In a weekend report, the LA Times has more on an interview Mexican President Felipe Calderon gave last week in which he expressed his strong opposition to California’s upcoming ballot initiative on marijuana legalization. According to the paper, Calderon argues the proposition “reflects softening attitudes toward drug consumption in the U.S. that are undercutting efforts to control organized crime groups in Mexico.” Calderon:
“I think [the United States has] very little moral authority to condemn Mexican farmers who out of hunger are planting marijuana to feed the insatiable [U.S.] appetite for drugs.”
That view, however, is far from unanimous in Mexico where, the Times contends, “sharp debates” have been triggered by the California’s Proposition 19. Mr. Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, for one, has made public his strong support for Prop. 19 arguing that its passage would be a “great step forward” – one which might “open the door to these ideas for us.” Mr. Fox’s former spokesperson, Ruben Aguilar, went further in imagining the changes that could be on the horizon after Prop. 19:
“People in California will be in their supermarkets and their Walmarts with their legal pot, and down here we'll be killing each other. Things will have to change here. It makes no sense for us to keep killing.”
While Mexico did decriminalize the possession of small amounts of narcotics last year, it did not go as far as Prop. 19 would [The paper says that, should Prop. 19 pass, it would not only legalize the possession of small quantities of marijuana but would also allow “cities and counties to approve commercial growing and sales of the drug”].
Of course there is a counter-argument being made by anti-legalization advocates. For one, many argue that that Mexico's other leading narcotics exports to the United States – cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine – would continue to supply cartels with significant profits. And, according to the paper, even if drug smuggling profits fell, skeptics also maintain that since Mexican cartels have diversified into numerous other criminal enterprises in recent years (kidnapping, extortion, migrant smuggling and selling pirated goods), their power may be unaffected by marijuana legalization.
Meanwhile, in other drug-related stories from this weekend: the AP reports on the assassination of another Mexican mayor, this time in a small town in Oaxaca. Antonio Jimenez Banos would have assumed office in January, following his July election in the town of Martires de Tacubaya. The murder was the 12th slaying of a Mexican municipal leader this year. Mexico’s El Universal has more on the new framework being put together by the Mexican government to protect journalists. The details were presented last week by the Mexican Human Rights Commission. [More at Slate, on what Mexican journalists can learn from the Colombian experience]. The New York Times reports on the killing of an American citizen on Falcon Lake last week. The shooting was “the latest in a string of attacks by pirates on the lake that began on April 30,” the Times reports. According to the paper, the incident has “strained tense relations between the Texas authorities and the Mexican government.” And finally, the unlikely bed fellow of legalization advocates, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, in the Wall Street Journal. To help Mexico deal with its “antitrust” problem, O’Grady argues “the U.S. has to recognize that competition in the narcotics sector is preferable to the monopolistic syndicates that threaten the state and could move north.” O’Grady also touches on the complexities of the cocaine trade – a somewhat more difficult issue, it would seem, than marijuana.
To other stories:
· The New York Times’ Simon Romero sat down for an interview last Friday with Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. I recommend reading the full article which traces the unlikely rise of the country’s populist economist-president. On the tensions which triggered the recent “coup attempt,” Correa tells Romero that “obviously what I’m doing affects privileges, and we always knew that there was risk in this project. But the only way of not generating conflict is to do nothing, and I wasn’t elected to do nothing.” Under Correa, Romero says, there has been a “constitutional overhaul that raised pension payments for the poor, prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and enhanced [the president’s] own power, allowing him to run for two new four-year terms that could enable him to stay in office until 2017.” Correa has also taken on international financial institutions, expelling the World Bank’s Ecuadorean representative and defaulting on foreign debt. And last year Correa made good on a popular campaign promise by not renewing the US military’s lease at Manta – all changes he says are commensurate with FDR’s New Deal. Correa:
“If they were in our place, the large majority of North Americans would do the same thing because they would never put up with the levels of injustice, inequality and inefficiency that this country has had.”
· With more on Ecuador. News that the government has decided to extend its “state of emergency” in Quito for an indefinite period of time. The objective: to keep the military in charge of security at the National Assembly and other public institutions while a restructuring of police forces begins. According to the minister of internal and external security, Miguel Carvajal, the measures (legal under the country’s constitution) will not include restrictions on individual rights. Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera says police officials arrested thus far for their alleged role in the recent uprising-turned-coup-attempt are complaining that they have become the objects of a “witch hunt.” And new post-crisis poll numbers show Correa picking up a significant boost in popular support. Again, Al-Jazeera: “Correa's popularity rose five percentage points to 58 per cent after the violence, according to a Cedatos-Gallup survey released on Tuesday.”
· Reuters reports on the congressional letter sent to US Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, contending that “the United States should support November elections in Haiti only if they include all eligible political parties.” The failure to do hold “free, fair and inclusive presidential and legislative elections on Nov. 28,” the letter maintains, could endanger Haiti’s governance and reconstruction.
· In Cuba, news that three more political prisoners will be released to Spain. The new releases will bring the total number of prisoners who have freed upon accepting exile in Spain to 42. Interestingly, the latest releases are not part of the “Group of 75,” and according to reports this may “confirme the Cuban regime’s intention of widening the scope of the release of political prisoners beyond the 52 already promised.” More from the AP.
· From the New York Times, a report this morning (with a somewhat bizarre photo) looks at community policing (aka the “peace police”) in Rio de Janeiro – with a particular focus on perhaps the city’s most famous favela, City of God. The Times:
“[A]lmost two years after the new police units first arrived, many residents in this community of 120,000 people still struggle to accept that the 315 police officers working 12-hour shifts around them are no longer the enemy. Others welcome the calm but distrust it, worrying that the police force — formally called ‘police pacification units’ — will leave once the Olympics end.”
· Colombia has been accepted as the newest non-permanent member of UN Security Council.
· The 33 trapped Chilean miners are on the verge of being rescued. The New York Times, among others, has reporting.
· The AP has more on new anti-racism legislation in Bolivia which was approved early Friday by the Bolivian Senate. The legislation has been the object of protest by various journalists in the country – over 60 of whom have since gone on a hunger strike in opposition.
· Finally, a handful of opinions. The Latin America Working Group’s Lisa Haugaard, at the Huffington Post, on the need for the US to take responsibility for human rights abuses committed by military officers it trains and funds in Colombia and Mexico. Also at the Huffington Post, Joel Hirst of the Council on Foreign Relations, argues against what he sees as the potentially “destabilizing” prospect of constitutional reform in Honduras. And John Lindsay-Poland and Susana Pimiento, both of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, have the latest on the status of the US-Colombia bases deal, at Foreign Policy in Focus.
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