The 24-hour period between last Thursday and last Friday is being called the bloodiest 24 hours of Felipe Calderón’s three and a half year presidency. According to the New York Times’ Marc Lacey, 85 individuals were killed over the course of those 24 hours. And the wave of killings prompted a response from President Calderón. It wasn’t necessarily what you may have expected, however. Here’s how the Times describes it:
"Mr. Calderón responded with his most extensive defense of his administration’s drug war, a 5,000-word missive published on the presidential Web site and in local newspapers that shifted some blame for violence to previous administrations and to the United States and insisted that backing down was not an option."
“If we remain with our arms crossed, we will remain in the hands of organized crime, we will always live in fear, our children will not have a future, violence will increase and we’ll lose our freedom,” the paper quotes the president as saying.
But analysis of the president’s response had only just begun when news of more mass killings interrupted. In Zitácuaro, a town in the state of Michoacán (a stronghold of La Familia), the Wall Street Journal says at least 12 federal police officers were killed and dozens more injured in a shootout with suspected cartel gunmen. In a separate incident in Chihuahua, three officers were killed while on patrol. And, in a Sinaloa prison, 28 inmates were killed, along with three prison guards, when detained cartel members led a jail uprising.
More than 22,700 individuals have now been killed, according to government numbers, since Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006. In New Mexico, a university librarian, Molly Molloy, has been keeping her own tally on the number killed in Mexico’s bloody drug wars. The Wall Street Journal profiles her count this morning, which puts drug-related murders in Ciudad Juarez alone at over 1000 just this year. Apparently Ms. Molloy also has a useful email list to which she sends out news, numbers, and analysis of the Mexican drug war to over 300 subscribers daily [a Hemispheric Brief for just Mexico? On the New Mexico State Library website, it says you can just send Molloy an email at mollymolloy@gmail.com if you’d like to join her Mexico mailing list.]
Beyond the headline:
· The Miami Herald reports on rising military expenditures in Latin America, one week after the topic was discussed at the OAS’s general assembly in Lima, Peru. It begins with a discussion of Ecuador’s rising military budget (SIPRI says military purchases have risen 240% there from 2000 to 2009). According to Peruvian President Alan García, the host of last week’s meetings, “the cost of maintaining military bases in South America over the last five years has been $125 billion.” He maintains that with just $35 million of that money, drinking water, healthcare, and education could be provided to some 10 million Latin American families. As an interesting point of international comparison, the SIPRI report released a few weeks ago also notes that worldwide military purchases are up 49% over the last decade. In Latin America, such expenditures have risen 79% over that same period. Finally, the paper highlights that there was no mention in last week’s OAS declaration of new US military bases in Colombia – a controversial issue for most in the region.
· In Quito this week, new UNASUR Secretary General Nestor Kirchner is meeting with congressional presidents from around the region ahead of this weekend’s Summit of Parliamentary Presidents. The group will put together an agenda for increasing cooperation among the region’s various national parliaments while also discussing “options for a new South American financial architecture,” developments related to the Bank of the South, and the possibility of a regional payments compensations system. According to Infolatam, a draft of what would be the summit’s final declaration was approved by consensus yesterday. It’s focus: approval of treaty that would set in motion the creation of a UNASUR parliament. According to the president of Ecuador’s National Assembly, Fernando Cordero, “There is no doubt that that we have the political will to make a huge step forward, with optimism and maturity, toward strengthened integration.”
· In Colombia, AP news from yesterday that a fourth FARC hostage was released yesterday, in addition to the three others already reported on here.
· On Haiti, Al-Jazeera has a video report on the problems of human trafficking in the country. The annual US government report on trafficking “singles out” Haiti on the issue for the fifth year in a row. Also on Haiti, the AP has a new piece on how private foreign firms are salivating over reconstruction contracts, which have not yet been awarded. One of the companies which has been most open about its desire to make big money on reconstruction in Haiti has been AshBrit. “The company has formed a joint venture with the GB Group, a conglomerate run by one of Haiti's wealthiest men, Gilbert Bigio, and established partnerships with a number of smaller construction firms,” the AP says.
· From Venezuela, the New York Times this morning reports on Venezuela-Cuba military ties which are “raising concern among critics of [President] Chavez.” In an interview with the paper, former Chavez aid and now retired brigadier general, Antonio Rivero, says, the country is “at the mercy of meddling in areas of national security by a Cuban regime, which wants Chávez to remain in power because Chávez gives them oil.” Carlos Romero, a political scientist at the Central University in Caracas puts the number of Cubans working with the Venezuelan military at around 500. But the impact of the Cuban military in Venezuela is frequently difficult to measure. Rocío San Miguel, a legal scholar who works on military affairs in Venezuela notes that “Cuba doesn’t sell weapons systems, setting it apart from the military cooperation agreements Venezuela has with Russia or China. What Cuba sells is intelligence and strategic planning, based on 50 years of experience in keeping a repressive regime in power.”
· Also, on rights issues in Venezuela, the AP says anti-Chavez media mogul Guillermo Zuloaga appears to be in hiding after state authorities issued a warrant for his arrest last week. And Human Rights Watch posts its statement before the UN Human Rights Council on declining judicial independence in the country. HRW highlights the case of Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni, who remains in pre-trial detention
· These reports comes as new Datanalisis poll numbers show Hugo Chavez’s popularity back on the rise over the last month. The president’s approval numbers shot back up to 48% for May, up six points from April. And while I don’t typically find the pro-Chávez site Venezuela Analysis to have the most interesting analysis, I recommend two recent interviews posted there, which give interesting insights about why/how Chávez remains an appealing figure to many Venezuelans. One focuses on the “comunas” system, another on the Chavez-centeredness of the Bolivarian project.
· The EU has said it will delay any revisions of its Cuba policy until September, allowing on-going discussions between the Catholic Church and the Cuban government to proceed further.
· The AP reports that the world’s two richest men, Bill Gates and Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim, are teaming up to donate $150 million “to fight malnutrition, dengue, malaria and other health problems in Mexico and Central America.” Each man has pledged $50 million to the new initiative while the Spanish government has said they will match the donations with $50 million of its own.
· A new study from Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation says at the current rate, by 2014 just 8% of the country’s population will remain in poverty. That would mean slashing the number who currently live in poverty from 30 million today to just 15 million four years from now. Structurally Mal-adjusted, meanwhile, has a good breakdown of recent unemployment numbers from Latin America, as reported by the CEPAL. While most saw marginal rises in unemployment numbers last year, Uruguay was the only Lat Am country which continued to reduce unemployment during the financial turbulence of the last year.
· Is the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in El Salvador the new School of the Americas? A recent piece in Argentina’s Página 12 raises the question after two Argentine police officers traveled to El Salvador to take part in what the paper calls “counter terrorism and counter narcotics” coursework.
· Finally, in Chile, President Sebastian Pinera is under more criticism for comments made by his allies on the far Right. This time, however, it’s the president’s own brother, José, a former minister in the Pinochet government. Speaking with the Argentine paper, Perfil, the BBC reports on José Pinera comparing the trajectory of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government to that of Adolf Hitler.
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