The Colombianization of Mexico?

Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said cartels operating in Mexico are looking more and more like “insurgencies” struggling for control of Mexican territory. “We face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug-trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into, or making common cause with, what we would consider an insurgency,” Clinton said, responding to a reporter’s question after her talk.

Ms Clinton added another comparison in her speech, which the Obama administration has been careful to avoid thus far. Here’s the Washington Post, quoting (full Clinton quotes on the Mexico situation, from Boz):

“It's looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narco-traffickers controlled certain parts of the country.”

The comparison, says the Post, signals “growing anxiety in the Obama administration about Mexico.” The LA Times, meanwhile, calls Ms. Clinton’s words “a striking shift in public comment by the Obama administration about the bloodshed that has cost 28,000 lives in Mexico since December 2006.” For its part, the Mexican government issued a quick response to the Secretary’s comments Wednesday afternoon. According to President Calderon’s national security adviser, Alejandro Poire, Mexico does not “share these findings, as there is a big difference between what Colombia faced and what Mexico is facing today.” Specifically, Poire said his country was acting with force and “in time” to save itself from a Colombia-like fate. If there was any similarity between the two cases, Poire continued, it lay north of the Rio Grande, rather than in Mexico or Colombia. Poire:

“Perhaps the most important similarity … is the extent to which organized crime and narcotics-trafficking organizations in both countries are fed by the enormous and gigantic U.S. demand for drugs.”

[More from BBC Mundo, examining the accuracy of the comparison – or lack thereof]

Beyond growing anxiety in the US government about the Mexico situation, observers are asking, why the Colombia comparison now? And it was Clinton herself who may have tipped the administration’s hand in her comments that followed yesterday’s speech. Clinton, again responding to the reporter following up on Mexico:

“I know that Plan Colombia was controversial. I was just in Colombia, and there were problems and there were mistakes, but it worked. And it was bipartisan, started, you know, in the Clinton administration, continued in the Bush administration…And we need to figure out what are the equivalents for Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean.”

The AP has more in Spanish on the possibility of a second Plan Colombia. As does El Salvador’s El Faro, whose headline this morning reads “United States Seeks Plan Colombia for Central America and Mexico.” A new debate may have just begun.

Behind the headline:

· To be fair, Ms. Clinton did acknowledge Latin American concerns that it’s demand for drugs in the US which fueled Colombian violence during its peak and which today fuels violence in Mexico. Clinton, yet again:

“[T]hose drugs come up through Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, through Central America, southern Mexico, to the border, and we consume them. And those guns -- you know, those guns, legal and illegal, keep flooding, along with all of the mayhem -- it's not only guns; it's weapons, it's arsenals of all kinds that come south. So I feel a real sense of responsibility to do everything we can. And again, we're working hard to come up with approaches that will actually deliver.”

A new report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns highlights the full nature of Clinton’s words on US guns going South. And add to the mix the fact that the most recent drug kingpin arrested in Mexico, Edgar Valdez Villarreal, aka “La Barbie,” is a US born citizen, as the New York Times examines today, and the case for shared responsibility for drug war violence seems quite appropriate. Yet talk of a second Plan Colombia seems off-track with more structural discussions about drug decriminalization/legalization and alternative approaches to dealing with addiction the topic of most discussion amongst drug policy analysts – this is a topic the UNODC’s head, Antonio Maria Costa takes on in a provocative piece against legalization at the Guardian today.

· And wrapping up drug war stories this morning, reports from the AP that another Mexican mayor has been killed by suspected drug hitmen – the third such murder this month. Reuters says seven individuals, affiliated with the Zetas, have been detained in connection with the massacre of 72 migrants in Tamaulipas. That killing is now being called “the worst massacre in the country's escalating drug war.” And in the LA Times, columnist Héctor Tobar says the aforementioned massacre should be provoking more outrage than it has, particularly within the US immigrant rights movement.

· From Haiti, the Miami Herald looks at that country’s presidential race. The paper says “ideology” has “fallen by the wayside” as each candidate attempts to present himself as the “unifer in a country with class, race and political divisions.”

· More on Venezuelan elections from the Real News, which talks with Venezuela scholar Greg Wilpert about the September 26 vote for a new legislature.

· Fidel Castro makes it two for two with what analysts see as two provocative – or at least out of the ordinary – statements from the former Cuban leader, both by way of the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who was recently in Havana. Yesterday, reports that Castro criticized Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. And today the story that Castro has lost faith in the Cuban communist economic model.

· The North American Congress on Latin America has its latest NACLA Report on the Americas out, examining how indigenous movements are confronting capitalism around the region. The articles seem to complement a few other recent pieces (Immanuel Wallerstein here and Raúl Zibechi here, for example) which highlight growing tension between the developmentalist agenda of many of the region’s left-leaning governments and the ecological concerns, forwarded by various social movements around the region. An excellent Al-Jazeera video report on mining conflicts in Ecuador is also worth a look.

· And, lastly, fascinating news from Costa Rica where the country’s Constitutional tribunal has declared access to the internet a fundamental human right. The state has an obligation to promote and guarantee universal citizen access to new technologies, the body’s magistrates ruled this week, adding that access to such technologies is today the basic means for fulfilling other rights, including the right to education, democratic participation, and free expression.