Acapulco's New Heat

In less than 24 hours, a score of brutal murders around the increasingly violent Mexican resort city of Acaculpo this weekend left more than 30 individuals dead, including – says the AP – at least 14 men (the New York Times says 15, the Wall Street Journal now says 16) whose headless bodies were found near an Acapulco shopping center. Most of the killings occurred in the “non-tourist” section of the city, the AP writes, but two police officers were killed alongside a waterfront avenue in front of both visitors and locals. The dismembered bodies, meanwhile, were left with notes signed by “El Chapo’s People,” says Fernando Monreal Leyva, head of police investigations in the state of Guerrero. The AP interprets the messages to mean “the Sinaloa cartel killed the…men for trying to intrude on the gang's turf and extort residents.”

The federal government repudiated the rash of violence in Acapulco, with the Interior Ministry calling the most recent acts of violence both “reprehensible” and a sign that the fight against organized crime must continue. Shortly thereafter, state authorities called for additional security forces to be sent to the city, including requesting that members of the Mexican navy and military begin patrolling its streets. But as the Wall Street Journal notes, it may be precisely that type of operation that has set off recent violence in Guerrero. Since the killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva by the Mexican Navy over one year ago, the paper writes that murders in and around Acapulco have soared. The reason: a vacuum in which various trafficking organizations are now fighting for control of the city’s port to ship drugs north.

Also, in the Northern Mexican town of Zaragoza, another mayoral murder as the body of Saul Vara Rivera was discovered by authorities Saturday, his body peppered with bullet holes. According to the AP, at least a dozen mayors were killed in 2010.

And in the Oaxaca city of Chahuites, the Latin America Herald Tribune reports on a march of some 60 human rights activists, led by Father Alejandro Solalinde, to protest violence being committed against migrants passing through Mexico. The march ended where some 50 Central American migrants are suspected of being abducted last month. Fr. Solalinde reported those disappearances after one migrant, who allegedly escaped abduction, arrived at the priest’s migrant shelter. Solalinde has since become the target of numerous threats from trafficking organizations.

To other stories:

· The New York Times and the Miami Herald both report on the beginning of the trial of suspected anti-Castro Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles in El Paso this week. As mentioned last week, in a case reminiscent of Al Capone, Posada faces perjury, rather than terrorism, charges, for lying to immigration officials about his role in the bombings of popular Havana tourist locations in 1997. According to the Times, Posada “also faces several charges of immigration fraud and obstruction of a proceeding, stemming from lies he is accused of telling United States officials about how he entered the country in March 2005.” Of the one-time CIA asset, the National Security Archive’s Peter Kornbluh tells the paper the US intelligence agency “trained and unleashed a Frankenstein,” adding “it is long past time he be identified as a terrorist and be held accountable as a terrorist.” According to the report, the potential sentence for Posada – should he be convicted – could be “stiff”: a maximum sentence of five years for each of 10 counts in the indictment, and 10 years on the last count. Former federal judge and US attorney in Miami, Thomas Scott, tells the Herald that by pushing the perjury case, prosecutors appear to have a “reasonable shot at conviction.” The paper also notes that on Sunday, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Jose Pertierra, a U.S. lawyer who represents the Venezuelan government that has been seeking the extradition of Posada for years, planned to stage a “people's tribunal” in El Paso to condemn Posada and demand his extradition to Venezuela or Cuba.

· In a speech last week at the Brookings Institution, US Asst. Sec. of State for the Western Hemisphere, Arturo Valenzuela, addressed the issue of US-Latin American relations as the DC think tank published its new mid-term study on the matter entitled “Shifting the Balance: Obama and the Americas.” In the Asst. Secretary’s view, the last years have seen the “convergence of two powerful and positive trends” in the region: “the consolidation of successful market democracies that are making big strides in meeting their peoples’ needs, and the growing global integration of Latin America.” He says such issues – and related challenges of regional “inequality, the impunity of power, lack of rights, ineffective institutions, and lack of opportunity” – have become part of the State Dept.’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) which, in the case of Latin America, will emphasize what Valenzuela called “dynamic engagement.” Among the specific policies that such a strategy would entail, the Asst. Secretary suggested: 1) making Latin America a key target of the president’s National Export Initiative which seeks to double US total exports in just five years, 2) further developing security partnerships aimed at organized crime in Mexico and Central America by continuing to move “away from supplying big ticket equipment” and toward “providing more training and technical assistance” and 3) continued US aid to Central America and the Caribbean for things like health treatment and infrastructure projects. Key criticisms were reserved for Venezuela and its outgoing National Assembly’s decision to grant special decree powers to President Hugo Chavez (a move Valenzuela said was “anti-democratic”), and for the events surrounding the 2009 coup in Honduras – although, in 2010, Valenzuela reiterated the US position that the country had made “significant progress in strengthening democratic governance and promoting national reconciliation.”

