Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos completes his first 100 days in the Casa de Narino this week with a new Ipsos-Napoleón Franco poll from Colombia’s Semana showing some 73 percent of Colombians holding a favorable opinion of their current president. Sixty-six percent of those surveyed say Santos has moved to carry out to his campaign pledges thus far. Just 7% say the new president has governed “poorly” or “very poorly.” As Semana notes, those numbers are the second highest levels of approval for Santos over the course of his entire political career, coming close to numbers he reached when, as defense minister, he directed operations that successfully rescued 15 FARC hostages, most famous among them Ingrid Betancourt.
Curiously, however, Santos has yet to reach the popularity that his predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, still enjoys in Colombia. Again, from the new Ipsos poll, 76% of Colombians still have a positive opinion of the former president – that despite having exhibited a much more confrontational and polarizing governing style than the reform-minded Mr. Santos , and despite the opening of numerous judicial investigations against Uribe and his allies since the former president left office.
Differences in governing style have been perhaps most notable in the area of foreign affairs where Santos has embraced regional integration and sought to mend fences with his neighbor Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. That move has the support of a quite amazing 84% of Colombians and the president’s foreign minister, María Ángela Holguín enjoys very high levels of approval for her work as well, says Semana.
On the latter issue – that of Uribe-linked scandals – Semana has a second interesting report this week, examining some nine such corruption scandals that have come to more full public view during President Santos’s first 100 days.
But it’s on the issue of security – both national security (i.e. the lucha against los FARC) and citizen security—where Colombians still feel least comfortable. Fifty-seven percent of those polled, for example, believe the struggle against the FARC could end sometime in the next 50 years – or never – despite ongoing military strikes against FARC camps (the most recent coming yesterday when 13 more rebels were killed in strike near the Ecuadorean border).
It’s also here where international attention remains squarely fixed. This week Newsweek runs a Q & A with Santos National Security Adviser, Sergio Jaramillo Caro – the first individual to fill the post which was created by Santos upon assuming office in August. Newsweek calls Jaramillo, a former deputy minister of defense, “a key architect of Colombia’s strategy against the FARC” and someone who oversaw the consolidation of the now famous Colombian strategy of “pairing military efforts with basic development.” Seen as a success by some, a nefarious militarization of development by others, the Newsweek interview highlights the current internationalization of the Colombian model, mentioning its adaptation in Afghanistan, in Mexico, and, it now appears, increasingly in Honduras where there are more reports this week of Colombian police directly training Honduran police in the country’s special investigation services (DNSEI). Focusing on Mexico, however, Jaramillo says the Mexican government has not yet been successful in replicating Colombia’s “successes” because it has yet to “regain authority” and put its “own house in order.” Interpretation of what exactly that means I leave to readers. On the US side of the equation, Jaramillo also says Colombia’s ally now has a “duty” to cooperate with Latin American countries struggling against traffickers and organized crime by supporting “regional efforts.”
To other stories:
· In the aforementioned Mexico, reports on the rescue, by Mexican marines, of over 100 Central American migrants and five Mexicans being held at a banana plantation in the state of Chiapas by alleged human traffickers. The Central Americans identified include 83 men and 25 women from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The AP adds another story on marines freeing 10 other migrants in the Tamaulipas city of Altamira on Monday. The “hostages” included three Mexicans, four Colombians, two Salvadorans, and an Ecuadorean. Three police officers are suspected of serving the migrants up to an armed gang. More on human smuggling and migration issues in Mexico in a new television documentary “Life and Death on the Border,” which apparently began airing yesterday on Current TV.
· A new piece from the Economist calls Ciudad Miguel Aleman the Mexican drug wars’ “first displaced persons camp” after “all but 200” residents of nearby Ciudad Mier fled to Miguel Aleman over the last week. The magazine frames the root of the problem in terms of ongoing turf battles between Los Zetas and the crime syndicate which brought them into being, the Gulf Cartel. The Economist, on life in Miguel Aleman:
“Around 400 people have already moved to the refuge [in Miguel Aleman], where they queue up to eat donated food rations three times a day, sleep on donated foam mattresses, listen to live bands play norteño music, and pray. A few children are learning to play chess, while others wrestle and, worryingly, toy with utility knives. Each day brings around 30 new arrivals—a pace that would fill the shelter to capacity in a week.”
