Mrs. Obama to Mexico City

Worries in some corners that the United States may increasingly be a target of drug gangs in Northern Mexico rose late Friday when the US Consulate in Nuevo Laredo was struck with a small explosive device. According to the New York Times, no officials were injured in the attack which occurred around 11pm, although both the consulate and a consular office in nearby Piedras Negras are closed indefinitely following the incident. Investigators say the bomb appears to have been homemade.

As the Wall Street Journal writes, the Friday attack is the second against consular employees in Mexico in the last two months. On March 13, three individuals affiliated with the US consulate in Juarez were shot and killed. And arrests connecting those murders to the Barrio Azteca prison gang have since been made. But, say investigators, there do not appear to be any links between the those attacks and Friday’s incidents. [Nuevo Laredo and Juarez are controlled by different cartels, notes the Journal]. In 2008, two gunmen also fired on the US consulate in Monterrey and lobbed an explosive device at the building which never exploded.

The Friday incident comes as First Lady Michelle Obama prepares to make her first solo diplomatic trip Tuesday, with Mexico City being her chosen destination. There she will do events with youth and women’s groups while also dining with President Calderon and his wife, Margarita Zavala de Calderon at Los Pinos. [Both women have an interest in childhood obesity]. Mrs. Obama has never been to Mexico before and the visit is expected to draw significant attention. “It will be on the front pages of every single newspaper in Mexico,” Mexico's ambassador to the U.S., Arturo Sarukhan, tells Politics Daily. According to that report, “Mrs. Obama's stay in Mexico City is designed to emphasize the close relationship between the two countries, even as leaders of both nations wrestle with the cross-border problem of drug use in the U.S. and escalating violence among drug cartels in Mexico.” A senior White House official echoed that feeling as well this weekend. “I think [the trip] underscores the importance that Mexico has for the United States and for the Obama administration.”

To other stories from the weekend:

· The Economist looks at the new threat of organized criminal gangs in Colombia ahead of May’s presidential vote in this week’s issue. The magazine writes that outgoing President Alvaro Uribe has had notable success with his “democratic security” program, “crippling guerrilla groups,” demobilizing “tens of thousands of their paramilitary opponents,” and reducing murders, kidnappings and other crimes significantly. So successful have such policies been (at least in the public’s mind) that security no longer tops the list of voter concerns. To the contrary, poverty, unemployment, and healthcare now are now apparently Colombians’ top worries. Nevertheless, the Economist continues, many doubts still remain. The article cites the Colombian Commission of Jurists which has noted that extrajudicial killings doubled between Uribe’s first year in office and June 2007 (from 127 to 228). And another security threat looms on the horizon: new criminal gangs (called “successor groups” by Human Rights Watch in its recent report on the matter), frequently led by “former mid-level commanders of the paramilitaries” and “mostly dedicated to the cocaine trade.” The National Police says some 4,000 people are involved in eight main gangs spread across 24 of Colombia’s 32 departments. Human-rights groups say the number could be much larger.

· Also from Colombia, new poll numbers show the centre-left duo of Antanas Mockus and Sergio Fajardo now running a close second to frontrunner and Uribista, Juan Manuel Santos. A Datexco poll puts Santos at 29.5% with Mockus at 24.8%. Conservative candidate Noemí Sanín has fallen to third at just over 16%. However, the eccentric former Bogotá mayor Mockus also revealed this weekend that he has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He insists the illness is in its incipient stages and would have no effect on his ability to govern but there is speculation that the revelation could affect his campaign. Finally, via Just the Facts, news about new US House legislation being presented on internally displaced persons in Colombia. The Washington Office on Latin America has more with a statement supporting the new legislation. The Latin America Working Group, meanwhile, has an action alert on the matter at its site.

· In Honduras, a shootout between rival gangs fighting for control of drug trafficking routes in the country rocked the city of Tegucigalpa Sunday. Nine were killed, say Honduran officials, when “gang members wearing police uniforms and ski masks” burst into a house on the periphery of the capital. Those involved in the shootout are believed to be part of the Mara Salvatrucha and its rival gang, Mara 18. More than 7000 persons were killed in Honduras in 2008—a 25% increase from 2007.

