Four of the five major US papers that regularly cover Latin America have four distinct features this morning which look at the drug war around Mexico.
We start this morning with a piece from the Washington Post’s William Booth who reports on rising drug violence in northeastern Mexico, just south of the US border. “The northeastern states along the Gulf of Mexico had been mostly quiet as drug cartels and the Mexican military fought farther west,” writes the paper. But that has since change, as “powerful and warring crime syndicates have now launched a campaign of terror…abducting journalists, beheading police officers and assaulting military garrisons.” The region made headlines earlier this month when traffickers lobbed a grenade at US consular offices in Nuevo Laredo, and, Booth says, “the cartels' tactics are growing in sophistication.” Stealing vehicles to barricade roads, highways, and bridges, for example, have become common tactics in Nuevo Laredo and Tamaulipas. Journalists have become particular targets, with four having gone missing in recent months. And police in certain rural locales have all but disappeared, leaving local officials helpless.
“We are being crushed between forces,” the mayor of the town of Los Aldamas says, sitting in his empty city hall while he awaits the arrival of promised troops after two of his police officers were brutally murdered [prompting the resignation of the remaining six troopers on the town’s police force].
The New York Times begins to take us west and a little south with a report from the wealthy Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza García. There the Times’ James McKinley looks at the city’s controversial mayor, Mauricio Fernandez. Critics accuse the recently elected Fernandez of having “questionable ties” to the Beltran Leyva drug cartel, based in Sinaloa, with some claiming that the mayor has “appeased that gang in return for peace and protection from the Zetas.” His supporters argue the opposite: that it is Fernandez who has “run organized crime out of this elegant town of walled mansions with his own teams of spies and extrajudicial enforcers.” The latter was Fernandez’s campaign promise last year, and since being elected, he has admitted to having created a network of “intelligence squads”—mostly “former police officers and other muscle-bound types”—who are being bankrolled by private businesses. On the security end, Fernandez’s vigilantes seem to be doing the job as crime and kidnappings have fallen significantly over the last six months. Further, nine out of ten residents back the mayor’s work. But at what cost, ask detractors?
Next, the Miami Herald takes reporting west along the US-Mexico border for a piece on Ciudad Juarez. The paper begins with this apocalyptic lead: “crime is so pervasive that the people are either leaving, cowering, avoiding the streets -- or getting kidnapped and killed.” Already 686 people have been murdered in Juarez in 2010. Thousands more have fled. “The exodus is dramatic,” said Gustavo de la Rosa, the local ombudsman for the Chihuahua State human rights commission. “There are at least 20,000 abandoned houses, and maybe up to 30,000.” And businesses have closed their doors. “Six thousand businesses have closed during the last nine months,” Daniel Murguia Lardizabal, head of the local branch of the National Chamber of Commerce, tells the paper. This means that those who remain (many of them youth, ages 15-29) are left without jobs, fueling the vicious cycle of drug violence. An estimated 70,000 young people neither study nor have jobs in the city, according to the local head of the Mexican Employers’ Association.
Finally, the LA Times takes us South to the state of Morelos and the city of Cuernavaca, just one hour from the Mexican capital. The city has become the latest site of a spike in cartel activity as rival gangs fight over drug routes once controlled by the aforementioned Arturo Beltran Leyva, killed last December. Nearly 50 people have been murdered in the formerly quiet state of Morelos since the year began. And residents’ fears rose last weekend “after anonymous e-mail threats warned people to stay away from nightspots or risk being caught up in what the sender described as a hunt for rivals.” The paper’s Ken Ellingwood interprets the situation in Morelos in the following way:
"The sudden outbreak of killing in Morelos underscores how violence has hop-scotched around Mexico since President Felipe Calderon mobilized the military in a crackdown on traffickers and other organized-crime groups in December 2006."
