Better than any piece I have read in recent months, a new article by anthropologist Sarah Hill in the Boston Review draws the links between the staggering violence of Mexico's drug wars, in Ciudad Juarez particularly, and the country’s turn toward an export-manufacturing model during the 1980s– or what she calls the “globalization of manufacturing.” Just three years ago, says Hill, Juarez was a still seen by the business community as one North America’s “cities of the future.” With some 250,000 factory workers who helped make up 1/5 of total US-Mexico trade, the border region had “one of the highest economic growth rates” anywhere in the hemisphere. Today, 125,000 of those factory jobs have disappeared, along with 400,000 Juarez residents. Large sections of the city have been simply abandoned, writes Hill. Their replacements: 10,000 “combat-ready federal forces in armored vehicles” brought in to fight the growing presence of violent drug gangs.
As Hill tells it, in the late 1980s the border city was one filled with optimism – even if “head-spinning extremes” lay not far behind. “High tech industrial parks,” she writes, butted up against worker slums while “one of the world’s most profitable Wal-marts sat within view of settlements without decent water, sewers, or paved roads.” With the passage of NAFTA on January 1, 1994, the “maquila model” – which actually began with a 1960s agreement between the US and Mexico – boomed. Rural immigrants flooded Juarez and other Mexican border cities, drawn in by “relatively high maquila wages.” But instead of work, many found unemployment and poverty. And even if they did get jobs, Hill writes, most “struggled to meet basic needs, including fees for schooling that would qualify their children for factory work once they were old enough to earn a living.” The poor and unemployed turned to a new “industry – hardly obvious in the 1990s when most were concerned with the decline of the PRI’s monopoly on political power. Hill’s key observation:
“As globalization of manufacturing ramped up in the 1980s, it did so in parallel with dramatic changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of illegal narcotics. In the early ’90s the global pressures that disrupted the trade routes for cocaine that ran from Andean jungles to U.S. consumer markets converged on Juárez.”
I’ll leave the rest of the piece for you to read in-full here. Again, it’s worth a look, helping to understanding the drug trade as part of an economic process – one which, cloaked in a very dreary and bloody irony, has seen the cartels “take control” of multinational capital. Again, here’s Hill:
"For decades, the maquilas’ critics longed for border businesses to be in control, rather than simply in service, of multinational capital. This is the irony of Carrillo Fuentes’s innovation: he became the Mexican-border trade baron who accomplished all that and more. [Carrillo Fuentes is credited with moving trafficking operations from the sparsely populated Big Bend region of Texas to Juárez in the 1980s]. His generation of traffickers adapted the maquila model to their own use by taking advantage of its infrastructure to move and market their products."
Hill’s piece comes as Mexico comes to grips with a new page in drug war violence. Alfredo Corchado has more in the Dallas Morning News about the murder of PRI gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre in Tamaulipas. Read with Hill, what Corchado says about the PRI candidate is interesting: Torre campaigned on a platform security and “bringing jobs, in part by further integrating the state's economy with that of Texas.” The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, asks whether the murder might get the PRI behind Felipe Calderón’s drug war – a call the president himself made after Torre’s assassination. “United, Mexicans can and will overcome a common enemy that today threatens to destroy not only our tranquility but our democratic institutions,” Calderon said in a broadcast message yesterday. “It's in the divisions between Mexicans where criminals find spaces and vulnerabilities to harm Mexico.” More on calls for “national unity” ahead of July 4 elections from Time’s Ioan Grillo.
Moving along this morning:
· In Guatemala, two brothers – Francisco and Jose Valdes Paiz – turned themselves in to Guatemalan authorities yesterday, admitting to have helped organize the murder which took the life of Rodrigo Rosenberg over one year ago. The bizarre story, from the BBC:
“A United Nations investigation found that Mr Rosenberg had told the Valdes Paiz brothers, who were his cousins, he was being blackmailed and needed their help to hire a contract killer to murder the blackmailer. The pair allegedly hired the killer and, following Mr Rosenberg's instructions, told the killer where and when he could ambush the blackmailer. But it was Mr Rosenberg who then appeared at the time and place given to the contract killer, and had himself shot, the commission found.”
· In Colombia, the AP says a Colombian court has handed out its first set of prison sentences against leaders of demobilized far-right paramilitary death squads. According to the AP: “Edward Cobos, better known as ‘Diego Vecino,’ and Uber Banquez, alias ‘Juancho Dique,’ each received the maximum of eight years in prison dictated by the Justice and Peace law under which they surrendered.” By turning themselves in, the two avoided harsher sentences of up to 40 years for ordering massacres, kidnappings, and forced displacements.
· From EFE, the former deputy director of DAS, Jose Miguel Narvaez, has been accused by the Colombian Attorney General’s office of organizing the 1999 murder of popular journalist Jaime Garzon. The accusations come from testimony provided by former paramilitary, Jorge Ivan Laverde.
· And also Tuesday, the Colombian government said it is amending its extradition policy. According to Colombia Reports, the Ministry of Justice and Interior, by way of a press release, now says demobilized paramilitaries participating in the Justice and Peace program can not be extradited until after they have complied with the national reparation process.” The press release reads:
“With this norm, the national government seeks to ensure compliance with international commitments made by Colombia, among which, as well as being tried for crimes committed in the exterior... maintain the guarantee of a trial on national territory.”
· And lastly on Colombia, the International Crisis Group has a new report out which looks at security policy in the country going forward.
· In neighboring Venezuela, a new US ambassador has been nominated. Career foreign service officer, Larry Palmer, was tapped by President Obama Monday. Palmer currently serves as the president and CEO of Inter-American Foundation. He has held previous posts in the region as US ambassador to Honduras and Charge D'Affaires in Quito, Ecuador. Palmer would replace Patrick Duddy, if confirmed.
· Also in Venezuela, BBC Mundo reports on the “commune” system of local governance, which will likely be institutionalized by the Venezuelan parliament in the coming days. According to a co-drafter of the “Commune Law,” 214 communes are already functioning within the country – one of the major local/participatory democracy initiatives on the Chavez government’s agenda. Not surprisingly, the opposition disagrees saying the commune’s are a form of “centralism.”
· And a Venezuelan rights group, the Venezuelan Prison Observatory (OVP) is calling on the Inter-American Human Rights Commission to investigate an incident at a Caracas prison in which six inmates were killed.
· From Amnesty International, a new report on freedom of expression restrictions in Cuba; the result of what Amnesty calls a “repressive legal system.” “The laws are so vague that almost any act of dissent can be deemed criminal in some way, making it very difficult for activists to speak out against the government. There is an urgent need for reform to make all human rights a reality for all Cubans,” says Kerrie Howard, Deputy Americas Director at Amnesty International.
· Finally, opinions. Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue answers questions about Washington’s policies and views toward Latin America, at Infolatam. The Miami Herald welcomes Haitian President Rene Preval’s decree designating Nov. 28 as election day. And in Roll Call, Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), who recently visited Honduras, explains why he believes the US must change its current Honduras policy. Here’s the congressman, in his own words:
“Here’s the real rub for the U.S. in all of this: Given Washington’s subsequent silence on the coup, on Zelaya’s exile and on the call for investigations, we are not only losing an opportunity to enhance democracy for the people of Honduras, but simultaneously endangering allegiances throughout South America and undermining our multilateral efforts elsewhere.”
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