· That news comes as other reports of violence and state militarization come from the Honduran countryside. At Honduras Culture and Politics, RAJ has the latest on an increasingly tense situation between campesinos in Bajo Aguan and state security forces. Some 30 military transports were ordered into Bajo Aguan by President Pepe Lobo this weekend to quell so-called “anxiety.” Peasant organizations have been struggling to obtain land rights on the Atlantic coast for months.

· The Open Society Institute’s new blog has a post up by my colleague David Holiday who recently interviewed Carlos Dada, editor of the Salvadoran online daily El Faro. The discussion focuses on the outlet’s exclusive interview with former death squad member, Alvaro Saravia, on the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

· The National Security Archive has released a recently declassified State Dept. document showing that then Sec. of State Henry Kissinger rescinded instructions sent to, but never implemented by, US ambassadors in the Southern Cone which warned against the escalation of international assassinations. The Sept. 16, 1976 cable from Kissinger came one day before the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt in DC’s Sheridan circle. “The September 16th cable is the missing piece of the historical puzzle on Kissinger's role in the action, and inaction, of the U.S. government after learning of Condor assassination plots,” says NSA analyst Peter Kornbluh.

· On Latin America’s foreign relations agenda this week, US Sec. of Defense Robert Gates visits Colombia and Peru where AFP says the growing influence of Russia and Iran are top on the secretary’s agenda. His trip will end in Barbados for discussions on security and anti-drug efforts which were also under discussion when Ass’t. Sec. of State Arturo Valenzuela wrapped up his Latin American tour in Peru Saturday. [AFP says Valenzuela proposed the creation of a new Andean anti-drug initiative in Lima]. The trip is the secretary’s first to South America in his two and a half years at the helm of the Pentagon. Brazil, meanwhile, awaits with great anticipation the arrival of Chinese President Hu Jintao. Xinhua reports that the Brazilians are “attaching great importance” to Hu’s visit which begins Wednesday. “We are thrilled with [the visit], that is an important step, ensuring significant progress in several dimensions of the relationship, and we are very happy because it will complete a process of rapprochement that has been taking place for a long time but gained more momentum recently,” said Roberto Jaguaribe, assistant secretary-general for political affairs of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry.

· An interesting video report from Al-Jazeera on “solidarity hospitals” which provide basic healthcare to low income groups in Peru.

· Some LatinAmerican countries, including Bolivia and Ecuador, are being penalized by the US for opposing the UN’s Copenhagen Accords on climate change. More from the Latin Americanist and the AP.

· Finally, a handful of opinions. Andres Oppenheimer writes on Hu Jintao’s Latin America visit, saying there are reasons to worry about the “China-Latin America love affair.” His arguments about Latin America’s overdependence on raw material exports, the need to diversify in order to prevent a “boom-bust” situation, etc. are ones which readers may have heard before. John Kerry and Robert Menendez have a piece in the Miami Herald on drug violence in Mexico, arguing trust-building and intelligence sharing with the Mexican government must continue to improve. Their proposal is new legislation, specifically the recently proposed “Counternarcotics and Citizen Security for the Americas Act of 2010.” Also in the Miami Herald, columnist Carlos Alberto Montaner publishes a series of exchanges he has been having with musician Silvio Rodríguez about the situation in Cuba. And lastly, Mary Anastasia O’Grady is provocative as usual criticizing Arturo Valenzuela for meeting with Rafael Correa. While her concerns about crackdowns on press freedom in Ecuador are legitimate, there’s something about her style which is frequently off-putting. Her second paragraph caught my eye:

Why pay attention to a mid-level diplomatic visit to a banana republic? Because if you want to know what Honduras avoided by refusing to kowtow to the U.S. last year, Ecuador is it. Moreover, Mr. Valenzuela's visit demonstrates how little the U.S. is willing or able to do for people who fall victim to left-wing tyranny.”