· Also criticizing Venezuela’s “Enabling Law” over the weekend was OAS chief José Miguel Insulza. The Sec. General, in an interview with the AP on Friday, called the move “completely contrary” to the OAS’s Democratic Charter. He expected the inter-American body to analyze the matter further in the coming weeks, although no member state had has yet made a formal request to do so. However, the solution, Insulza says, could be a “simple one:” that the Venezuelan government allow “the new congress to debate in-depth the enabling law and reach some decision about it.” For his part, Chavez only briefly responded to Insulza’s statements, dismissing the OAS’s criticisms.

· As for the “progress toward national reconciliation” Valenzuela mentioned with respect to Honduras, reports this morning from rights groups in Honduras that Juan Chinchilla, a member of the campesino group MUCA in Bajo Aguan may have been disappeared. Chinchilla has been a participant in on-going MUCA-government talks over land issues and had told friends in recent days that he believed was being followed. His moto was found on the side of the road near Tocoa with two bullet holes over the weekend. More from Rights Action and the FNRP, by way of Quotha, while in the US House, new Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman and right wing hawk Illena Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), made one of her first moves the drafting of a letter to Asst. Sec. Valenzuela, expressing concern that the State Dept. has been “pressuring the Honduran government to ignore Honduran rule of law in order to absolve former President Manuel Zelaya of criminal charges he is facing.”

· More regarding the issue of Latin America’s role in a “National Export Initiative,” El Tiempo reports on Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and John Barrasso’s (R-WY) visit to Colombia over the weekend, showing their support for a Colombia-US free trade agreement. As AFP reports, the two will travel on to Brazil, Chile, Panama, and Mexico, promoting “free trade” and “security cooperation.”

· La Silla Vacía interviews Colombian economist and forced displacement expert Luis Jorge Garay about the proposed “Ley de Victimas” legislation in Colombia. The bill, passed by the country’s lower chamber in December, will be taken up in March by the Colombian Senate, but, says Garay, there are serious risks that the current bill is “unconstitutional” for only providing “social services” and “humanitarian assistance” – not “preferential access to state subsidies” – as a form of reparation.

· In regional economic news, the Wall Street Journal looks at worries of rising inflation around the region (and around the developing world, more generally). Again, connecting back to President Obama’s national export plan, there are growing worries in countries like Brazil, the paper says, where a weaker dollar is “pushing up prices of foodstuffs and raw materials.” According to the Financial Times, Brazilian inflation hit a six-year high to end 2010. There are similar worries in Argentina, the Journal writes. Meanwhile, the Latin Americanist with an interesting post about the rise of Latin American multinationals – what Bloomberg has called the “Multi-Latinas”— which have apparently driven much of the region’s economic growth over the last decade.

· The National Defense University, in a new study, looks at China’s growing “soft power” in Latin America.

· The American Enterprise Institute lays out a Republican Lat Am agenda for the new congress, drafted by Roger Noriega.

· Competing opinions from US Ambassador Kenneth Merten and Professor Alex Dupuy about Haiti and foreign assistance, in the Washington Post this weekend as the one-year anniversary of quake approaches. Also, from the Miami Herald, a report on a changed US stance re: Haitian elections. The Herald: “The Obama administration said Friday it might be able to support tossing out the results of Haiti's disputed presidential election if that is the course called for in a soon-to-be released international review.” The Center for Economic and Policy Research, meanwhile, with a new report detailing the extent of fraud on the country’s Nov. 28 vote.

· Finally, the center-right government of Sebastian Pinera in Chile offered its recognition to an independent Palestinian state Friday – the seventh South American country to do so in the last month. Paraguay and Peru are apparently up next, the New York Times writes. While commentators like Andres Oppenheimer seem critical of such moves, the words of Chilean Senator Eugenio Tuma, the chief advocate of the measure in Chile, suggest times are changing:

“South American countries are acting every day with greater coordination…” With the move by Chile’s government, “we are demonstrating that South America can play, together, a role in the great global issues affecting humanity.”