Narcobloqueos and More Murders as Clinton, Gates Go to Mexico

The Mexican press calls them narcobloqueos. They involve drug traffickers hijacking tracker-trailers, buses and other vehicles and then blocking traffic on city streets in some of Mexico’s largest cities. According to the New York Times’ Marc Lacey this weekend, they’re the latest tactic being used by Mexican cartels to thwart security officials and generally frustrate the Mexican public. Monterrey was particularly affected by the bloqueos last week, as alleged traffickers blocked more than 30 streets and highways in and around the city. The head of public security in the state of Nuevo León, Luis Carlos Treviño Berchelmann, says the blockades are a cartel response to recent antidrug offensives by the government.

Two university students were also killed in Monterrey over the weekend during a shootout between traffickers and security officials. Mexican officials initially labeled the two victims drug traffickers but later revised that statement, indicating they were simply bystanders caught in the line of fire. Elsewhere in the country on Saturday, 51 others were murdered, according to Mexican reporting, making it one of the deadliest single days in the last three years. This as a delegation of senior US officials prepares to travel to Mexico on Tuesday for a meeting on security issues. The high profile group includes Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen. According to the Nuevo Herald, much of the group’s focus will be on effectiveness of the Merida Initiative.

Also on Mexico drug violence this weekend, the Wall Street Journal runs a piece on Ciudad Juárez, describing the mass exodus of “those with the means” from the one-time NAFTA boomtown. The paper writes:

“No solid number exists for the exodus, a matter of debate among Juárez's leaders. But the city's planning department estimates 116,000 homes are now abandoned. Measured against the average household size of the last census, the population who inhabited the empty homes alone could be as high as 400,000 people, representing one-third of the city before the violence began.”

If accurate, those numbers would be “one of the largest single exoduses in decades.”

At Foreign Policy, a re-print of a Small Wars Journal column by Robert Haddick, managing editor of the journal, argues that last week, with the murder of three U.S. consular officials, may be the week Mexico lost its battle with drug traffickers. According to Haddick:

“Three years into Calderón's escalation, an increasing number of Mexicans may now conclude that the only path to greater peace may be accommodation with the cartels. With their ability to apply intense pain and also distribute their massive revenues within some of Mexico's neighborhoods, the cartels are in a good position to sway public opinion toward a truce. Calderón sought to establish the state's authority as supreme. Juárez could instead show him what defeat looks like.”

And in her Wall Street Journal column, even conservative columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady seems to have lost all faith in the militarization of Mexico’s drug war.

“Some 7,000 troops now patrol Juárez, a city of roughly one million. Yet even militarization has not delivered the peace. The reason is simple enough: The source of the problem is not Mexican supply. It is American demand coupled with prohibition.”

O’Grady doubts that tomorrow’s US delegation’s visit to Mexico will acknowledge the US responsibility in fueling the drug war, but, she adds, the killing of consular officials last week may force Americans to finally “face their role in the mess.”

To other stories this weekend:

· Bill Clinton and George W. Bush will be traveling together to Haiti today to “assess recovery needs.” The two, tapped by President Obama to head fundraising efforts back in January, will be greeted by frustration, present and past [as the AP writes, One [Clinton] restored a Haitian president to power; the other [Bush] flew him back out again.] Supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in particular, are planning protests for today, according to the AP. The two former US presidents plan to meet with Haitian President Rene Preval on the grounds of the collapsed national palace.

· Other Haiti stories from this weekend include a Time report on “Haiti’s next big crisis:” the holding of elections. In an interview with the magazine last week, Preval insisted again that speedy elections were “a necessity” for his country. “They may not happen tomorrow, but they will happen before I leave,” says Preval. “We have 11 months.” The piece continues with great doubt: “…many Haitians are skeptical that a government that has seemed incapable of addressing basic needs like security, shelter and sanitation can put together even one national election, let alone two.” The New York Times examines one of the numerous tent cities around Port-au-Prince—this one at the former, upscale Petionville golf club that is now home to some 44,000 displaced Haitians (some 40% of Haiti’s 1.2 million displaced citizens are still without tents, the paper adds). Editorials in the Times and the Miami Herald call on the US to do more for Haiti, demanding US officials speed up the granting of Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the US and grant trade preferences to the country. And for those interested in a bit of interesting history, a recent piece by Ted Widmer in the Boston Globe retells the story of how the U.S. may never have come into existence if it weren’t for Haiti.

· On Honduras, historian Dana Frank, just back from the country, has an interesting piece in The Nation on the FNRP, the newfound political energy found within the anti-coup resistance, and ongoing repression targeting political activists. Frank writes, “What unites the resistance is not just opposition to the coup regime but a positive vision of a new Honduras, to be enacted through a national assembly that would, in turn, produce a new Constitution.” She continues: “In a snowballing process of collective awakening and self-discovery…this ongoing process of protest, repression and even greater subsequent protest has changed ordinary people's sense of themselves and their power--all the more astonishing because none of this was supposed to happen in Honduras.”

· Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch issued a statement late last week calling on the Honduran government to investigate three recent murders of journalists in the country, along with death threats against numerous others. In Colombia, journalist Clodomiro Castilla of the magazine El Pulso was murdered this weekend at his home in Monteria. Castilla had received various death threats prior, connected to his reporting on politicians linked to paramilitary death squads. Alejandro Aguirre of the Inter American Press Association says press freedom around the region has come under fire. The countries he highlights: Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez rejected the idea that his government has any plans to censor internet freedoms, after hinting at such a move one week earlier. And the New York Times has a piece on satirical journalism in Venezuela and the popular site, Chiguire Bipolar (Bipolar Capybara)—apparently rivaling major Venezuelan dailies in pages viewed daily.

· Time reports on ex-Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo, who will be tried in the US “on charges that he laundered tens of millions of dollars that he had embezzled while he was President.” According to Joseph Tulchin, senior scholar at the Wilson Center, the unprecedented extradition of a former president will be “extremely important in addressing impunity” in Guatemala and beyond.

· Finally, with a couple of opinions this weekend, Andres Oppenheimer calls Latin Americans trend-setting, One Laptop per Child Programs (begun in Uruguay three years ago) the “best thing happening in Latin America nowadays.” And, in Newsweek, former Clinton assistant secretary of state, James Rubin, calls for the US to increase its pressure on Brazil to support a new round of UN sanctions on Iran. “If simple logic won't secure Brazil's support…then the United States should make clear that it will take Brazil's position on the Iran nuclear issue into account in deciding whether to support permanent (UN Sec. Council) membership,” says Rubin.