In other news:
· In Argentina, the New York Times reports on the sentencing of that country’s last military dictator to 25 years in prison for his administering of the Campo de Mayo concentration camp outside Buenos Aires during the 1976-1983 Argentine dictatorship. The sentence handed down to Reynaldo Benito Bignone (82 years old and currently under house arrest) was one of the longest given to any leader of the murderous military junta. The scene outside the courtroom speaks volumes about the sensitivity that still surrounds unprosecuted rights abuses committed during the dictatorial era.
“Outside the gym, about 1,000 supporters of the families of the victims gathered on a leafy street. After the verdict was read, people began singing, ‘Like the Nazis/It is going to happen to you/Wherever you go/We are going to find you.’”
· Meanwhile, Argentina and Uruguay seem to be on the brink of moving beyond a border dispute, almost a half-decade in the making. On Tuesday the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued its final (and non-appealable) ruling on a paper mill built on the Uruguayan side of Rio Uruguay. Argentina has long maintained that the mill built on the river which separates the two countries was ecologically harmful. However, that claim was rejected by the court who ruled in Uruguay’s favor [although the ICJ did say Uruguay had failed to meet its obligation to notify Argentina about the project].
· More on Colombia-Venezuela-Ecuador relations after frontrunner Juan Manuel Santos (and conservative Noemí Sanín) said this week that they stand by the decision to raid a FARC camp in Ecuador in 2008. [According to BBC Mundo, Santos, then defense minister, went so far as to say he was “proud” he led the military strike while Sanín said she would do the same thing today, if needed]. That response provoked Hugo Chavez’s recent comments about Santos being a “threat” to Venezuela, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. Rafael Correa echoed those sentiments via his presidential website yesterday. “I feel a profound sorrow for those who play emperor and would like to convert Latin America into the new Middle East,” he wrote. “Next time they will find Ecuador much better prepared, we’ll know how to defend ourselves.”
· Also on Colombia, the Latin America News Dispatch reports on (and interviews) Colombian journalist Claudia Lopez. Lopez’s reporting on the para-política scandal prompted investigations of over one third of Colombia’s Congress members for ties to illegal groups. She was forced out from her position as a reporter at El Tiempo last year. Lopez spoke at New York University last week and Princeton University yesterday. The short video and interview can be watched here.
· Elizabeth Dickinson at Foreign Policy says she’s been reading a Semana profile of Antanas Mockus, his Partido Verde, and the “Green Revolution” sweeping through parts of Colombia. I thought I would give the piece a look as well, and, Dickinson’s right. It’s certainly worth a read. One favorite section of mine:
“In Colombia, despite Uribe’s popularity, people are claiming a change, particularly young citizens. The only force comparable to Uribe is not the ‘antiuribismo’ but that of something different. And Mockus embodies it. In a certain way, he could be described as a freak in a country accustomed to the purposes and not the means, but he also appears as a theoretical educator whose philosophy is centered on ethics.”
· NACLA has a piece on the “political uses of the drug war” in the Americas, particularly against left-leaning presidents in Central American and the Andes.
· Cristina Kirchner spoke of an ever-more unified Latin America, with talk of “creating South America,” as she addressed the Venezuelan National Assembly to mark that country’s bicentennial. At an Ibero-American summit in Madrid this week, others, including former Mexican foreign minister, Jorge Castaneda, expressed an opposite sentiment of regional disunity. According to Castaneda, the region’s two largest powers, Mexico and Brazil, are heading in opposite directions and it is “impossible to establish a common position in the region.”
· Reports from Day II of the Bolivian climate summit at Jim Shultz’s Democracy Center blog. Shultz was also on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman to talk about the event.
· China and Venezuela have completed the details of a new joint oil deal—a $16.32 billion venture between the two countries that will pump 400,000 barrels/day out of the Orinoco belt. PDVSA controls 60% of the project while the China National Petroleum Company controls the remaining 40%.
· And, from Haiti, Partners in Health has a new three-month report on the medical-humanitarian work being done around the country since January’s quake.
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