· On the deepening internationalization of drug trafficking networks, the AP on the latest in intercontinental shipment methods: South American drug gangs “buying old jets and other planes, filling them with cocaine and flying them more than 3,000 miles across the ocean to Africa.” According to new series of US indictments, at least three syndicates have entered the African aviation business, frequently using Venezuela and Panama as a South and Central American departure points and Guinea, Liberia, and Guinea-Bissau as stopovers before flying on to destinations across Europe. The traffickers themselves seem to be a combination of Colombians, men from Sierra Leone and other African nations, and a handful of Venezuelans – the much discussed and recently detained Walid Makled, among them. Makled, who up one week ago apparently still controlled his own airline (the Chavez government seized that operation last week), is accused by prosecutors of controlling various air strips in Venezuela to “launch drug flights.” Makled – whose destination for extradition is now in the hands of the Colombian Supreme Court – says again this week the Venezuelan military helped protect him. For its part, the Venezuelan police this weekend seized another major drug shipment – some 3 tons of marijuana – as it crossed into the country, by car, from Colombia. Some 60 tons of drugs have been seized by the Venezuelan police this year alone.
· Meanwhile, as the US (or Florida) Right prepares to take the reins of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in January, the extradition case of Walid Makled is already becoming a centerpiece on the conservative agenda vis a vis Latin America. The Miami Herald sat down with Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL), who will head the House’s Western Hemisphere Subcommittee and the congressman tells the paper he is asking the State Department to “stand up to Hugo Chavez” by demanding Colombia extradite Makled to the US, not his native Venezuela. Unfortunately, Rep. Mack’s interest seems to have little to do with Mr. Makled’s alleged crimes. Mack:
“It appears that the [Obama] administration's posture with Chávez is to give into Chávez, and make some attempt to reach our hand out to Chávez like that will get us somewhere. If we could get Makled here, I think he could provide a lot of evidence about the Venezuelan government's involvement in narco-trafficking.”
· From the North of Haiti, a series of reports (Washington Post, Reuters, CNN) on violent protests that broke out against UN Minustah troops in the country’s second largest city of Cap-Haitien yesterday. Another incident occurred in the central plateau town of Hinche where seven UN soldiers were injured. Protests targeted Nepalese troops who are being blamed by many for perhaps having brought cholera to the country. Also, a CBS 60 Minutes report on Haiti and growing frustrations over cholera, from last Sunday.
· The New York Times’s Deborah Sontag with a long feature piece this weekend on the place of education in Haiti’s reconstruction.
· Time Magazine profiles former Haitian first lady, Mirlande Manigat, the apparent frontrunner in a field of 19 running for the presidency in Haitian elections, still scheduled for a week from this coming Sunday.
· IPS previews the beginnings of presidential electioneering in Guatemala. The most notable information seems to be all the potential candidates who face legal barriers for even entering the race – including President Alvaro Colom’s wife, Sandra Torres, whose relationship with the current president may prevent her anticipated candidacy.
· CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot, AEI’s Roger Noriega, and Carlos Ponce of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy debate Hugo Chavez and Venezuela on the news show Ideas in Action, with Jim Glassman.
· The Atlantic magazine looks at Rio de Janeiro’s police “invasion” of favelas in the city, in preparation for the 2014 Olympics.
· Adam Isacson, in a new Just the Facts podcast, discusses the on-going Costa Rica-Nicaragua border dispute (among other issues), the OAS’s ruling in favor of Costa Rica over the weekend, and the new threats to withdraw from the OAS by Nicaragua which followed.
· And finally, the UN General Assembly has passed a resolution declaring March 24 as the International Day of the Right to Truth. The designation of the day is a tribute to slain Salvadoran Monsignor Oscar Romero, gunned down while he gave mass in the country on March 24, 1980. More at Central American Politics.
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