterday, prohibiting crossings others who had arrived to join the ousted president. In Tegucigalpa, Reuters writes that the Honduran Congress delayed a vote on whether or not it believed Zelaya could return to the country under a power sharing agreement, saying the matter was a “constitutional” one for the Supreme Court to decide. A congressional committee, however, was formed to study various elements of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias’s proposal. It is expected to report on Thursday.
Also this morning, intense questions from the government of Sweden about how Swedish-made anti-tank rocket launchers, sold to Venezuela, have ended up in the hands of FARC rebels in Colombia. The discovery of the weapons appears to have strengthened Colombia’s claim that the Venezuelan government has provided weaponry to the FARC. In the wake of U.S. plans to move counter-narcotics operations to military bases in Colombia, the news will likely make relations between the two country even more tense. The LA Times’ Chris Kraul adds to the reporting saying Venezuela is notorious for “seepage” by corrupt officers, who resell arms and munitions as contraband.
On Haiti, as many as 85 Haitians are missing today after their boat capsized off the Turks and Caicos Islands, writes the Wall Street Journal. Over 100 survivors were found by the U.S. Coast Guard, along with two bodies, near a reef which the large vessel apparently crashed into. In Haiti itself, the Miami Herald has a story today saying the country is showing signs of progress, a year after powerful storms destroyed significant portions of Haiti’s infrastructure. As the Inter-American Development Bank’s president, Claudio Moreno, visited the French-Caribbean country, the MH writes: “In a country where promises are broken and donor contracts take years to execute, the $1.2 million Mariani Market on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince illustrates the steady pockets of progress being made in this fragile Caribbean nation.” In the last three weeks Haiti has had $1.2 billion in foreign debt erased, the U.S. and Canada have revised travel warnings to the country, and Bill Clinton, Moreno, and development specialist Jeffrey Sachs have all visited the island.
New findings by Amnesty International on women’s issues in Nicaragua show that a ban on abortion instituted in late 2006 is responsible for rising deaths among pregnant women and girls in the country. The Central American country is currently part of the 3% of world nations that do not allow abortion under any circumstances.
And two notes on Cuba this morning. First, the New York Times reports that the U.S. Interests Section in Havana has turned off the billboard message board installed in 2006. “We believe that the billboard was really not effective as a means of delivering information to the Cuban people,” the State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, said Monday. Kelly also noted that the Cuban government had removed some of its negative billboards around the mission earlier this year, which he said the United States viewed as “a positive gesture.” Finally, the Wall Street Journal writes that U.S. airports are lobbying the government to expand the ports of entry for flights going to and from Cuba. Currently Miami, Los Angeles, and New York are the only three cities that service the island, following relaxation in family travel a few months ago.
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